I am testing Firefox 3.5. The hype surrounding this version, the expectations that Firefox automatically gets in users’ minds, and my poor perception are possibly the major reasons why I am not yet impressed.

Decline: Slower startup time

Saw this before: Tab Tearing in Google Chrome, Private Browsing in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, Smarter session restore in Maxthon.

Improvement: Tagging URLs for Awesomebar, Memory usage

Interesting: Location-aware Browsing

Neat: Recently closed tabs and windows

Very neat: Forget this site

Cool: 70 languages

Super cool: Audio and video tags (Apparently Apple Safari 3.1 has this feature too.)

I tried to insert a video but it didn’t work. Something that I must be doing wrong.

Like Kevin Purdy wrote, Firefox 3.5 is a pretty substantial update. Not a lot more than that considering that they have gone from 3.0.11 to 3.5 directly.

I don’t talk about the speed because these days the browsers have become so increasingly competitive, which I am not complaining about, that I take improvements for granted.

.: Flex RIA @2008

Like it or not, believe it or not, it seems Twitter sticks with us now. As social animal we human being seems very unsecure about social or communication. We’ve got phone, cellphone, emails, IMs, blogs, SNS and now up to twitter to maintain humanity’s social status. Anyway, why not, right? Guess that is Yahoo’s attitude when they released this Sideline, a Aodbe AIR twitter desktop tool.

This is a typical AIR application and it does what it does. It is also something that you will try it and forget about it, either because it’s from Yahoo or because you give a try to every AIR application as I do. We wrote about a few twitter clients so we know this one has nothing special. But again, why not. Give it a try when you are in a slow day.

Back in February, I used to waste a lot of time on time management. I took a couple of courses and tried a couple of tools, until I returned back to the good old text document. Reasons could be that I don’t plan a very long time ahead and my life is not complicated enough.

Anyway, I had to try this new AIR app called Colabolo which Rob Christensen recommended. It is worth trying for everyone looking for task management software, especially for those who collaborate with others for their tasks.

Colabolo uses a Mac theme that can cool you a bit when you are overwhelmed with tasks. The tasks, called “issues”, can be as simple or as elaborate as you want. The user can attach files to include more information about the tasks and this can be done using a simple drag and drop, a feature that is yet to be adapted widely in AIR apps.

Some of the things that can be included in defining an issue are: title, description, start date, deadline date, priority, progress, status, comments (real-time), assignee, assigner, and notify list. Anyone who has worked in at least a mid-sized enterprise will identify this tool has all the features that are necessary for a “CRM tool” or an “Incident Tracking tool”. Email works, but it is a poor alternative to a tool like this in tracking issues.

Teams tend to have a large number of issues to be tracked, so there is a search feature which works pretty well. And the software doesn’t seem to be hogging system resources like most AIR apps do.

The current beta version is freely available but future versions will cost about $10/user/month. I think all small-to-mid sized teams should try this software.

ImaHima Inc, which is currently focused on the enterprise collaboration space, is the company behind Colabolo.

I just spent good half hour playing with the Adobe AIR application Nomee. It’s a all-in-one social network desktop application. I’m very impressed by the radical idea/concept (shared card) and the number of sites it searches to collect your online social life. However, even though Its first tag line is “simplify”, my experience is everything but simple. After half hour with it, I’m still having no idea what this nice AIR tool could help me. In stead, I’m a bit of upset about the waste of my time.

Only because it’s an AIR application I tried my best to understand it and find good usage of it. I failed. The UI is cool but the default black theme is kind of overdone and depressing while struggling to understand the usefulness of it. A new tool with this magnitude of setup won’t get a lot of traction with new users. I think the problems is they want to do too much. I might be able to get everything straighten out if spending another half hour. But I don’t think I’ve ever give any new tool beyond 10 minutes before deciding keep it or dump it. There are way too many alternatives are waiting. I seriously hope people who design and develop RIAs learn and practice the real “simplicity” principle.

Towards the end of last week, Farah Fawcett was followed by Michael Jackson was followed by Billy Mays. Gawker has some interesting statistics about how the news about MJ’s death melted the entire Internet, and Lee Brimelow tweeted that he was thinking about approaching Billy Mays for a joke infomercial for Adobe.

The first Android smartphone with Flash is here. That was fast. Ryan Stewart thinks it’s going to be a good year for Flash Platform developers who want to get into the mobile space. And Rob Christensen is already busy collecting wishes from everyone to push for Adobe AIR on Android. Please take a moment if you wish it.

Jeff Atwood finally bought an iPhone and he really really digs it.

Microsoft scored another major win with Live at Wimbledon which is to be powered by Silverlight.

Audience measurement firm Nielsen released an insightful report on how teens use media. TechCrunch has a summary.

James Whittaker recommends Lupo to all Flex developers working on a project with multiple locales.

Carlos Pinho rounded off his three-part tutorial on Flash Catalyst. A good starting point if you are looking for one.

Did you know that there are some analysts who believe that Youtube is a gaping sink to Google’s revenue? There are others who argue otherwise about how important Youtube is to Google from a strategic viewpoint in taking over the media.

I’ve seen people are very easily in agreement with major principles but each one might practice them differently. Lots of developers claim they do like to put “Simplicity” on the top of their RIA design approach check-list, but in the end there are still just way too many of complicate “rich” applications. That’s the reason when I saw fizy, a music search/player Flash app(not 100% though), it strikes me that it’s a perfect example for the talks about what is a simple, lean and useful software.

There is not whole lot to talk about this site. When you on it you start use it. When you find what you like you play it. It’s straight to the point without any distraction. It’s not colorful but it’s just feeling beautiful, generated from the calm and ease usability.

I’m certainly not talking about business model or profiting because those needs lots of BS building. From pure software engineering perspective, can you design a better software for exact function than this?

.: Flex RIA @2008

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Not really. But the Armor Games website has a simple game called I Love Traffic which I recommend to all the fans of the boy who never grew up. I have been playing this for more than a couple of hours and have stopped only to tell you about it.

The idea is to control traffic using a set of traffic signals that are controllable by the user. The objective in each level is to clear X cars within Y seconds. There are cars of three sizes and of a few different speeds. A simple idea but it gets more and more difficult as you go to higher levels. I reached the 20th Level and have been stuck there for more than 30 mins.

Update: I won! Proof here.

It is not a game with great graphics (though they are neat); just what we typically call a “Flash game”. The foot-tapping music often pushes you to move faster, pushes you to make an accident.

The only trouble I had was with the counters (cars and seconds left) being on the bottom right corner. I prefer them on the top right corner.

As one moves up the levels, the game is no longer in the player’s deft controls but also in his or her understanding of probability. How good do you think are the odds of clearing a level with turning all signals green and biting your nails?

I liked this game especially because it goes against the usual kinds of destroying everything within sight or pushing for greater speeds blindly. It is about controlling, averting a danger, and doing it now.

You can download the 1 MB game and play it offline from here.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog recently carried a post assuring webmasters across the globe that Google is now capable of indexing Flash content along with its associated external resources. In plain English, it means that if SWF X loads content from SWF Y, then Y can be recognized as a child of X and both X and Y can be indexed. The post also clarifies that sites scripted using AS1, AS2 and even AS3 can be indexed.

Yesterday, Dennis of the Morphic Group sent us a link to his nice tutorial about how to go about with Flash SEO. It can be easily followed by SEO neos and ninjas alike. A most curious tip he gives is to test how your Flash site looks like when using a text-mode web browser like Lynx or W3m. It won’t work for all SWFs, but the test could give some Flash site owners great relief.

Learning Flex’s component’s life is proven very important when you are developing application involving complicate event and object interaction (um…something like frameworks). Mrianl Wadhwa from Bangalore, India did a very good job showing what it looks in Flex 4.

There are code examples on Wadhwa’s site and worth checking out too.

A week ago Microsoft made a press release about Photobucket’s Visual Search, a new way to search, which is powered by Silverlight and Live.

Though my first attempt to Visual Search abruptly ended with my Opera browser crashing, Visual Search itself provided easily one of my best image search experiences so far.

First of all, Photobucket has some of the best image collections (relevance). Say when you search for Watchmen on Google Images, Flickr, Picasaweb and Photobucket you will see the difference.

The dark background and absence of external ads and links makes Visual Search very pleasant. Instead of the usual 20 thumbnails displayed in each page of Photobucket, Visual Search displays 100, enabling a quick navigation across what seems like a longer carefully created album.

Mousing over any image has a few more options and clicking it shows the image in full size. The image can be downloaded or shared (with Live) or embedded in one click.

The best feature though is the “Related Terms” drop-down which I haven’t come across anywhere else. It understandably shows what Photobucket considers as related terms and Visual Search can search for those related terms. This feature is yet to be enhanced. e.g. While the “Related Terms” for Watchmen search includes the names of various Watchmen, those for Silverlight includes terms like “S3XUAL WHORE”.

I think Microsoft has a good win with this partnership with Photobucket.

Image Source: Photobucket Visual Search