Recently installed
These days I’ve been too busy with other things to get much blogging done, but I thought I would take this opportunity to write about a few new-ish applications that I’ve been quite pleased with recently.
Firebird 0.7
I find it highly ironic that once Microsoft won the browser wars, it stopped updating its browser. The reasons for doing so are of course many and varied, but the result is simply that the world’s most commonly used browser is one of the least sophisticated. (I regularly encourage Windows users to stop thinking of MSIE as a browser, but instead as a component in the operating system that does an adequate job of rendering HTML.)
Much more sophisticated browsers abound, but almost nobody cares about them. (This is particularly true in Japan, where everyone seems to assume that “browser” is a synonym for MSIE.) Mozilla is, of course, one of the best in its class, but even it has drawbacks, which is why the folks developing it have decided to break Mozilla into two separate projects, Firebird (which inherits the browser functions) and Thunderbird (which gets the e-mail and newsgroup functions), in order to focus on the specific needs of each application. The results so far have been pretty good.
Firebird recently reached the 0.7 level in its development (1.0 being the point where it is ready for the general public), but it is already good enough to replace Mozilla as my primary browser. It’s lightweight and fast, standards-compliant, and it comes pre-configured in a way that most users would appreciate (it blocks pop-up windows by default, for example). By all rights, Firebird deserves to be the leading browser, but until Microsoft gets around to producing MSIE 7, I’m afraid most of the world won’t have anything even close.
FeedDemon
If you are still one of those folks who still visits individual sites one at a time to find out what is new, I’ve got news for you: This is the 21st century. People don’t do that anymore.
So what do they do instead, you ask? They install a news reader and gather updates via RSS, of course! News readers, although insanely popular among the weblogging community, don’t seem to have caught on with the general public to the extent that they probably should. (I’m sure they will, though, because just about every site worth visiting has its own RSS feed these days. Heck, even I have one.)
In the news reader category, there are a lot of different applications to choose from, but the best one I’ve found to date is FeedDemon, which is produced by Nick Bradbury, the same guy who gave us HomeSite and TopStyle. Even though FeedDemon is still just a release candidate (RC4a at the time of this writing), it already beats the pants off several other applications I’ve used in the past—even the ones that I’ve purchased.
One of the coolest things about FeedDemon, though, is that it makes it easy to post incoming news directly to pMachine, which is the blogging tool I use for this site and several others—so not only does it help me get information quickly and easily, but it enables me to share it quickly and easily, too. (Need instructions on how to set up FeedDemon to do this? Or how about for Movable Type/TypePad users?)
<oXygen/> XML editor
This one is a bit more esoteric than the first two. Everyone needs a browser, and everyone who has a clue (or simply wants one) needs a newsreader, but not everyone needs an XML editor.
XML, being simply a way to mark up text, doesn’t really require a full-featured editing program (even a simple text editor like WordPad will do the job), but the features are a nice perk for people who work with the markup a lot. The project-management features, in particular, make it easier to keep track of large-scale projects, which is something that WordPad simply cannot do.
The best feature, though, is the license, which allows the user to install the software on any number of computers, so long as only one copy is in use at any given time. That means I can use the same copy at work (where I use Windows) and at home (where I usually use Linux), all for the same price! I wish more software developers would adopt this approach. I’d buy a lot more software if they did.
