These Things Matter To Me

(graphic based on screengrab from IntelliAdmin’s very nice Vista interface review)

• wowza. Five kinda serious usability issues with Microsoft Vista. ( really well written)
• very funny podcast with mostly-Mac blog Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, and Panic’s Cabel Sasser (this was done at Macworld, soon after The Keynote. Lotsa Steve Jobs mocking that comes from a place of love.)
• For real. IBM announced gigantor social software suite, Lotus Connections. This kinda competes with Microsoft’s gigantor Sharepoint. Many companies will pay for the privilege of buying these packages, and then learn how to use them and in some cases, if to use them. (see also, Enterprisey) Drupal’s Dries Buytaert suggests an IBM/ Drupal collaboration.
• wait. that deserves its own bullet-point. Enterprisey. (”…a derogatory term describing sophisticated software architecture which is claimed to be good enough (robust, flexible, etc.) for use in enterprise applications, but in fact is merely excessively complex…”)

(original screenshot snagged from Drupal.org’s 5.0 screenshot page)

What’s Drupal? Drupal is open source software. Drupal can be used to manage blogs, communities, newspapers, magazines, forums, wikis, on-line video channels, and other kinds of content. You’ve probably visited a site powered by Drupal, and not even realized it! (’Da Drupes is humble like that.)

A new version of Drupal, Drupal 5.0 was released last week. What’s new since Drupal 4.7, its last major revision?

• There’s a web-based installer! (It’s not as nice as the Wordpress installer, but it’s easier than Drupal 4.7’s.)
• The administration panel/ tools is totally reworked since Drupal 4.7. In a good way.
• The new core theme lets you change color stuff dynamically with CSS
• more!

If you want to check out some sites that use Drupal, the video below shows some famous ones, like MTV UK, This Week in Technology, and SpreadFirefox.com.

While it’s easy to find out that software like Drupal is being used when it’s running a famous public website, it’s a little harder to know when it’s being used internally, in corporate, community, and organizational intranets. As it turns out, Yahoo! uses Drupal internally, and outlined the process. Based on this awesome Drupal case study from IBM, one can only assume they use it for collaboration stuff as well.

Related links:

• Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert’s personal blog (powered by Drupal, duh)
• Drupal superstars Lullabot
• The Digg.com Drupal 5.0 announcement thread. (for the patient and thick-skinned)

We now have a decent Flash version on Linux.
quick notes:

• You can get Flash 9 for Linux here
  
• Red Hat will include this in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, released February 28
• Novell will put Flash 9 in Service Pack 1 for SLED 10 (date undetermined)
• step by step Flash 9 installation how-to for Ubuntu Linux (thanks osnews.com!)
• still no 64bit version

Adobe’s Linux Flash player has been stuck at version 7 for ages, while Windows XP and Mac OS X sat pretty with Flash 9 for six months. (Let alone version 8, which was totally skipped for Linux)

Less than two years ago, being a couple of versions back with your Flash player wouldn’t have been the end of the world. This is as much about Flash’s totally reinvented usage, as it is about Linux. Previously, not having Flash didn’t make you feel totally left out. Maybe you’d miss some animated banner ads (but they’d probably still work). With the increasing importance of search engine optimization (Flash isn’t so easy to index for Google), and social bookmarking (Flash isn’t so great with the unique URL’s), and people’s patience (Flash can get people kinda mad when they have to renavigate 6 steps after hitting the “back” button), web sites managed by Flash were getting less popular.

But then the YouTube/Vimeo/Google Video/Blip.tv/Revver embeddable video storm happened.

(original photos via Chris Pirillo’s video experiment)

And Flash was actually really great for video inside of an otherwise non-Flash page. And then people started using it even as an embeddable mp3 player.

(a screengrab of a del.icio.us page set to browse mp3’s and podcasts)

You didn’t have to download podcasts and other mp3’s. You could cleanly play audio and video in a browser page. (Yes, other specialized players/ plugins could previously do it, but way more clumsily than Flash).

With the newly realized ease of embedding video and audio (aided not just by Flash, but by the excellent players being made by the likes of YouTube and del.icio.us), audio and video was being used a lot more not just for entertainment stuff, but for delivering technical, business, and basic communications stuff. (For example, here I have an embedded demo of VMware Fusion Beta. In Flash!)

In any case, the huge wave of new Flash content really stung when you were on Linux, because all over the web, almost any embedded video was a reminder that you were a second-class citizen.

Ideally in the future the web won’t be dominated by closed players, and users won’t be held hostage by any single company. But given how much better Flash performs these basic multimedia functions at the moment, it’s a good day for Linux.

related:

• the Gnash project, an source Flash player currently playing stuff up to Flash 7