Rex Flex

After looking at PodiPodi yesterday there was an obvious problem of context, which brought up a very valid question, “why would someone want to do a google/yahoo/whatever search while on your page and have the results displayed as an overlay on top of your page?”  There’s just no real point to it or value added to your site, so it seems really useless and as Ryan said, “just meant to be a flashy addition to a website.”

I found another program called Devo that solves this problem.  Well, sort of… I’ll get to that later.  It’s a Firefox extension that gives you basically the exact same UI (you press Shift+X or set the trigger command to whatever you want it to be instead of it always being Shift+Space) and allows you to search google, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia along with several other sites.  There are also a few other cool features like annotating a site through SharedCopy.  Those are all cool, but what I think really makes this stand out is that it allows you to create your own commands.

So, back to the contextual problem; I still see it here.  These commands are only available when Firefox is open.  What if you boot up your computer and you want to immediately do a google search, without having to open Firefox?  What if you want to use that same UI to do something in another application, like notepad, iTunes, or internet explorer?  I think that ultimately Enso solves the entire contextual problem because it’s a small program you download and install on your computer.  This makes it computer-wide, so you can use it within any application you want to.

As for the features that Enso packs, it has all the web searches you could ask for.  There are media controls to control your music (which Devo also has, however you must have the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin).  There’s the spellcheck command which will do a spellcheck on any text you have highlighted, and since this is computer-wide it brings spellcheck to every application on your computer, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me.  There’s also the launcher commands which, if I’m remembering correctly, crawls your computer for applications to run and adds them to the launcher so to open the calculator you can type, “open calculator” or “open calc” since the auto-complete will fill in the rest.

I really like these command based UI’s that allow users to do what they want to do quickly, without losing focus of the task at hand or having to reach for the mouse, keeping the UI pretty (not like a command shell), and keeping the commands easily readable by humans.  I think that once more and more people start using these, they’ll realize how helpful these tools can actually be.

It’s been over six months and two quarters since I’ve posted anything. So at the beginning of last quarter, I began working on an ongoing project here at Neumont University known as NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect). This is the most complex project I’ve ever been apart of.

Last quarter I was working along with Josh, getting verbalizations working for the ORM subset constraints. After we worked on that for about eight weeks, we were assigned the task of creating the framework to make it possible for end users to generate a PHP back end once they get their information modeled. We were able to get this done successfully in 10 days.

This quarter I’ve been working on reverse engineering a database to ORM. This task has had its complications, but is coming along smoothly. When this is done I’ll be teaming up with Josh again to get the framework setup to generate a Java back end.

Also, since the release of Internet Explorer 7 (and its support for alpha transparent png’s), I’ve decided to go back to the old layout on the site. I’ve always thought it looked nicer, however it didn’t play nice with IE7.

I’ve also been on a team of a group of coders known as Revolutionary Networks. We’ve been working on a portfolio type project which will, in the end, display each of the members in Rev Net and display certain details such as which projects they’re working on, which technologies they know, where they’ve worked, their resume, etc. It’s a very in depth project that’s been going on for awhile.

I downloaded Flock today and it seems pretty cool.  It has a built in blogging untility, which I’m testing out right now. Just a wild guess, but I’m going to say it’s based off the Firefox source, since it looks surprisingly similar.

The quarter is almost over, thank god. I’ll be happy to get back home for Christmas and hang out with all my old friends that’ll be there, unlike last time I came home when they were all gone at school, lol.

After trying to get the images on top to actually look good as a transparent gif, instead of a transparent png, I’ve decided that this site is just too cool for IE. For a web browser to not support standard features, is completely ridiculous. If you’d like to see what this page is SUPPOSED to look like. I recommend you download a new browser and use IE as a secondary web browser. Firefox is a great web browser. Opera is another good one. At least try another browser so you can see how lousy Internet Explorer really is.

Just yesterday these images of Internet Explorer 7 were released to the public. Following the current trend started by Safari and Firefox; it supports RSS feeds for faster access to information. Not surprising that it looks like a poorly done copy of Apple’s Safari which is already available.

I’m going to give it a good three days after it’s “official release” before a security patch is released.

Source: Flexbeta

To the average user, Microsoft’s recommendations to either uninstall the Netscape browser or fix a specific code in the registry makes no sense.

Most computer users have no idea how to install or even uninstall software. Trying to fix something foreign such as the registry is like reading Greek in Latin.

Then again, those who have downloaded the Netscape browser are not your ordinary users; They are on the cutting edge, the cusp. They are also the real minority.

According to figures from w3schools.com which is a site frequented by the Browser elite, Netscape is not even a pimple on a mole. For them, the real browser battle is between Microsoft IE and Firefox. Microsoft makes up 65% of use while Firefox is now up to 25%.

That is a big WOW and it doesn’t take a degree in foreign archaic languages to understand the significance.

Last May, according to the wschools.com users, Microsoft IE was booming at 82%. It has dropped 17% in a year. This is the case despite the fact that virtually every computer has IE as the default browser. This means that people are walking with their fingers. Netscape still has a chance to pick up steam. Once it gets rid of some of the bugs and the bad press, it might start to inch its way up and might cut into both Firefox and Microsoft. Still, the average user is going to continue using what comes easiest and the geeks will play with the browser that has the buzz and the stability.

You can see that due to Internet Explorer instabilities and those trying to poke holes in it, there is room for change. The browser war is far from being over. Much will depend upon the satisfaction of Apple, the maturation of AOL and competing technologies that want to be the window to the Internet world, even if their name in Latin, Greek or even English is not Windows.

(Source: BayouBuzz)

Personally I use Firefox and I love it.