Do you like tech? Do you like well made video podcasts? Do you like English accents? Well, then my friend, I must introduce you to ChannelFlip.com. What is it? (Why are there some many rhetorical questions in this post?) It’s an online… video…um, you know what? (there I go again!) I think they describe it the best on their site. Channel Flip makes TV shows, but they put them on the internet.

This relatively new network, which was created by Wil Harris and Justin Gaynjer, is not dissimilar to Revision3. However, they have one sinister advantage. All of the hosts have English accents, this is an obvious ploy to get the attention of Americans who just can’t resist the English articulation. Well played, well played indeed.

But seriously now. Channel Flip actually has good content. Currently, there are 3 shows. Unwired is tech show hosted by everyone’s favorite Wil Harris (remember when I mentioned him before? that was cool…), where he reviews the latest gadgets and talks about the big news in the techno world. Play:Digital is a video gaming show hosted by the very lovely Katharine Fletcher. Finally, we have Discus, which is a show all about everyone’s favorite Olympic sport…actually, no. Discus is a DVD review show hosted by Piglet Gayner (um… I’m not gonna touch that one).

So, if you’re like me and you are always in search of a good podcast go check out Channel Flip. Wil has personally assured me that if you’re not 100% satisfied with the content, then you’ll get your money back!

It seems like a lot of people have been hard on Flock in the past, but I have been a fan of it for a while. The reason Flock has probably received a lot of this flack (hehe) is because it’s basically a modified version of FireFox (it’s based off the same code). However, once you use it you realize it’s an entirely different browser. I thought I’d defend this fine browser by going over some of the features of the new version.

Social Networks in the Sidebar

One of the biggest changes in the new version of flock is the advanced social network integration. There is now built in support for Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube, Photobucket, Piczo, Delicious (that’s how they liked to be called now), and Magnolia. If you are an avid user of anyone of the services you’ll love the new flock.

Basically, what they have done is taken theses sites and squished them into the sidebar of the browser. For example, with Sidebar Facebook you can see how many messages, pokes, friend requests, group invites, and event invites you have. You can also update your current status on Facebook as well as view your friends. Also, you can post links, upload photos or videos, and look at previously uploaded media right from the sidebar.

Sidebar Twitter is pretty good too. You can basically do everything you can on the real twitter with a few minor exceptions. The only issue is that it doesn’t bring in updates right when they are posted, instead it checks periodically.

My only issue with the Sidebar Social Networks is that some of my favorites are missing. I’d love to see Vimeo, Zooomr (which is currently lacking an API, which could be part of the problem), and Tumblr in the sidebar. I’m sure down the road we’ll see some more social networks integrated with Flock.

Media Bar

This isn’t a new feature in Flock, but it now includes support for Facebook (it previously was only for Flickr). The media bar is really great because you can use it for drag and drop uploads as well as viewing content on sites like YouTube and Flickr.

Blogging Client

Flock includes a very nice blogging client that’s good at the basics (writing and posting text), but for anything more advanced I’d suggest you try Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit. The main issue with it is that you can’t upload images (however you can upload your Facebook and Flickr images, or post an image from someone else’s site, which is not usually a good idea unless you are 100% sure they are trustworthy). It’s not a big deal for many, and it’s a simple thing that can be easily added. I’m sure we will see it in future version (maybe even the final release?)

Web Clipboard

This is probably one of the coolest features of Flock. The web clipboard allows you to drag an drop just about anything onto a page for later use. For instance, you can drag an image into the sidebar and then later drag an drop it into any other web form or app and it will put in the HTML code for that image. It’s pretty fucking cool.

Everything Else

Flock includes a built in RSS reader that’s pretty nice. It also includes a feature called My World which was introduced in the last edition of flock. I’m not really sure what to make of this feature. I’m pretty sure it’s a page that will show you updates from social networks as well as feeds all in one page.

Verdict

Flock is a great browser that can only get better. There are a few things missing and I’d like to see some more integration with some of the social networks I use most often. I think most people will like this new update, however I can’t help but feel that they will have some issue competing with other browsers. It’s definitely not for everyone, but there is definitely a userbase for it. Overall, I’d highly recommend it.

Colloquy - This is the greatest IRC client ever. It has a great UI and it’s extremely simple to use. I know what you’re thinking, does anyone really use IRC anymore? Yes, yes they do. For on reason or another this app is always open. It just one of those nicely polished apps that’s always there when you need it. There is even an iPhone web app version! Colloquy is freeware.

Transmit - A really cool FTP app. It’s has a nice drag and drop UI and a lot of useful unique features. If you upload to/download from a lot of different places it has tabs, yes, tabs allowing you to have multiple connections open at once. My favorite feature it the “Edit with Transmit” feature that will open up a built in text editor for making quick edits files, you could even write a who new site if you wanted right in transmit (but I’d suggest you use Coda, another app by the fine makers of Transmit, Panic). It even supports S3!. Transmit is shareware and sells for $29.95.

MarsEdit - This app solves a big problem for me. I love Wordpress but I hate their text editor. It doesn’t seem to work well in any browser for me. This app replaces that text editor in a desktop app. This is cool because it brings your blog offline, you can still write new posts even if you’re offline and then publish them later. It does everything the web based editor does and more. It’s really cool if you have more than one blog because you can update them all from one place. MarsEdit support Wordpress 2.3 (even tagging) and just about every other blogging platform you’d need. MarsEdit is shareware and sells for $29.99.

1Password - This app does a lot of stuff but I’m just going to point out the reason I bought it. It will save and fill in all of your usernames and passwords on various websites. It’ll even find and click the submit button for you. It works perfectly as advertised. It can do other things like save your credit card info for easy entering and it can also generate very secure passwords. Don’t worry about security. It saves everything encrypted locally on your HDD and the app locks itself down from time to time and you need your master password to unlock it to get it to do it’s thing, so if your laptop is stolen someone is going to have some trouble getting at your passwords. There is a beta out right now with iPhone support too. 1Password is shareware and sells for $29.95.

Adium - Adium is the perfect Instant Messaging app. It has support for just about every IM service ever, some I’ve never even heard of before. It has a completely customizable UI, however I like the defaults, and basically if you have a mac you should be using this for IM. This app works great with Growl, which I’m getting to. There are only a few issues with this app; there is no IRC support unlike similar apps, but those similar apps are for PC, also there is currently no audio or video chat support, I really hope they add it soon, then it’ll be perfect. Adium is freeware.

Skitch - I’m just going to call this a screen capture app. It’ll also capture from your iSight, but screen capture is where it really rocks. Skitch will let you capture an entire window just by clicking it, this is so incredibly useful, I find some reason to use this app everyday just because of that feature. Skitch will also upload the pic right to Flickr, and FTP, or MySkitch which is Plasq’s, the developer, own ImageShack type site. it also has built in drawing tools that let you make little notes on your captures. I’ve found that it’s great for making LOL cats. Skitch is currently in private beta, but I’m sure it’ll be released soon.

AppFresh - AppFresh is Apple’s Software Update for everything else. It uses a site call iusethis as a database to check for updates for all of you apps. IT’s similar to the apps that you get with a Version Tracker or MacUpdate membership, but it’s free.

The Unarchiver - Remember when you everything sent to you was a .sit file? Well this app would have come in handy then because it’s a free way to un archive .sit files as well as a shit-ton of other files including Rar, Zip and Tar-GZip. Many of these formats are uncommon these days, but when they come up you’ll be glad you have this app. The Unarchiver is freeware.

Transmission - A lightweight, no frills torrent app. It just sits in the background and does it’s thing. And that’s all I have to say bout that. Transmission is freeware.

Growl - Growl is an interesting app that takes a little getting used to at first, but it’s really cool. It’s an alerts app that pops up a little bubble in any corner of your screen when something happens. It actually works with 4 of the apps on this list; Transmission, Adium, Transmit, and MarsEdit. It works really well with Adium, letting you know when someone logs on. It’s just a nice way to keep track of things on your mac. Growl is freeware.

VLC - This app is a great video player. It does a bunch of stuff, but I mainly use it as a backup media playing app. When something won’t play in quicktime, I’ll try it in here and it will almost always work. It’s just great. VLC is freeware.

FireFox - Unlike many of you out there I use Safari as my main browser. It’s one of the fastest browsers out there and it works very well. However, once in a while I run into issues with some sites that just won’t support it. That’s where FireFox comes in. Everything works in it. It’s my backup browser. I also really like StumbleUpon when I want to procrastinate. FireFox is freeware.

Akismet - Akismet is the best blog comment spam filter. period. You’d be surprised how much blog spam you’ll get and Akismet takes care of it all. In my time using it I haven’t noticed any false positives and it just plain works. This plugin comes with WordPress, all you need to do is activate it with your API key which you get when you sign up for a WordPress.com account.

Creative Commons Configurator - I’m a total Creative Commons nut and I want my content to be free for anyone who wants to use it. So this plugin lets you display proudly on your blog that you support Creative Commons.

Page Redirect - You may have noticed that I have some links to other sites in my sidebar. This is the plugin that lets you do that, otherwise you’d have to enter in the HTML code for a redirect and that isn’t as fast.

FeedBurner FeedSmith - This plugin does the work of setting up your burned blog feed on your blog. If you click the RSS link in the sidebar it will bring you to my burned feed. This is a lot easier than entering in the code yourself and it can easily be removed. Feedburner is a great way to monitor your RSS to see who is subscribing, something that might be important to you if you really care about your stats.

FireStats - Speaking of stats, this plugin shows your stats in a nice clean interface. It’s a nice way to see how many people came to your site and where they came from.

iWPhone - This plugin is really cool. Once installed this plugin will active a an iPhone/iPod touch formated theme if it identifies the iPhone/iPod touch user agent.

Live - this plugin is kinda useless, but still pretty cool. It shows you hits to your site in real time. Not much else to say about it :).

Random Redirect - this plugin allows you to create a link to yourblog.example.com which will redirect someone to a random post on your blog, in a StumbleUpon-like fashion.

Search Hilite - This is a pretty cool one too. When someone is referred from a search engine like Google or even the one on the blog itself, the term they searched for will be highlighted.

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form - Don’t want spammers to know your email address. I can’t blame you. This plugin lets you make a nice contact form in order to keep you inbox filled with just the stuff you want to see.

SpotMilk - This might be my favorite plugin. It’s a theme for the admin panel of WordPress. It just makes it look a little nicer. Not really important, but if bad design is something that bugs you you might want to check this out (not saying that WordPress default is all that horrible).

Twitter Tools
- Do you twitter every time you make a blog post? Well this plugin will do it for you, as well as let you make new twitters right from the admin panel.

WordPress.com Stats - If FireStats isn’t for you then this might be. users of WordPress.com will be familiar with this because it’s built in there. It’s just another way to check on your stats. Plus this one has cool little graph. It’s just not as in-depth as FireStats.

WP lightbox 2 - This is a plugin you’ll either love or hate. It adds lightboxing to your blog. If you are unfamiliar with lightboxing, it’s a little bit of JavaScript that will bring up a larger version of an image without you having to go to another page. The reason you may hate it is because for some people it is very slow and they find them annoying.

[tags]wordpress, extension, plugin, addon[/tags]

Remember the Zune? Well, it’s back! I have to admit, as big of an Apple fanboy as I am, they did somethings right this time. First, let me remind you off the major issues with the old Zune. It was a big ass rectangular brick that came in crappy colors, it had almost useless Wi-Fi (you could share songs for 3 plays or 3 days, which ever came first), it had horrible DRM issues, the music store sucked, and there was no podcast support (If I remember correctly it also had some issues with codecs).

So, what did Microsoft fix. A lot actually. The new Zune is thinner, has more space, comes in more colors, you can now sync wirelessly (something I wish the iPhone and iPod touch could do), the shared song never expire (but they still only last for 3 plays), there is podcast support, the store now has more content including video, and they added more codecs including H.264. The new Zune (Nune?) also will now take content recorded on your media center PC,it has a larger screen, a touch control pad, and I think the UI is also a little cleaner.

Overall it seems like a good update… but I didn’t mention the best part. Old Zune owners will get all of the new features (well, not the hardware ones). Isn’t that cool, all 500 of you Zune owners will get the new features. Now i would complain that apple doesn’t do this with their iPods like Gizmodo did.. but, when you think about it, they have. Remember when Apple added games? The old iPod video got support for games. That’s the only time I can think of where Apple would be able to put new iPod features on older iPods (there is a reason Coverflow and the new UI isn’t on the 5g iPod video or nano, their processors can’t handle it, the new ones barely can).

So, good job Microsoft. I still won’t buy a Zune because I don’t need one but if I didn’t like the iPod touch and iPhone as much as I do, I would consider it. I wonder if it works on mac yet.

The new Zune comes in a bunch of flavors; an 80GB black hard drive model at $249, a 30GB model at $199, and some tiny little models at $149 and $199 with flash-drives at 4GB and 6GB respectively.

When I heard that Amazon managed to not only to get labels to agree to let them sell digital versions of their songs on Amazon, but to get all of these tracks DRM-free, needless to say, I was amazed. How could Amazon do this? More important, why can’t Apple? So I thought, “There must be a catch! there’s always a catch!” However, I was wrong in my assumption.

There is no catch! Really! All of the songs on the Amazon Music Store (that what I’m gonna call it anyway) are actually DRM free. There is a slight watermark on the files, but it only says where the file is from. Nothing about the user or anything (that doesn’t mean you should email them to your friends!). They are just nice clean tracks.

I only have one issue with the store. It could be a little more user friendly. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, but it does take a few more steps to buy a track that on iTunes, the one click purchasing isn’t exactly “one-click” if you know what I mean. They make you download this little app, it’s basically a download manager (see pic below) that shows you your download progress and I assume previous purchases. The cool thing about this app is that it’ll drop your new track right into your music playing app automatically (well it does it with iTunes at least). It’s not terrible.

So, overall I’m pretty impressed with this new music store, considering Amazon previous attempts at digital content distribution (*cough* unbox *cough*). Considering the amount of music I buy on average (not a lot) and that the tracks are cheaper than iTunes (some are $.89, some $.99, but they are all DRM-free so it’s pretty good when you consider it’s $1.30 on iTunes) I’ll probably be using the Amazon store in the future. Well done Amazon, well done indeed.

[tags]amazon music, itunes, mp3[/tags]

[tags]succinct, short, tiny, to the point[/tags]

I’ve never quite been a fan of channels on video sites, it just seems no one has even done them quite right. YouTube had come the closest, but their profile really just looked like glorified profiles and while the gave the user some customization, the resulting pages never look that great. If any video sharing site could change my opinion on channels, it was going to be Vimeo, and they have! Vimeo made their channels simple, dead simple, like, really really really simple.

Vimeo Channels give the user all of the customization and features they need. You can add your logo, you can change they colors, and you can add an remove little widgets that add things like RSS feeds and forums to your channel. Really you can do just about anything you could want, and no matter what you do the page will still look good and function well. Vimeo did something with their channels that more sites should think about, they limited how much the user can change the appearance. Sound bad at first right?

Well, consider for a moment all of those horrible Myspace pages. Really, have you honestly ever seen a Myspace page that didn’t look like it was made in 1996? The most important limitation on Vimeo Channels is that you can’t change the background color, it’s white. A nice neutral color. No color looks bad on top of white. No making a tiled background that’s going to take forever to load, no making horrible scrolling gifs that make the viewer want to poke their eyes out, just plain white.

Also, the font. You can’t change it either. Not that unusual I know, but more importantly, you can’t change the color! No making yellow text on white backgrounds and no using stupid Apple Chancery that won’t show up on 80% of the computers out there. Just a nice, plain, sans serif font. Just don’t be a douche and make the widget titles white text on light backgrounds… no fucking light yellow!

Finally, my favorite limitation of channels, no HTML embeds. Like any other modern website some HTML tags are OK, your not gonna have a hard time if you want to make something bold or in italics. However, there will be no pasting in autoplaying movies or songs on Vimeo Channels. Just a nice pretty place for you to share you content and interact with your viewers. Simply put, it’s the way channels should be done.

(a little note, I’ll be puting up a Vimeo Channel for video content related to this site. If you like this site and like Vimeo, please subscribe. Link in the side bar… I hope.)

Bobby Andersen just stated (like literally just started, he’s still editing the first post as I’m writing this) called Implodr. If you are unfamiliar with him, he’s the awesome designer behind the Pixel Implosion (use PocketTweets?, yeah, he did that). The reason for my damning him, is, well, just look at his blog! It looks so good! I’m jealous! Anyway, go read his blog, he just wrote a great post about Apple hiring him. (Oh, and if you are reading this Bobby, Congrats on getting the job… and I hate you.).

For the most part I think private messaging systems are helpful. Especially if someone doesn’t know your email address and wants to contact you, or you don’t want someone to know your email address but you want them to contact you. Recently, through twitter, I agreed to help someone test an app they made with my new iPod touch. In return for helping him he gave me a license to his app (the app is PodWorks, and it rocks), but he didn’t have my email address so he Direct Messaged me through twitter with the license so I could test the app.

In that instance private messaging was rather helpful, but I will admit that in most cases it isn’t. I make my email address (well, one of them anyway) rather public, it’s on this site, it’s on my personal site, it’s also on every social network I use. If you really need to contact me, and for some reason you can’t through email… then you just aren’t trying very hard.