Hello.World

If you are like me you are still figuring out the best way to manage your favorite RSS feeds. Today I discovered Sage, a Firefox extension that lets you read your RSS and Atom feeds inside your browser – which makes sense to me. It is very simple to use and is not cluttered with features I don't need. Here are some of the features I like about it:

• Press "Alt-S" to toggle Sage on/off in the Sidebar.
• Press the magnifying glass icon to auto-discover feeds on the current page.
• Manage your list of feeds exactly like managing your bookmarks – you can sort them any way you like, rename them and place a seperator between them.
• This is probably my favorite feature – Sage very quickly renders a column formatted list of the posts to read. See the image posted above for an example. The look and feel of this layout can be customised via CSS – in fact there are additional styles already created for you to download.

Catching up on the latest via RSS is now a logical extension of my browsing experience thanks to Sage…

I only just wrote an article on Console² and I found something better – FireBug. FireBug is a new tool for Firefox that aids with debugging Javascript, DHTML, and Ajax. It is like a combination of the Javascript Console, DOM Inspector, and a command line Javascript interpreter.

FireBug is fairly simple – it adds a console to the bottom of every web page in Firefox. It enables the following features:

• Mouse-over DOM Elements on the page
• Type in JS expressions into the command line for execution
• Inspect AJAX (XMLHttpRequest) responses as text or XML
• Only show errors for the current page – previous data is cleared
• Display JavaScript, CSS or XML Errors
• Show a red dot in the Status Bar to indicate errors on the current page
• Set preferences on what errors you want to see

If you are a developer you can even get your page to write directly to Firebug – instead of using "alert()" or other methods for debugging. There is even a tutorial on how to do this.

Yup, you have to install this one…

The new version of Thunderbird was released yesterday. Thunderbird 1.5 introduces several new features including a software update system, spell check as you type, built in phishing detector, auto save as draft, and support for deleting attachments from email messages. Message filtering has also been improved with new filter actions for replying and forwarding. Saved search folders can now search folders across multiple accounts. A great update to a great product.

According to a comment yesterday by Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, the new Intel-based MacBook Pro and iMac will both be capable of running Microsoft Windows. Schiller noted that Apple:

"won't sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn't done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves . . . That's fine with us. We don't mind . . . If there are people who love our hardware but are forced to put up with a Windows world, then that's OK."

Google not only is distributing videos now, it's handing out software. The Google Pack, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show, offers a single control panel for installing key software helper applications.

The Google Pack, available now, is able to install the following software:

Google Earth
Google Desktop
Google Pack Screensaver
Google Toolbar for IE
Picasa
Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar
Adobe Reader 7
Trillian
Ad-Aware SE Personal
RealPlayer
Norton AntiVirus 2005 SE
GalleryPlayer HD Images

The service requires Google Updater, a smart application that can scan the computer's hard drive and determine whether it contains the latest versions of the applications, only downloading what's needed. There's one user license agreement and one console for all the applications.

Yup, Google is taking over the desktop…

If you are keen to see what is coming in Windows Vista check out these two short videos from the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show:

• Bringing Vista to Life
• Vista in Action

According to sources of the LA Times Google has been in negotiations with Wal-Mart and other retailers to sell a Google PC. The machine would run an operating system created by Google, not MS Windows, and it would be relatively inexpensive — perhaps as little as a few hundred dollars (US). Couple that with articles like this one and you start to wonder. Pointless speculation? Maybe

del.icio.us is a very popular social bookmarking service recently acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. del.icio.us allow you to keep your bookmarks online while you can access from everywhere and share them with your friends. A new del.icio.us extension for Firefox offers everything you need to seamlessly integrate the del.icio.us service with your Firefox browser. In the future I will integrate the links on my weblog with my del.ico.us account.

I recently discovered webERP – a web based accounting/ERP software package produced by an ongoing community of accounting software developers. It is developed using PHP and MySQL which means that you can look at the source code, customise it and integrate it with other applications like SugarCRM. It's worth a look.

If you still use Internet Explorer as your primary browser (hint: use Firefox instead) then I suggest you have a look at Maxthon. Microsoft should take note! Maxthon uses the IE browser engine, but supports many additional features such as Tabs and a number of security enhancements. There is a feature tour to introduce you.