Ryan Price and the Media

Boing Boing recently made a post about Darren Arnofsky's first film in more than 6 years, The Fountain (Apple Trailers). They were pointing out the fact that the space scenes were generated without using CGI, using liquid suspensions and other real-life techniques to get an analog look to things.

You can see samples of 4 of these effects at the Official Flash Site for the film. Very otherworldly, very 80's -- think Krull. I don't know why they chose to make that the official site. There is no information about the film at all, no way to send it to your friends, not even a mention of the title or actors. I guess they figure it can be viral even if they don't push viral? I wouldn't doubt if this has been on Digg. You can also download a screen saver of the undulating swirling goo from the site. Now, if it said "The Fountain, hitting theaters this November", that would probably be a good thing. Somehow I don't think it does.

P.S. Shameless plug: If you click over to Amazon to buy The Fountain, consider clicking on this link and sharing the love.

If you don't know about Songbird yet, then you are likely not a geek, and that's OK. It's not made by Mozilla, but in fact a standalone commercial venture like Flock. Eerily similar, actually. They even have some of the same developers. Like Flock, Songbird includes the Mozilla Firefox browser, complete with themes, extensions, and a web browser. For geeks, it is built in XULRunner, which is pretty similar to a Konfabulator or Dashboard widget, using XML, Javascript and images to build an application that runs on any platform.

As we are currently in "Developer Preview" mode (like Flock was last year), the Songbird boys and girls decided to count how many smoothies they make in their bicycle-powered Fender Blender, and the other stats you see. Very good idea. The marketing for songbird is top-notch so far, and they're nowhere near a public release. Building geek loyalty early (like Firefox and Flock) seems to be a new trend in applications. They are also advocating actually paying for your music, hooray for them!

Since songbird includes the Firefox browser (or most of it), you can go to any webpage just by typing in the address bar. Once you're there, Songbird will show you a playlist of all the media files linked from the page. Pretty nice. It will even try to give you a preview of the length of the song: not sure how it does that without messing with everybody's server logs, but c'est la vie.

After getting a handy playlist of everything on a page (even video), you can easily subscribe to all the content on your favorite web page or mp3 blog. Not quite a podcatcher, but better in some ways. A lot of times a more general solution gets the job done almost as well as a niche tool while allowing for, well, more general uses.

this is a project I will be watching very closely. I have heard a little bit about it in the past, but now having tried it for myself, the only question I have is "How will they monetize a farting bird mascot?"

Firefox 2 now has support for external RSS subscriptions instead of stupid Live Bookmarks. This means I can use my favorite reader Netvibes whenever I see the happy little orange icon in my address bar.

Netvibes is not one of the default RSS subscription engines, but this post includes a one-click update that couldn't be simpler.

I also dig the new notification style that just kind of appears at the top of the viewport. I know pop-up blocking and plug-in notifications have been appearing in this space for a while now, but I like this a lot better than an alert window.

Firefox has supported RSS since (I think) version 1.0, but this allows me to consume RSS in exactly the way I like. Why is this important? If I don't read feeds at all, the old school Live Bookmarks feature at least lets me know they exist, and lets me check them out if I am a bookmark whore. Firefox also provides 3 default choices to subscribe, being Bloglines, My Yahoo, and Google Reader; arguably the 3 most popular feed readers, and 3 of my least favorites. Because I know that Mozilla makes money by all sorts of content partnerships, I can imagine that they somehow got sponsored to include these three, and not any others.

Another lowered barrier to entry is the way the browser "skins" unskinned RSS, instead of displying raw XML. NO web browser should display raw XML, but there should be a developer hack to override the default, always.

Apparently Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista will have support for RSS. Hooray. Sadly, not for podcasts or netcasts, boo. More on this later.

Oh, and View Source doesn't exist in IE7. Why?

In an effort to scratch my own itch, I remembered a time when I wanted to burn some files to data CD or DVD and thinking "there must be an easier way to do this". Enter Automator, basically the most powerful and underused feature on any Mac.

I created a simple workflow I called "Burn to Disc..." that I installed to the right-click menu of my Finder. Now I just select one or more files in the Finder (they need to all be in the same directory in this case) and choose Automator > Burn to Disc... No software needed.

I decided to to use the actions "Get Selected Finder Items" and "Burn a Disc". Then I chose to "Save as Plugin..." to the Finder, which means it shows up in the right-click (ctrl + click) menu.

If you are making workflows that act on files in the Finder, choose File > Save as Plug-in... Then name your plugin and choose Finder. The option will show up when you right-click or ctrl+click on any number of finder items. To select multiple items, use shift+click or cmd+click.

You can also choose to save the plug-ins to Folder Actions, iCal Alarm, Image Capture, Print Workflow or Script Menu. Think: iCal Alarm = CRON Jobs from Unix, or Scheduled Tasks from Windows. Send an email at 3PM, destroy an incriminating file at a future date, send that virus to everyone on the network days after you've left on vacation.

If you are an RSS subscriber, there are also 2 more quick examples there... oooh! RSS only features! How does he do it? Thanks Feedburner!