Let me first start by saying that I have a bit of a soft spot for the Flock browser. You see, three years ago, before Automattic opened up WordPress.com for public use, it was in a private beta phase and invites were difficult to come by. Upon the arrival of one of the company’s first betas, Flock decided to issue invitations to WordPress.com to accompany the download of the Flock web browser. It was on that day, October 31st, 2005, that the Fans of Tech weblog was born. Using Flock’s embedded blog authoring tool and my new WordPress account, I began what would ultimately become not only an obsession, but also my favorite hobby: informing readers about the development of new technologies that can actually make all areas of their lives just a little bit easier.

That said, I thought it might be fitting to celebrate our 3rd year with some news about the recently-released Flock 2.0.

Exiting beta just a couple of weeks ago, the final release of Flock 2.0 brings a few new features to the Firefox-based browser. First up is support for one of the oldest social networking sites out there, MySpace.

"Now MySpace lovers can stay up to date with their MySpace friends and activities no matter where they are on the web. MySpace users will also find that Flock offers the easiest way to upload photos, insert photos and videos in MySpace comment fields and share most any web content by simply dragging and dropping it into the Flock People sidebar."

The new release also brings support for themes to Flock for the first time. There are two brand-new themes now available to Flock users: Dublin and MyBlue. I personally wasn’t terribly impressed with either of them (I definitely prefer the original better) but, honestly, that goes for a lot of Firefox-based themes I encounter as well.

Now, those two new features are just the tip of the iceberg for the final 2.0 release. Among the many new features introduced in the first Flock 2.0 beta, released back in June, include an improved codebase built upon Firefox 3 - which was unveiled this past spring - as well as support for Media RSS (MRSS) detection.

Flock 2.0 brings plenty of user-reported fixes including a fix for what was once a big problem for many Flock users, including yours truly: memory leaks. Thanks to the new Firefox 3.0 code, Flock now consumes far-less memory per session even despite a large number of open tabs and windows.

This is all in addition to what Flock already offered: a media mini-bar to quickly preview online photos and videos, built-in Webmail viewing for your favorite online email accounts, a built-in blog editor compatible with all of the most popular blogging services, a superbly-powerful search bar for find-as-you-type results from search engines/browsing history/favorites as well as support for pretty much any Firefox add-on that you can find.

Now, many of you may not recall this but Flock actually began as a company by the name of RoundTwo which was built to support the development of Firefox extensions like FlashGot, TinyURL Creator, Copy Plain Text and more - extensions that may not be around today without the support of the company that would eventually craft the world’s most popular socially-aware Web browser.

If you’re not yet using Flock and you want to know a little bit more about it and how it can pretty easily change your social networking experience, their official site, at flock.com, is (in my humble opinion) uniquely easy-to-browse and provides all of the information you need. Read over what all the browser has to offer and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll find yourself downloading it… or one of it’s many incarnations.

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Editor’s Note: Both Flock and WordPress are definitely the best in their class and I not only think it’s great to see that these products/offerings are still available three years later but I’m also proud to have based the first-ever post on Fans of Tech on them. I’m looking forward to three more years of posts on these products and a plethora of others as well.

Related Articles:
- Use Flock 2.0 to Import Delicious Bookmarks Tags Into Firefox 3.0
- Manage Your Multiple Social Personalities with Flock Profiles

ReadItLater is a Firefox add-on designed to help you keep track of new blog posts, news stories, etc. that you just don’t have time to read right now.

As you’re navigating the Interwebs, you’re bound to come across plenty of things that you’ll want to read when you have some spare time. Upon encountering one of these items, you can just click the ReadItLater button and save it for later.

There’s plenty of other extensions/add-ons that can do the same thing but RIL is definitely the most polished of the bunch. One of it’s more powerful features is the ability to synchronize your list across different computers.

This add-on has proven to be priceless but today’s release just made it even sweeter. Some of the new features released in today’s update include online access to your saved items (access them even without Firefox and ReadItLater), PostRank sorting of your saved items, enhanced UI-customization options (including a new option to read your list in a sidebar), enhanced offline functionality (have RIL automatically save offline copies of your saved items) and, my personal favorite, Google Reader integration.

As for that last item, if you’re like me, you’ve got a ridiculous number of RSS feeds and just want to flag an item to read later without actually opening the page. Well, you can now just check the box next to the item in Reader and RIL automatically captures the source and adds it to your list.

If you spend more than a few hours in the browser every day, you’ll definitely want to add ReadItLater to your frequently used Firefox add-ons.

A couple of new entries on MSDN (Microsoft Developer Network) Blogs this morning point to some now-unavailable pages on Microsoft.com… and I think we all know what that means.

The posts in question refer to “Windows Azure” and different development tools (SDK, Visual Studio tools) available for use with it. The following are the posts to which I refer:

• Bookmarks: Windows Azure
• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio

From the latter:

“Windows Azure is the development, hosting, and management environment of the Azure Services Platform, which enables you to run applications at Internet scale while leveraging the skills and tools you use today.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running, and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.”

It seems pretty obvious based on these posts but is “Azure” Microsoft’s new Cloud OS?

Update: Just a little more information: the PDC2008 keynote (featuring Ray Ozzie) where Azure is expected to be announced is scheduled for 8:30am PST. Looks like these bloggers may have just had an itchy trigger finger.

PatternCooler.com, being the ingenious web app that it is, might just be the answer you’re looking for… if the question being posed is: “how can I quickly and easily create a custom background for my site (or my client’s site) without having to scour the Web for Photoshop tutorials or pattern sets?”

How does it work?

First, browse through the 80 different designs (and growing) currently available to find a pattern that you like. Next, adjust the colors within the pattern using the available color-picker as shown below.

The next step is to adjust the sizing of the pattern. Your options range from 25% to 200% of the original design size  - which can result in a dramatic change in appearance. Check out the image below and click for a larger view.

Once you’ve made your adjustments, you can add the completed version to your account for future reference and then download the final bg pattern, free-of-charge, to use on your site/project.

Like I said, the site is free to use but I highly recommend making the $1.00 donation that’s mentioned on the final download page. Just think about the time you’ll save by avoiding numerous Google searches or an hour or two inside Photoshop/Gimp/etc… and then fork over the buck to ensure that this site can continue to provide a quality service. (Which is more than I can say for about 86.3% of all the other web apps out there on the InterWebs.)

Lifehacker today pointed to an add-on (it’s hard not to call it an extension) for Firefox by the name of Drag & DropZones that can help rid yourself of some unnecessary right-clicking when it comes to searching, saving images, opening links in new tabs/windows and, basically, anything you can do via a context menu in Firefox.

How does it work? Start to drag a link or an image and “drop zones” instantly appear. Each drop zone represents a different command and dragging the link or image onto the drop zone activates that particular command. The zones are completely customizable and you can modify the color, transparency and location of each drop zone that you’ve enabled.

If the concept sounds vaguely familiar, there’s a good chance you’re thinking of a couple of other add-ons that have been around for a while longer: Super DragAndGo and Easy DragToGo. Those particular add-ons enable you to quickly drag a link downward to open it in a new background tab or upward to open in a new focused tab… in addition to enabling you to quickly drag an image to save it to a default location. (Note: if you have Easy DragToGo installed, Drag & DropZones’s functionality will render Easy DragToGo useless. The two, apparently, cannot coexist.)

Source: Lifehacker via Webware

The oft-reported-on site, Hulu, now has a special page up dedicated to providing us campaign ads (not just Presidential, either) dating from the 1950s through the 1980s… 32 in all.

There are spots for Reagan’s presidential run and re-election as well as for his run for governor of California (the one where he’s being endorsed by none other than John Wayne), Nixon’s presidential run, and the ever-infamous “We Like Ike” presidential campaign ad for Dwight D. Eisenhower:

Check out: Hulu’s "Historic Campaign Ads."

Just yesterday, we published a post about a a couple of new options from Microsoft which present some easy options to get started with Web development: the Web Platform Installer and Web Application Installer.

That eagerness to continue to offer new ways to teach individuals how to program for the Web and the desktop continues today with the introduction of MSDN DevLabs and one of the first featured projects: SmallBasic. According to the site, SmallBasic is:

“…a project that’s aimed at bringing "fun" back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.”

Despite the amateur-looking interface of the development tool, when they say it’s “aimed for kids and adults alike,” they really mean it. The 62-page introduction guide provides more than a few examples of quick-and-easy applications that can be created: anything from an application where you control a turtle that responds to your commands and subsequently draws a picture on your screen all the way to an application that generates random Flickr images.

These are simple examples, yes, but, from what I’m seeing, it’s a great way to learn the fundamentals of programming.

I personally feel as though Microsoft’s willingness to provide free and powerful tools to aspiring developers has been both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing in that they’ve got more and more programmers developing applications specifically designed for the Windows environment… which, in turn, enhances the operating system’s usefulness; thereby ensuring its future. It’s a curse in that they’ve got more and more lazy programmers developing applications specifically designed for the Windows environment… which, in turn, can cause the OS to perform slowly and, in many cases, crash.

Either way, I’ve had a strong itch to start developing for the Windows platform (I’m most anxious to start with the Windows Mobile platform) so I’m personally rather appreciative of these new tools.

Be sure to check out the other new tools available at DevLabs.

Source: Somasegar’s Weblog

(For Vista/Windows Server 2008 Only) The Microsoft Web Platform Installer Beta is a single package that contains everything you need to start developing for the Web. The package includes IIS7, Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition, SQL Server 2008 Express Edition and the .NET Framework. You have the option to install the package as a whole or just install individual components.

Once you’ve got the components installed that you want, you can dive right into testing and use Microsoft’s Web Application Installer Beta to install various PHP & ASP-based Web applications including DotNetNuke, Drupal, Gallery, Graffiti CMS, osCommerce, phpBB and WordPress. (For most of those applications, you’ll need to have PHP and MySQL installed. However, Microsoft has some pretty simple directions for installing PHP alongside IIS as well as for installing MySQL.)

That’s it. Two quick installations and you can have everything running on your computer to develop new applications or enhance pre-existing, open-source applications like WordPress.

Of course, to help get you started in the world of Web development, the Microsoft Web Platform site features a plethora of resources available to help you along the way including, but not limited to, getting started with ASP.NET and Silverlight.

To get started, check out microsoft.com/web… but keep us posted as to how these packages might have helped with your own project(s).

In case you’re interested, here are the entire contents of the Web Platform Installer package:

Common HTTP Features:

• Static Content
• Default Document
• Directory Browse
• HTTP Errors
• HTTP Redirection

Application Development:

• ASP.NET
• .NET Extensibility
• ASP
• CGI
• ISAPI Extensions
• ISAPI Filters
• Server Side Includes

Health and Diagnostics:

• HTTP Logging
• Logging Tools
• Request Monitor
• Tracing
• Custom Logging
• ODBC Logging

Security:

• Basic Authentication
• Windows Authentication
• Digest Authentication
• Client Certificate Mapping Authentication
• IIS Client Certificate Mapping Authentication
• URL Authorization
• Request Filtering
• IP Security

Performance:

• Static Content Compression
• Dynamic Content Compression

Management:

• IIS Management Console
• IIS Management Scripts and Tools
• Management Service

Compatibility:

• IIS Metabase and IIS 6 Configuration Compatibility
• IIS 6 WMI Compatibility
• IIS 6 Scripting Tools
• IIS 6 Management Console

WAS:

• WAS Process Model
• WAS NetFXEnvironment
• WAS Configuration API

Deployment and Publishing:

• FTP Server
• FTP Management Console

New IIS 7.0 Extensions:

• Bit Rate Throttling
• IIS 7.0 Manager for Remote Admin
• Web Playlist Release Candidate
• FTP 7.0
• WebDAV
• URL Rewrite GoLive
• Microsoft Web Deployment Tool Beta 1

Microsoft .NET:

• .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1

SQL:

• SQL Server Driver for PHP
• SQL Express 2008

Visual Studio:

• Visual Web Developer 2008 Express SP1

Windows:

• Windows Installer 4.5

While an exact release date has yet to be given, the Microsoft Office Sustained Engineering Team is projecting a release of the latest service pack for the Microsoft Office suite sometime in either the late first quarter or early second quarter of 2009.

With a possible release date of nearly 6 months away, why announce a service pack so early? A desire to “increase transparency and visibility into the Office servicing model” is the official reason and it falls in line with the concept behind the Engineering Windows 7 official blog. It looks like Microsoft is finally learning that there’s plenty of feedback to gather from a world full of eager testers/customers.

So, what’s expected with this service pack release? In addition to a focus on interoperability, including enhanced support for ODF, XPS and PDF, you can also expect to see:

• Outlook performance and reliability enhancements
• improved Excel charting functionality
• the ability to add animation to SmartArt graphics in PowerPoint
• “a tool that enables the uninstall of Office client service packs”

Not exactly everything you were hoping for/dreaming of? The post goes on to state that individual product teams (think Excel, Outlook, OneNote, etc.) will soon be announcing more specific enhancements that you’ll be seeing with the release of SP2.

In addition, a private beta test of the service pack will be released to selected individuals in the coming week.

I pledged on Monday to involve Fans of Tech in "Blog Action Day." The campaign, for those of you who may not know, has been set up to encourage bloggers ’round the world to inform their readers about a single topic that affects millions of people around the world. This year, the topic at hand is poverty. (One of the great things about the campaign is that they encourage participants to try and stay on topic. This means that the nearly 11,000 sites participating in Blog Action Day more than likely won’t be inundating you with the same information over and over.)

On behalf of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, Bill Gates recently addressed the United Nations to discuss the progress being made with the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals including the "End Poverty 2015 Milennium Campaign."

"End Poverty 2015…" is, essentially, a collection of eight goals established to help eradicate poverty all over the world by the year 2015 either by taking action or by educating others on the problem we are all witness to at one point or another. The goals are as follows: end hunger, universal education, gender equity, child health, maternal health, combat HIV/AIDS, environmental sustainability and global partnership.

"Thanks to these goals," Gates says, "not only UN agencies but the world at large knows the key measures of poverty, hunger, health, and education. Some of the numbers are good and some are not. But the fact that the world is focusing on the numbers is excellent."

Gates goes on to highlight technological advances that are helping to eradicate this global epidemic including, in the area of agriculture, the development of "drought-tolerant maize for Africa." According to Gates, "this could bring dramatic increases in yield that would help African farmers adapt to climate change."

Gates also makes a good point: if you’re doubtful that we can all band together and eradicate this worldwide epidemic, just look to the past. We all helped to eliminate smallpox and we can join together again to help end poverty.

You can watch and/or read Gates’ address to the UN on the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation official site or read more about the "End Poverty 2015…" campaign at endpoverty2015.org. I highly encourage that you take a few minutes away from your RSS feeds, turn down your music and read about the epidemic and explore the different ways you can help. If, however, you do have limited time today, just check out some videos on the topic (from some additional famous voices like Shakira, Michael Douglas and Lenny Kravitz) at noexcuse.endpoverty2015.org.