While it has mostly gone unnoticed until this point, Growl is some of the coolest new software around. It doesn’t do much on its own right now, but it won’t be long before lots of your software utilizes it.
Growl provides a notification system for all your applications. All a developer need do is send notifications to it. Current applications that you can use with it are:
Growl has been around for a little, but only recently was a build offered to the public. Some warnings need be said. gCount will need an update to use the newly released build. You’ll need a version of Adium 0.7 (currently in beta).
I personally like to use Synergy for iTunes stuff and Mail Appetizer for Mail notifications, but I like having this universal system in place. We can expect to see a lot more use for it.
For some time now, I’ve been using MarsEdit to post to my weblog. It’s the standalone version of the blog editing capabilities that were part of NetNewsWire (Pro). I didn’t get to talk about this because it was private. With the now public beta releases I am freed of that obligation.
You can see more information on Brent Simmon’s Blog (which should be part of your RSS subscriptions by now). Simply said, it’s pure perfection. You can use it with any of a number of blogging software packages. This includes:
- Blogger
- Blogware
- Blosxom
- Conversant
- Drupal
- LiveJournal
- Manila (News Items)
- Moveable Type
- PHPosxom
- pMachine
- Radio UserLand
- SnipSnap
- TypePad
- WordPress
- Other Blogger-compatible systems
- Other Blosxom-compatible systems
- Other MetaWeblog-compatible systems
My emphasis was added because obviously, WordPress is what I use. Until I got a crack at MarsEdit, I had to use one the other types. There’s nothing necessarily all that wrong with that, but the behavior isn’t quite what you’d expect and you had to be a little more adept to set it up.
Drupal is also the system being used by Spreadfirefox.com which means yet another free place to set up your weblog.
At any rate, check out NetNewsWire 2.0 beta and MarsEdit beta. You may just buy a license. Imagine that. If you’re really cheap and don’t need a weblog editor, check out NetNewsWire Lite, perhaps the best free RSS reader on any platform.
The real question is for how long. I am noting this because again, it’s proof that WordPress works fine and great.
Now I’m waiting for the explanation.
After another series of exchanges with my webhost, I’ve reduced one of the problems I’ve been having to a single PHP command.
This should connect to NOAA, disconnect, print a success statement, and finish gracefully. The source can be seen here although you may need to use your browser’s “view source” command.
PHP or Apache hangs on this simple code. If anyone has seen this before, please comment.
