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I’m coming out and saying it, loud and proud!  “I’m a Flocker!”

Recently, I made the move from Firefox over to Flock on my main workstation.  It gave me everything I love with Firefox with the social features of Flock.

I was initially one of the testers when Flock was only on developer release.  Of course there were a lot of bugs that made using it neat but far from a daily tool.

Today, they’ve announced the first non-beta release of Flock with version 1.0.

I’m using the built-in blog editor to post this now, as I’ve migrated over to Flock on my laptop as of today.

One thing I wasn’t too hot for was that Yahoo! was the default search engine.  BUT… now worries just do an about:config type search in the filter bar and change the default engine form Yahoo! to Google.  Next time you load, you’ll be searching default with Google but still seeing the live search results from Yahoo!

One feature that I LOVE is the clipboard.  This is something that Opera has that I love, but since I’m a avid Roboform user I could never use it.

As a developer working on several projects at a time on an on-going basis, I’ve generally got quite a few bookmarks that are project specific.  Whether it be to a PHP class, a plug-in, or what have you.  These bookmarks can easily pile up over the long haul, but with the clipboard I can save text snippets, links and more with easy viewing and deletion.  It’s one of my new best friends!

All of this and I haven’t even mentioned the integration of Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc, etc, etc.

Flock is a great browser and I can’t wait to see what’s down the road… especially since I no longer have to see the word “beta’.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: flock, flock browser, browsers

I got my first look at TinyMCE 3.0 today and I’m highly impressed.  There’s times when certain dialogs didn’t load for me, but overall it’s a great improvement.  This new version is a complete rewrite of the TinmyMCE core.  Keep in mind that this is an Alpha version and there are several known issues with this version, and “we still suggest you get the 2.1.2 version if stability is your major concern.”

From a pure feature point of view, this release might not be very impressive, but if you are interested in JavaScript and do a lot of custom development, this is the release you have been waiting for. One of the main focuses for the new 3.x branch is to produce a more powerful API and also make it output valid XHTML code by default.

Some of the more notable changes are:

• Rewrote the core and most of the plugins and themes from scratch.
• Reduced the over all script size by 33% and the number of files/requests by 75% so it loads a lot faster.
• Added new and improved serialization engine, faster and more powerful.
• Added new inlinepopups plugin, the dialogs are now skinnable and uses clearlooks2 as default.
• Added new contextmenu plugin, context menus can now have submenus and plugins can add items on the fly.
• Added new skin support for the simple and advanced themes you can alter the whole UI using CSS.
• Added new o2k7 skin for the simple and advanced themes.
• Added new JSON parser/serializer and JSON-RPC class to the core API.
• Added new cookie utility class to the core API.
• Added new Unit testing class to the core API only available in dev mode.
• Added new Safari plugin, fixes lots compatibility of issues with Safari 3.x.
• Added new on demand loading of plugins and themes. Enables you to load and init TinyMCE at any time.
• Added new unit tests in the dev package of TinyMCE. Runs tests on the core API, commands and settings of the editor.
• Removed all button images and replaced them with CSS sprite images. Reduces the number of requests needed.
• Removed lots of language files and merged them into the base language files. Reduces the number of requests needed.
• Removed lots of unnecessary files and merged many of them together to reduce requests and improve loading speed.
• Fixed so convert_fonts_to_spans are enabled by default. So no more font tags.
• Fixed so all classes from @import stylesheets gets imported into the editor.

Thats right, its now 33% smaller and loads even quicker than before! The fastest loading editor just got even faster!

Check out the complete changelog.

A new example of the alternative Office2k7 skin can be seen here:
http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/example_sk … ample=true

The Spellchecker and Compressor for TinyMCE 3.0 Alpha has also been updated.

The Alpha version is live on this server and the Wiki example pages. If you wish to try it out yourself, go to the download page.

TinyMCE Forum / TinyMCE 3.0 Alpha 1 Released

Tags: tinymce3, tinymce, wysiwyg editors, inline editor

PSDTuts.com has a great tutorial for creating a stunning digital smoke effect like you see above. Although they use Illustrator, you should be able to use any vector app that you have as long as it has a tool similar to the Blend Tool in Illustrator.

PSDTuts - Just Great Photoshop Tutorials » Creating a Stunning Digital Smoke Effect [Updated]

Tags: illustratortutorial, smoke effect in illustrator