Archive for the ‘desktop’ tag
Scrobbling my BBC Radio listening on Last.fm
A couple of months ago I’d heard that the BBC Radio Labs had developed a desktop widget that scrobbled the songs you listen to on BBC Radio (currently only available for Radio 1, Radio 2, 6 Music and 1 Xtra) [via Last.fm]
I’m not a big fan of gimmicky desktop widgets - it’s bad enough that Vista comes with them as default - some people love them, some hate them… I just prefer less clutter on my desktop!
The other day I was listening to a lot of Radio 1… to which I thought it would be nice to have these songs scrobbled on my Last.fm profile. So I bit the bullet and downloaded Yahoo! Widgets and the BBC Radio + Last.fm widget. (OS X widget is also available)
So far I’ve been fairly impressed with the way it works. That is, once I’d hidden all the gimmicky widgets - yes I already have a clock in my taskbar; the weather outside is cold and wet… I know this already, this is England after all!
Mozilla Prism - Bringing Web Apps to the Desktop
I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months. I’ve only just heard about Mozilla’s Prism - and it’s already changing the way I use web-apps.
Prism, (previously called WebRunner), is essentially a Site Specific Browser (SSB) - meaning that it’s a desktop application designed to host a single web-application. This is good for many reasons, foremost it causes less distractions.
So far, I have prisms set-up for most of the Google apps that I regularly use: Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Reader. Now each of these web-applications are not open as separate tabs in my Firefox, but as individual desktop applications. (Now I don’t have to worry about finding my Gmail tab in Firefox, nor about browser-crashes.)
It reminds of Microsoft attempted to do with HTA - but it seemed more difficult to interface them with external web-applications.
You can read more about Mozilla Prism on their Lab’s blog. [http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/]
