twoplustwoequalsblog

Or, “Three XUL Apps You Should Be Running, But Aren’t”

Hello everyone! How are you all enjoying your summers? Good? I coded up quite the storm today, and I have to say I am rather impressed with what I am creating. Too bad it has extremely little applicability outside of what I am writing it for. Oh well.

Today, I am here to talk to you about some really sweet XUL based applications that I am really like. “XUL (XML User Interface Language) is a markup language developed by the Mozilla project for its applications. Like UIML and XIML it is an application of XML that describes user interfaces. The name is pronounced as zool.” Thanks, Wikipedia!

The first application, and arguably the most still-in-beta, is called Songbird. It’s a media library application, but they are trying to things a step further. Why should you be limited to media you already have as MP3s? The Internet is a burgeoning place, and more sites are starting to grow around the music experience, like pandora.com and last.fm. They want to unite the music listening experience with the music-on-the-internet experience. The main reason I like it is because iTunes doesn’t run on my computer. It also looks really cool because the default skin is black.

The next application, and arguably the most fun, is called Democracy. No, it’s not a program for keeping track of all your favorite politicians. It’s a feed reader designed specifically for watching Vidcasts. “What’s a vidcast?” you may ask. A vidcast is a video podcast. “What’s a podcast?” you may ask? You’re way behind the times.

Democracy does a really good job keeping itself up to date, and basically takes all the effort out of watching vidcasts. I used to not watch a few shows because it was always such a hassle to find out when they updated. I am a big fan of when my content comes to me, so Democracy is a gem in the rough. It’s based on the VLC player, so it can play everything. It’s still in beta, but it’s already extremely usable, just a little graphically jumpy at times.

The final application, and arguably the one that I am using its built-in-blogging-engine to write this article, is called Flock. Flock is a browser based on Firefox. “But wait, don’t I already have a browser that’s eleventy two times better than Internet Explorer?” Yes, but why should you only use one web browser? That’s like using one fork at dinner. Everyone knows their is a salad fork for the salad, a regular fork for the regular food, and a dessert fork to taunt you when there isn’t a dessert.

Flock is designed around the concept of the ’social web’. It hooks into del.icio.us, flickr, and various other photo sharing sites and blogging APIs. While that is pretty nice in and of itself, the real gem here is it’s RSS reader. I have been searching for over a year (actually, I haven’t really been searching; I prefer when my content comes to me) for a really elegant feed reader. I didn’t want anything that forced itself on to me, and I did’t want anything that was obnoxiously web-based (and thus slow). Flock has the best RSS reader I have ever seen, and then it brings the actual page, not just the content, up in its browser. Did I mention pretty much every firefox extension works in it out of the box? Sweet!

That’s all I’ve got for you today. Look forward to future entries, like “Why Mechanicals Pencils are Infinitely Superior to Regular Pencils”, and “How to Learn ASP in a Day”

technorati tags:flock, democracy, songbird, xul