Flickr for Mac Users – Photonic is a new third-party client for Flickr that runs in Mac OS X. Instead of accessing Flickr through the web, you get a dedicated browser application on your desktop. You can see your own or your friends’ streams, search, and even set up and perform bulk uploads. When you’re ready to work with a particular photo, double-click and Photonic opens the appropriate web page for you.
Currently in beta (but reasonably stable), Photonic only runs on Leopard and is set to sell for $20.
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A Better Cashboard – Estimating, time tracking, and invoicing application Cashboard has added some new features since the last time we looked at them. Changes in the last six months or so include fully customizable templates for estimates and invoices, better editing facilities, and faster synchronization with Basecamp.
Although pricing remains the same (free plan available with some features, with successively more expensive subscriptions depending on capacity), they’ve also adjusted their pricing structure by making unlimited client logins a part of every plan.
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Send the Bureaucrats Home – As we’ve pointed out before, the federal government is home to some of the most ambitious telework programs around. Now comes the news that Lurita Doan, current administrator of the General Services Administration (the folks in charge of running buildings and offices for the government, among other things) has set a goal of having 50% of her staff telecommuting by 2010 (up from the current 10%).
This isn’t a complete radical decentralization of the office, as the government counts you as a teleworker if you spend 1 or more days per week offsite. But it is certainly a big step in the direction of validating what many web workers already know: that there are many, many jobs that need not be tied to a traditional office setting.
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A Different View of Search – Google isn’t quite standing still on search, though they’re certainly not rolling out user interface revolutions at a fast pace. Still, a visit to the Google Labs Experimental Search page gives you a few things to pay with. The latest thing they’ve rolled out is the ability to take search results and plot them on a map or a timeline, or integrate images directly into the main search results.
The additional info doesn’t seem to slow things down and may even be helpful, though I’d rather Google spotted the helpful views and showed them to me automatically. If you’re on the lookout for Google tweaks, it’s also worth having a look at the CustomizeGoogle extension for Firefox.
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Huddle ups the Free Ante – We’ve looked at Huddle, an online team-management tool in the same general arena as SharePoint or Basecamp, before. But in connection with this week’s DEMO conference, they made a couple of announcements that make them worth a second look. First, they’ve substantially upped the capabilities available for free: you can now get 3 workspaces (“huddles”), 1GB of storage, and unlimited users without paying. Higher-end plans get rid of advertising and add SSL security and custom branding, as well as additional storage.
The other thing they’ve done is offer integration with Facebook. If you’re a Facebook user, you can install the Workspaces by Huddle application and start using your account there for something other than throwing sheep. Looks like a smart way to reach more potential users to me.
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The Limits of Privacy – Photo-sharing site SmugMug has a problem. Whether it’s a PR problem or a privacy problem, I’ll leave you to decide. The basic facts, as brought out by Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped, are pretty straightforward: SmugMug uses an easily-guessed scheme for gallery and photo URLs, so a gallery marked “private” is really open to public browsing unless it’s also password-protected. In my own testing it took less than ten minutes to find a gallery by URL-hacking that I couldn’t get to via search (fortunately, that particular one only contained baby pictures).
That said, the process is tedious (though obviously open to automation), and apparently there has been no hue-and-cry from SmugMug users over the nature of privacy on the site. SmugMug’s CEO Don MacAskill responded to Lenssen saying that they did not currently see this as a major issue, but “If our customers (or potential customers) asked us to adopt GUIDs because this was a bigger issue than we were aware – we would.” With the news starting to ricochet around the blogosphere, I suspect this may become a bigger issue faster than MacAskill counted on. I also suspect there will be a lot more random SmugMug URLs typed into browsers in the immediate future.
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Quick Web Sites – There are lots of online tools to help you put together a web site quickly. The latest I’ve run across is Tank, which does indeed seem to streamline the process nicely. After an instant signup process you can create a new site, choosing between various canned templates (business, personal, and so on) or starting from scratch. Sites are composed of a hierarchy of pages, any number of post-oriented sections (blogs or journals) and any number of photo albums. You can change the formatting and edit text easily in their tabbed UI, with the markup using a very simple text-based engine. It’s possible to bang together something that doesn’t look half-bad quite quickly.
Your sites run on a subdomain of withtank.com for free for as long as you want to keep them in development mode. If you get to the point where you want to move to your own domain, or need more than 10MB of storage or 100MB of bandwidth, you need to move to a paid plan. Tank itself is under rapid development with new features coming along at a good clip.
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Travel with a Buddy – Personal travel assistant site Tripit (which we’ve written about before) is taking a step beyond just helping you organize all the emails that make up a travel itinerary. Now they want to help you share your trips with friends and colleagues, with the addition of social networking features to their site.
If you’ve got a Tripit account, you can start importing friends, either by entering email addresses or grabbing a whole address book from Gmail, Hotmail, LinkedIn, or other serves. Once you have a critical mass of friends online, you can start seeing which ones are going to be in the same area as you (and vice versa). The “closeness” notification happens automatically, but you have to actually share a trip for your friends to see the details of your itinerary.
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Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
