PLANET WWD

Anyone who spends time on the various tech news sites quickly realizes that stories come in waves: one day there will be a flurry of iPhone items, another day Google’s latest improvement is at the fore. Some of this is driven by press releases, but a lot of it is the “echo chamber” effect: tech journalists tend to write about things that other tech journalists consider important. If you’d like to cut out the middleman and see what is being buzzed about, you can turn to the various “meme trackers” out there - automated (or semi-automated) sites that attempt to identify the rising stories. Here are four to choose from; any of them will deliver a steady stream of chatter to your browser.

• Techmeme takes a fairly broad view of technology. It’s been criticized for unduly promoting the already established “A-list” sites.
• RSSmeme gets its idea of what’s important by looking at shared items on Google Reader. This means it tends to go beyond tech to humor quite frequently.
• Polymeme is a new site that combines automated tracking with editor’s picks, designed to focus more on politics and culture than tech bubbles or celebrities.
• TechJunk is also new, trying to sort out just new technology news from the other stuff that bounces around the web.

Just when I think I’ve seen everything that you can do in Firefox, along comes an add-on like Pencil (Firefox 3 required). By coupling the Gecko drawing engine with the ability to display, save, and load an external canvas, together with a palette of shapes, Pencil installs an entire drawing application into your Firefox browser.

It was 232 years ago today that a bunch of colonials got fed up with the king and announced that they weren’t going to take it any more. While I certainly don’t think the situation of web workers is comparable to that of America’s founders, the anniversary does provoke thoughts of dependence and independence. Despite my happy status as a work-at-home web worker, there are still some ties in my life that I would just as soon dissolve in the search of more complete independence.

For starters, I still pay too much for a wired broadband connection. Though the most recent Pew survey on home broadband indicates a continued growth in both broadband and wireless use, the penetration of these necessary technologies still isn’t universal enough to support the dream of web work anywhere at a reasonable cost (and as our parent GigaOM points out, usage-based pricing is likely to raise fees for many users).I’d also like to finish declaring my independence from Microsoft Windows. Though I’ve successfully banished it from my desktop, I’ve still got several Windows-based servers in operation, in part through inertia, in part to keep existing web sites based on Microsoft technologies online. Worse, even if I get Microsoft out of my own life, it may sneak back in if the current rush to competing proprietary browser-based runtimes (like Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe AIR) continues to work against the open, standards-based web.

A few days ago, when I was writing about the conflicting power consumption claims for solid-state drives (SSDs), it cost an extra $999 to get one in your new MacBook Air. Well, no more. Apple has revised their pricing: the premium for SSD over mechanical hard drive is now only $599.

Happy July 4th - a day I can catch up a bit while email is quiet, I hope.

• Programmer Competency Matrix - This one has been going around. I think the basic idea that you can measure a developer’s competency by this sort of checkoff list is nonsense, though; it tells us more about the particular prejudices of the author than some Platonic ideal of a programmer.
• Unit Testing iPhone apps with Ruby: rbiphonetest - Does Dr. Nic ever sleep?

Word processors have gotten so good at creating rich documents that many web workers never reach for a desktop publishing package. For creating really great looking documents, though, desktop publishing can give you many types of flexibililty and precision that word processors don’t offer. For a free, very robust desktop publishing application, consider Scribus.

An unusual notice appeared on the 37signals blog today:

With online office applications improving in quality all the time, they’re rapidly becoming the tool of choice for web workers. Between the ability to access your documents anywhere, the easy sharing, and the automatic backups, I know more and more people who are using these services. But in this rush to go online, we sometimes fail to understand exactly what we’re getting for free. Particularly as these services get used for more business purposes, it’s worth a look at their Terms of Service.

As a starting point, I looked at the terms for three of the major alternatives in the online document space: Google Docs, Zoho, and Adobe’s new Acrobat.com service. What I found might give you some pause - especially if you tend towards the cautious (or paranoid) end of the business user spectrum.

I’ve been using Web-based project management tools both as fodder for blog posts but, more importantly, to explore how they might positively impact my Web work. I’ve been using Basecamp the longest and pay about $24/month for a slightly upgraded service. After a small learning hump, most of my virtual team members are on board and some of my clients are working with it.

Firefox set another new record last month. No, not the 8-million-plus downloads on Download Day - that’s nice, but since this is the first time the Guiness people have ever certified a record in that category, it’s pretty meaningless. Much more important in the grand scheme of things is the browser’s continued market penetration. Net Applications has the data: a 5.5% increase in browser share in the last year, paralleling a 6% drop in IE use and leaving Firefox poised to hit 20% of the browser market this month.

I confess: my body clock is broken. My ideal workday usually starts at 3:00 am and ends three hours later - which means that I have the rest of the morning to do chores and run errands. Now, because I’ve spent the entire weekend reading until late in the afternoons, I wake up at 4:00 pm, which means that most establishments close an hour later, and the sun will set soon - leaving me unable to go out and perform errands. Plus, by the time 3:00am comes, I am already too tired to work.

Not an unusual predicament for web workers. Especially since we own our time. Although we don’t necessarily have a boss who prefers that we start at 9:00 am, waking up late in the afternoons isn’t ideal either.

There are times that I wish our kids would learn to sleep in.

• Get Started with Django - Webmonkey has the goods.
• Pretty Blocks in Rails Views - Some ways to make your code more elegant.
• ActionWebService is Back - And updated for Rails 2.1.0.
• Cornerstone - New Subversion UI for OS X. (via TUAW)

I work with so many different kinds of graphics that I’m always on the lookout for applications and utilities that can make working with them easier. In the world of freeware and open source software, you can find many good applications. Here are five examples.

If you are looking for on demand, toll-free conference call services, look no further. FreeConference announced this week that they now offer On-Demand Reservationless Toll Free Premium 800 service.

Microsoft today announced the launch of Equipt, a new suite consisting of the Windows Live OneCare security service and Office Home and Student 2007. What’s different here is the pricing: $69.99 per year on an annual subscription basis, covering three computers. Equipt users get whatever upgrades ship to their products during the duration of the subscription - and no right to use the software at all if they stop paying. Circuit City will be the initial retailer, but deals are in the works with other stores and OEMs.

Gone are the days when the cell phone is simply for talking.

In a survey commissioned by Access Systems Americas and conducted by Amplitude Research, buyers of new cell phones look at video capability (33%), music (34%), accessing the Internet (61%), email capabilities (63%), camera (67%), and text messaging (73%) as the most important features that they look for.

One of the eye-catching things about the MacBook Air announcement was the availability of a solid-state drive (SSD) as a standard option, replacing the mechanical hard drive. For a not-insignificant $999, you can upgrade the regular hard drive to 64GB of pure memory chips. SSDs have been around for years, but they’re just now starting to become affordable in consumer-oriented computers.

WWD’s Mike Gunderloy covered Mozilla’s Weave project back in December, noting its usefulness in synchronizing bookmarks between a user’s various installations of Firefox…essentially moving a Firefox user profile into the cloud.

I’ve mentioned PDF Download before - it’s one of my favorite unobtrusive Firefox extensions. It sits in the background, and when you click a PDF link, you get a choice as to whether to open them in the browser, open them in an external viewer, or view them as HTML. Now, there’s a beta of version 2.0 available, and it’s better than ever.

Sick kids have been taking more time than net cruising lately.

• New Controller Examples - David Chelminsky is experimenting with the scaffolded tests that RSpec generates for RESTful controllers.
• REST Anti-Patterns - Ways in which to drift away from RESTfulness when building a web service.