rudis dot net

Upon updating Google Gears in Firefox today, I noticed that ScribeFire (a Firefox add-on) was "featured". ScribeFire is an in-browser blogging tool. that seems to have a rich feature-set, comparable to the venerable MarsEdit.

Wish there was a way to use these add-ons in Safari (I understand why not, but it would be great fun if there was a plug-in that enabled it over in my favorite browser).

Whilst on my ride yesterday, I was testing out a SPOT tracking device along with the SPOT integration into the new Yahoo! Fire Eagle geo-social service.

I'll do a longer post when our house is not in so much chaos (birthday part deux is going on), but here is what this cutting-edge, super-cool (HTML 6 needs a <sarcasm> tag) device/service managed to pick up yesterday:

I had it in tracking mode (phones home every 10 mins) most of the time and actually deliberately sent a few "OK" check-in messages (that Fire Eagle picked up but does not show in the messages history of the SPOT site). It missed the whole island trek and the trees on the Burke-Gilman seemed to cause it major angst. Those check-in messages were also supposed to make it to my phone & e-mail but never did.

Again, I'll go into more detail about how it all is supposed to work, but I wanted to toss up a quick post on cautioning folks to perhaps wait a bit for the device and/or service to mature a bit before investing in either.

While if may be a tad oxymoronic to claim that an in-browser editor with blog-posting capabilities has the inherent quality of being distraction free, Writer does not fail to meet that expectation.

It's a pretty neat little web app by John Watson (and it works in Safari, so it's doubly cool) that mimics the features of WriteRoom and DarkRoom (Google for URLs for those). It has a good feel - though a blinky cursor would be nifty...in fact, *any* cursor would be welcome...but I suspect a potential Safari bug - and the post-to-blog functionality is especially slick (and it works with Drupal, so it's doubly slick).

The app/site works with/without registering for an account (rare these Web 2.0+ days), lets you choose spacing, font and colors, supports auto-save and doesn't seem to have any memory leaks during my initial tests.

No spell-check, but Safari's integrated textarea spell-check capabilities more than make up for that missing feature. Definitely worth a click... [via DownloadSquad]