The desire I have to buy a mac is getting stronger (although the way Apple market and make their hardware turns this desire into some illusion that I NEED a mac). The move to Intel coupled with boot camp has removed one barrier to moving over - I can run my windows software (GIS, games) on a dual boot; I do not want to go down virtual machine routes.

I have narrowed down where I ‘need’ this mac: in my living room connected to the TV and a macmini more than fits the bill. However, the story is not quite complete. What I want is one TV and one small box to replace my TV/DVD player/digitv box/stereo/PVR. What I should be able to do is choose to watch/pause/record TV, listen to music, watch DVD’s, browse the internet all from one source. The macmini is ALMOST there. Front row certainly allows me to switch between my media but the final and necessary jigsaw piece is the PVR replacement. eyeTV fills the gap but it is not seemless with frontrow. Give me frontrow that can interact with an eyeTV DVB-T type device using the apple remote to control everything and you will have me.

Of course iTV is on the way and nobody can be %100 sure how it will finally ship, but to me it appears nothing more than a glorified airport express box - far from what I want as it seems to be adding to my media box numbers not replacing any.

At present, a slimline windows PC running Vista could do everything that I desire, and unless Apple start tackling the PVR issue in front row it’s probably the route I will go down.

technorati tags:macmini, vista, itv, frontrow, pvr, DVB

Blogged with Flock

I am starting to have serious doubts about the future of flock. The beta has been out for a while now, the danphe release is being pushed back and a number of core employees have left. It is still my default browser but my current beefs/concerns:

1) Staff turnover.

OK, every startup has a staff turnover but with key employees such as Will Pate ‘leaving’ one wonders what is actually going on there. If I was working at a cool startup and knew that it was growing into something big, something special, I’d want to stay. I’d want to stay so that as it grows more employees join and the opportunity for more middle management posts arise. If user uptake was slow or flatlining, (alexa site traffic is certainly flat) then I would have serious doubts about the future and leave. Sure I would love working for Flock, think they are all great guys and not want to damage Flock in anyway, so I would probably leave quietly with some sort of “it’s good for me to leave” type explanation.

2) Danphe Release.

Developers at flock are awesome in their ability. Everytime I look at a danphe build I see more and more examples of great coding going on. But, the as yet unreleased danphe is coming too late. The perfectly valid excuse is they want to get it right rather than release to an arbitary release date, but they have simply tried to do too much in the time available. By the time Danphe comes out, it will most probably be released as a kind of 1.0 release candiate, with 0.8 and 0.9 being bypassed. If this does turn out to be the case, it would have been a serious mistake to go this route. I would have preferred to see minor improvements up through the release cycle, to keep my interest, to see that the browser is going places. Although I have no access to figures, I suspect that a lot of users have probably now gone back to firefox as they simply got tired of waiting. Danphe will be released, they might think ok I’ll try it again and will be greeted with what is in essence another beta.

There are also a lot of UI changes in danphe that were contrary to user opinion on the forums/blog comments (topbar/bottombar issue).

3) The flock website.

The insistence of sticking with drupal is causing the flock website to become more and more of a feature poor flock resource. The forums are no longer the hive of activity they used to be, either because user numbers have gone down as people go back to firefox, or because the piss poor functionality of drupal forums renders the thing a pain to use.

Last few months i’ve noticed that spam handling sucks. My legitimate posts are flagged as spam and whole threads seem to be automatically removed if they recieve spam and are never put back without it.

The extension section also needs a lot of work, most notably for 3rd party developers to upload and edit their extensions. There are a number of posts on the forum asking ‘how do I post my extension to your site’ (of course they can’t unless via email). It shouldn’t have to be like that, and the lack of flock specific extensions floating about the place is a small indication that the page is a barrier to 3pd’s.

Stop being anal about drupal and use the right tool for the right job – phpBB for the forums would be a good start.

4) Other.

Flock started off by declaring they would be open and interact with the community. The trouble was they made a rod for their own back. Users now expect complete transparency and not knowing where danphe is going or the actual usage numbers of the browser and whether they are on target is another off putting thing for me just now.

In summary

The flockstars mailing list is on a serious decline in useage, as is the forums. I hardly see any more “Hey this is my first post with flock and it’s awesome” type blog posts and alexa site traffic for flock is going nowhere. I can count the number of flock specific extension on one hand, with new extensions on the other. Employees are leaving, danphe is stalling and from the outside looking in I do not know what the future holds.

AT PRESENT the browser is awesome and I would encourage everyone to try it, but will I be here next year using it? Who knows.

Technorati tags:flock, flock.com, flock browser,

So its been a LONG while since I spent any time on geoflock, but I have managed to make a few changes the last couple of days.

1. First up, you can now sort the address list (default is name column ascending) as well as resize the columns;
2. I have put back the geotag photo dialog description insertion (eg, see where this photo was taken) but it is now optional (on by default);
3. I have added three more map layers, so if the road or satellite coverage in your area is not so great, you can try the others (road, satellite and hybrid from VE). The satellite imagery for me in the UK is a lot better for example;
4. Lastly, I have added support for geocoding UK addresses, although this uses a 3rd party geocoder, the longevity/stability of which I have no control.

I have tried to get flickr geocoding into the extension by utilising flock’s flickr api key and the locate methods but without success. Am still investigating this though.

Finally, I would just like to state that there is a lot of code changes needed for this to work in danphe and is proving a pain in the arse, most notibly the geodiscovery. I am also having a terrible time with the google maps API which really throws up some perculiar errors for me. As such, the extension will only work on version 2.61 of the API, and with it already up to 2.69 I simply don’t know what the future holds for geoflock.

One thought is to keep it as a simple geotag dialog for the photo uploader as the sheer availability of great map mashups renders the topbar almost benign and useless anyway. Peoples thoughts on this are welcome. Am I the only one that never actually uses the topbar once the novelty wares off?

technorati tags:flock, geoflock, googlemaps, geotagging

Blogged with Flock

Major bad news, techcrunch UK has been shut down by Mike Arrington, whether permantly or not who knows.

As a reader all I can say is shame on the whole situation. As far as I’m concerned both parties are at fault although it does make it hard from a neutral’s point of view to give an honest opinion if the route cause of the situation is removed and only one side of the story is allowed to be viewed on techcrunch uk/crunchnotes.

No matter who is truly at fault, and accepting that techcrunch is Mr Arringtons baby and he can arguably do as he wishes with said baby and staff, it has left this reader with a bad taste in his mouth and I shall never have the same opinion of techcrunch again.

Remember what Christmas used to stand for - good will to all men.

technorati tags:techcrunch, techcrunchuk, tcuk

Blogged with Flock

Cool, so after a bit of encouragement from Flock Inc, and some code snippets from Erwan Loisant, i’ve got the Flockstars Extension out of demo and into something a little more usable.

I personally still regard this extension as ‘experimental’ even though it works well and would welcome any feedback/suggestions/bugs. I know that Flock Inc are trying to concentrate efforts and not saturate their browser with a whole load of crap, but this is a relatively simple extension and would be a lot better if it was developed by flock and included by default - even if the extension was included in a default install rather than inbuilt to the browser code itself.

To those that are not aware, the Flockstars extension allows you to view a personalised ‘Flockstars Profile Badge’ - this is a slightly altered spread flock button which stores the web services you use. Other flock users with this extension can discover and view those services - Flickr/Photobucket photos open in the photostream mediabar, youtube videos open in the mediabar (danphe) or a new tab (cardinal) and all other services open in a new tab. Non-flock users just see the normal Flock spread button.

Technorati tags:flock, flockstars, extension,

Blogged with Flock