Monthly Archive for October, 2006

Flash Player 9 for Linux

Oh rejoice, ye wretched who adhere to the operating system you oh so love (Linux, of course), for finally thou art blessed with an up-to-date Flash Player. Yes, you read that right, Flash Player 9 Beta for Linux is out.

In case you are not familiar with the whole issue, Adobe didn’t produce the Flash 8 plugin for Linux, simply because it was too hard. So instead, they had always kept people at bay, by telling them they’d skip the 8 and work on the 9. After months and months, they’ve finally shipped, and even though it’s in Beta (it keeps freezing Firefox on some pages), it’s great to see that something actually has moved at Adobe.

Get the player here.

Leave your shouts of happiness and joy in the comments.

Bloglines updated too

Bloglines, the online feed reader, actually updated their service the same day the new Google Reader was released.

The change is rather minuscule, as it only affects the left pane. They’ve added a bit of AJAX magic, so that when the pane reloads to gather the new items, it’s done quickly and unobtrusively, and not as clumsily as it used to.

With these enhancements, Bloglines is still uncontested as the best online feed reader in existence. I tried going with Google’s reader, as it’s actually a very fine application, but unfortunately it lacks a few little things I’ve just come accustomed to in Bloglines: the display of a website’s fav-icon or the ability to sort and regroup your feeds any which way you want.

Many people have been giving Bloglines bad write-ups lately, mainly because they don’t update their service as often as others. But with the example of Rojo in mind, a service that offered just about anything you could ever need in a feedreader, but still never really got off the ground, Bloglines is doing the wisest thing by scaling and keeping their service stable and easily usable.




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