Did you notice the iTunes Music Store changed its name? Everyone is assuming movies, but what about other media? Like games? Xbox live is doing it and wasn’t there a rumor about Apple hiring a game developer? I think they will announce downloadable games tomorrow. The iPod and iTunes have been great trojan horses for Apple to sneak in their brand into Microsoft households.
Mycroft Holmes. That was the name of the famous detective’s older brother. It is also the name a project that provides a collection of Sherlock & OpenSearch plugins. I found it by accident when I was looking for a extension to lookups on selected text. I saw the demo of Zimbra and they had a real cool feature. You could create javascript behaviors the scan the page for items to make into links. They call them Zimlets now.
I thought it would be nice to create a custom one for us at work. We do not use Zimbra, I use Thunderbird, and if I could get this working, maybe I could get some converts at work too. I started to search for extensions for Thunderbird and found ConQuery it was for both Thunderbird and Firefox.
From my favorite extensions list… (article)
Best extension you never heard of. You can perform a search by selecting the text and right click to search different search pages. No need to copy and paste. OK, big deal… but have a look at Mycroft take your time (there are over 8,000), I’ll wait. My favorites are wikipedia, IMDB, Digg, Google images, and Amazon.
Once you get the hang of it, you will love it.
I spend a lot of time checking my favorite sites for new articles, constantly refreshing and switch from tab to tab. I tried RSS before; (builtin Safari, FeedBlitz, Google Reader, Sage, etc…) nothing really did it for me. Until RSS Menu, its super simple. It justs sits in your menu and updates the count when there are new articles. You can click the item and go directly to it, or hover over it to see a short description. What I like the most is I can just click the url title and got to the main page, helpful for sites that have a lot of articles I want to read.
To make it perfect you have to have GROWL installed. I currently have it setup to notify me with sticky notifications. That way I can see any new posts that appear when I have been away. Now I spend less time surfing and more time working.
I know everyone is excited to see what new hardware will be released, but the rumors always set me up for major disappointment. This time I am trying to get excited about Leopard, that way anything else Steve reveals will be “extra”. This is a developers conference, this is for the people responsible for writing the software for macs to find out to take advantage of the new OS, so that when it does ship their software will be able to take advantage of it. So relax, and enjoy.
But I still will be hitting refresh on those sites that are covering the event just in case 
