Taking a look back at '04

In January, we landed two probes on Mars that sent back a host of cool images from the red planet.

I started using Oddpost, a great webmail service as well. Oddpost was later purchased by Yahoo, and a new mail service is expected, well, “soon”.

In the spring, Google introduced their search-by-number feature for finding packages, products by UPC code, and more as well as a number of other features. Google later introduced GMail, a free webmail service with a whopping 1 gigabyte of mail storage, as well as the expected search and organization features from Google. GMail’s interface was also revolutionary, utilizing some creative DHTML and JavaScript to provide one of the best webmail interfaces around. Some privacy concerns arose, however, as GMail includes ads related to the content of the email being displayed.

Onfolio, a great application for keeping information organized and easily accessible, was also released. The version 2.0 beta test is now in progress.

Web conferencing also became more accessible. Macromedia made a number of functional and pricing improvements to Breeze. Convoq also introduced their ASAP service which is based on instant messaging but has a number of advanced features like screen sharing and shared presentation viewing.

Apple started making what I hope to be a comeback this year. The iPod mini was a huge success, and the later introduction of the new iPod with Click Wheel and the iPod photo further strengthened the product line. Sales of Macintosh computers also grew as a result of the iPod’s popularity and after more than a decade, I’m back to using Apple computers, at least part time. OS X is an elegant, stable, and easy to use operating system. They later announced the Airport Express, another innovative product that combines a firewall wireless access point, print server, and networked digital audio player into a box the size of a standard power brick.

Satellite radio became more and popular. XM Radio now has over 3 million subscribers, and competitor Sirius has about 1 million subscribers. Each has exclusive content and a variety of devices for tuning in to digital radio.

Desktop search became a hot topic this year. Products such as X1, Copernic, and Google Desktop Search now allow Windows users to quickly search the content of all their files, emails, and photos. Apple has promised enhanced search features via a feature called Spotlight in a future release of Mac OS, and Microsoft plans to include search features in Longhorn.

After years and years of little new developments, the Mozilla Foundation tested and released Firefox in 2004. This re-ignited the browser wars by offering a secure, fast, and feature-rich competitor to Microsoft Internet Explorer. Better support for RSS, tabbed browsing, enhanced privacy features, and much more made Firefox a growing threat against Microsoft’s complete browser dominance.

In the Macromedia world, excitement has been growing around the forthcoming release of ColdFusion Blackstone. New features are expected to include several Flex-like components for creating rich Internet applications, dynamic document creating in PDF or FlashPaper format, and more. The new features in Blackstone will enable developers to create some amazing web applications in the future. Macromedia also released the ColdFusion MX 6.1 updater, which packaged a number of previously released fixes along with new versions of the JDBC database drivers. Later in the year, Contribute version 3.0 was released for Windows and Macintosh platforms. Contribute is developing into a pseudo-CMS platform and it works pretty well.

Summer 2004 brought Windows XP Service Pack 2, which contained a large number of security-related enhancements to the Windows operating system. Still, regular security patches have been issued to fix a number of vulnerabilities for machines even with service pack 2.

Voice-over-Internet (VOIP) became a lot more usable in 2004. Free software such as Skype allows free or cheap phone calls to be made computer-to-computer very easily, and commercial services like Vonage make phone-to-phone calls via the Internet as easy as a regular POTS phone with comparable sound quality.

In the fall, SpaceShipOne won the X Prize by making two launches of a single spacecraft capable of carrying three people into space in less than two weeks. Virgin Galactic has licensed the technology and will be offering commercial spaceflight for tourists in the next 2 to 3 years.

Konfabulator, the popular Mac OS X tool for displaying informational “widgets” on your desktop, was released for Windows. Adobe released a new version of Acrobat, 7.0, with a reader that is significantly faster than previous versions.

We in the US reelected our President in November. In a very close campaign, conservative George W. Bush beat out John Kerry by winning the state of Ohio. The country remains very much divided between “red” and “blue” states.

Flickr, a unique photo-sharing site, was made available. It has a number of features for organizing and sharing digital photos very easily across platforms by using the web.

One of the largest natural disasters in history, a massive 9.0 earthquake struck Asia in late December. The resulting tsunami waves caused over 120,000 deaths and massive destruction in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia, Maldives, and Tanzania. The effects where felt as far away as Kenya and were reported to have caused the entire planet to wobble on its axis.

So that was 2004, at least according to what I blogged at the time. :-) I hope you have a happy and safe new year. Thanks for reading.

Matt

Help

The recent earthquake in southern Asia has caused huge tsunamis and massive loss of property and life. The American Red Cross is accepting donations on their website. The International Response Fund provides immediate and long term support for those in need outside of the US. Every bit counts - my best wishes go out to all of those who have lost a loved one or are otherwise affected by this disaster.

New WiFi Detector

Tom's Networking has a review of the new Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter. This is a WiFi detector that includes a LCD screen that shows not only signal strength, but the detected SSID, encryption status, and channel found. This is an improvement over some of the other WiFi detectors that just show signal strength.

New software for Airport Express

Apple's is the swiss-army knife of wireless networking. One of the most popular features is called AirTunes, and allows Windows and Mac iTunes users to stream audio to a stereo connected to the Airport Express. Now, Rogue Amoeba has announced a new application called Slipstream that allows any application, like RealPlayer or Windows Media Player to stream directly to the Airport Express. Slipstream will be available in early 2005 for Mac OS X.

Speed up Acrobat

Acrobat Reader has always seemed to take forever to open up PDF's even after disabling plugins and performing other hacks. Adobe has released Adobe Reader 7.0 which is tremendously faster than the prior version, at least on Windows.

IE7

No, not Internet Explorer. IE7 is JavaScript that can be inserted into an HTML file to make IE a bit more standards-compliant when it comes to CSS. The JavaScript parses and converts the CSS to work with Internet Explorer, allowing web developers to use CSS2 and CSS3 selectors that are otherwise not correctly supported in Internet Explorer.

Important Innovation

Its has been a while since coffee technology has been advanced, but it looks like Wolfgang Puck may do it with his new single-serve coffee can. At first this doesn't sound like a big deal until you get to the part where the can warms itself up without the need for electricity. It will be available in January - should be interesting to see how it compares to fresh coffee.

Google Desktop Search Update

A group of researchers at Rice University discovered a security hole in Google Desktop Search. Google has been quick to acknowledge the problem and already has released an update to fix the hole. The flaw would allow an attacker to read search results from Google Desktop Search. While entire files could not be read, the results often had snippets from the files in the search results.

iPod Remote Remote

Belkin has announced a new product called the Tunestage for the Apple iPod. The device attaches to the iPod and transmits the audio to a base station using Bluetooth. The base station in turn then connects to a stereo so the iPod effectively becomes both the remote and the music source.

I'm kind of surprised something like this isn't out already - Apple's own Airport Express makes an ideal base station for this kind of thing. There are always rumors about a WiFi enabled iPod but an adapter might work just as well.

Onfolio 2.0 Beta Available

As previously announced, Onfolio 2.0 beta 1 is now available. New features include a full featured RSS reader with a newspaper view, shared collection support, improved capture support, Firefox support, and a lot more. Onfolio is a great tool for staying origanized and keeping track of information of all kinds.

Photo Sharing

I've been using Google's Picasa to manage my photo library. It has some basic publishing capabilities, and can also send photos to a blog, but beyond that doesn't have a lot of sharing capabilities.

I recently discovered and signed up for Flickr, an on-line photo storage and sharing service. You can upload your photos to Flickr using either a browser or a drag-and-drop utility available for Mac or Windows to upload your files to your account. Once uploaded, you can add tags (keywords), a title, and a description. Other information, such as the date, is pulled right from the EXIF data embedded in the photo if your camera supports it. Photos are stored at full size but are resized for easy display in a web browser.

A cool, Flash based interface called the "organizr" allows you to organize photos into sets (albums) or groups (shared albums with multiple contributors)

Where Flickr really shines is in its sharing capabilities. Photos can be marked private, such that they are only viewable by you, public, or viewable only by a selected group of contacts that are labeled as family or friends. You can easily send invitations to friends and family members; Flickr automatically creates an account for them if they don't have one already. The aforementioned groups capability allows a shared album to be created where multiple people can upload photos to be seen by all.

Flickr offers a free trial account as well as a paid service for about $40 a year. This includes 1 gigabyte of upload per month, unlimited storage, unlimited downloads, and unlimited photos. If you'd like to check it out, I've posted a few public pictures of Charlie for everyone to enjoy.

Need a suggestion?

By now you've probably read about Google Suggest, the new interface for Google that suggests search terms as you type them in. While it is simple in concept, implementing such a UI across browsers and platforms is not exactly easy. Adam Stiles has posted an excellent blog entry about how they did it.

Copernic 1.2 Released

Copernic is a great desktop search tool that performs fast searches of email, contacts, files, and browser history. Version 1.2 was released earlier this week and includes a number of performance enhancements and new features. The most exciting is support for searching browser bookmarks and history from Mozilla Firefox. This is something that is missing from many of the other products I've tried (including Google Desktop Search) and as Firefox becomes more and more popular I hope we'll see more 3rd party add-ons like this that support both IE and Firefox.

Thunderbird 1.0 Released

Hot on the heels of the Firefox 1.0 release a few weeks back, Mozilla has released version 1.0 of their new Thunderbird email client. Thunderbird is a fast, stable alternative to Outlook and other email clients and has features such as built-in spam filtering, smart search folders, RSS support, and several useful privacy features.

Internet Dashboard

Announced some time ago, Ambient Devices has released their Dashboard. This is a remarkably simple device that receives information via FM radio and displays it on 1 of 3 analog dials. Swappable faces show nearly any kind of information - traffic, weather, how many waiting emails you have, etc. You can also customize it with your own "channels" to display pretty much any information you need to see at a glance.

Firefox in sync

There are 3 or 4 individual computers I use with any regularity between work, home, and while I'm on the road. I pretty much use Firefox on all of them and I just found a great extension that synchronizes the bookmarks across all of them automatically. The Bookmarks Synchronizer exports and automatically FTPs all of your bookmarks to an FTP server you specify. Each of your other computers can then automatically download the file and import the bookmarks. From then on, any machine can upload updated bookmarks which are then downloaded to the other machines. It works great, and is cross platform - the Firefox bookmarks on my Mac are identical to those on my Windows PCs.

Behind the scenes at Google

ZDNet Australia has a really interesting article about everyone's favorite search engine. It goes into more detail than I've seen before about Google's operation - more than 30 clusters of over 2,000 Intel servers each. All no-name, single (IDE!) disk machines. With over 4 billion web pages in its index, there are certainly some unique operational challenges that Google has met to keep their service fast, reliable, and up to date.

Macromedia Knowledgebase

Macromedia has added a new guided search tool to their support website. The new tool allows you to find content and narrow your search to specific products, content types, or topic (development, support, or customer service) More information is available in a FAQ posted on macromedia.com.

WiFi Detector Reviews

This is a good review of several WiFi "detectors" that are currently on the market. I've used the Smart ID WFS-1 and it usually works pretty well. The downside to most of these products is that while they can tell you if a wireless network is available, they can't tell you what kind ("g" or "b"), if it is an open network, or any other configuration information. They can also sometimes be fooled by microwave ovens, some cordless phones, and Bluetooth devices, but as most of the products mentioned are fairly low cost it is a useful tool to keep in a travel bag.

New Bluetooth Phones from Sprint

There are now a few options for Sprint PCS users who want to use Bluetooth to connect to the Internet wirelessly. Previously, the Sony-Ericsson T608 was the only available option. While the phone's software is buggy and battery life appears to be rather short, the Bluetooth connectivity generally works pretty well.
Two new devices will shorly be available that allow you to use Bluetooth similarly. The PalmOne Treo 650 PDA/phone has built-in Bluetooth. While the supplied software doesn't allow include the Dial-Up Networking profile (which allows another device, such as a laptop, to use the Treo's Internet connection), a user at TreoCentral has published a patch that enables this functionality on the device.

Sprint is also due to release the LG PM-325 handset. This is a new "slider" camera phone that includes Bluetooth functionality, reportedly including the Dial-Up Networking capability. While not as feature-filled as the Treo, this phone will work well if you already have a Bluetooth enabled PDA or laptop and wish to get on the Internet wirelessly.