Technocrank

Yet another incarnation of the impending Firefox 3.5 release, although it doesn’t seem to be up at the normal beta version download site which still has 3.5b4.  Apparently, if you download 3.5b4 and then do an in-browser Check For Updates you’ll be fixed up proper.

ClickToFlash is a nice little Flashblock-type plugin for Safari with one big problem.  Two, actually.

1. you can’t leave feedback for the developer without creating a (free) account on the project website.  Dude, I just wanted to tell you about #2…
2. the only way I could find to get into the whitelist and preferences for the plugin is via a page with Flash that isn’t already blocked (there’s a little control on the blocker that gets you in).  However, if you’ve already whitelisted the page there’s no way to get back in and un-whitelist it without going to another site with Flash.  Worse, if you’ve whitelisted it in Fluid (a single-site browser application instance of Safari) there’s no hope at all of making any changes.  You are stuck.

You need to get a preference pane in the main application fast.

One thing about ClickToFlash compared to Flashblock: as I’ve cranked about a few months ago, the Flash media player on MySpace doesn’t load properly in Firefox when you tell Flashblock to unblock.  However, with ClickToFlash in Safari there’s no such problem.  You click, it appears.  Flashblock developers say this is a known bug in the Mozilla code which I should point out nobody seems to be working on.  The Flashblock bug was logged October 2008, the Mozilla bug March 2009 and the feedback comments run in circles.  It’s also suggested that the problem is with the Flash player but ClickToFlash on Safari doesn’t have the same issue.

Score one more for Safari.

Anybody who hasn’t heard of Google Wave had better sit up.  It’s been in development by a team led by the brothers at Google Labs who brought us Google Maps (along with the API that’s helped make it so useful and popular).

They’ve dubbed it as what email would have been if it were invented today.  It takes the best of online/offline collaborative messaging and smooshes them together into what the preview announcement describes as product, platform and protocol (which will be open).  All of this is currently being made available to developers to start hacking together “robots” and “gadgets” which will surely bring about some terrifyingly brilliant, if not convoluted and sinister collective artificial intelligence which I’ll dub Skynet (when Wolfram escapes into its own robot instance) but is probably closer to Borg.

Anyway.  Sounds neat.

Google Calendar has been down for me for the past hour and a half.  The most irking thing about it is that I get bounced to this page, which offers no way out or to check back that the Calendar is up yet.  Unhelpful -
à la 1994.

I don’t really know what’s going on here but…I kinda want in on that action.