'Yahoo 360 CFC' & 'Flickr CFC' Published to Macromedia

I decided to rework my original Blogger CFC so it would also work with Yahoo 360 blog feeds and Flickr photo streams. Suprisingly, it didn't take me very long to modify. I published my new applications to Macromedia as freeware for others to use. Examples can be found at: http://www.cftags.net

'Blogger CFC' Published to Macromedia

There wasn't an existing application to pull information from blogger and render it on a standard Web site or Flash, so I had to build my own. I published my application to Macromedia as freeware for others to use. An example can be found at: http://www.cftags.net

Blogger Feed

My blog integration has been added. I wanted to see if I could consume the information from Blogger and feed it to Flash. Works very nicely.

Opera 8

I just tried Opera 8 out and I have to say I am extremely impressed with this browser. Without a doubt it's the fastest browser. I ran some comparitive tests loading and reloading the same pages vs. Firefox and Avant and Opera won. Using the forward and back buttons on Opera as well was a lot faster than the other browsers.

Aside from a few minor things on how it displays objects on the page it works VERY well. They've tightened up the UI. It looks very FireFoxish. The thing I like most about this is that it comes packaged with a LOT of the functionality you would have to search for and install manually with firefox. Such as dragable tabs, mouse gestures, the bookmarks auto sort corretly and can be imported from just about any other browser, even Konquerer. It also has an autoreload, an email client if you should chose to use it, and voice recognition. I haven't tested the voice recognition yet but it sounds very interesting.

Firefox

Firefox 1.0 has a memory leak error on Windows XP. Do a search on Google for "Firefox memory leak". I've witnessed this myself as it consumes and consumes resources. There is an XP "fix" for this here: http://windowssecrets.com/041202/

In all honesty, I think FireFox is a great step forward and is a model for future Web browsers. But I don't plan to use it just yet based on the problems I see which are:

1. Massive memory leak problems.
2. Ability install any extension from any developer. I think there should be some kind of appoval process for these extensions to make sure they do not conflict. I've already seen extensions conflict with one another. And a lot of these extensions merit being built into the actual full release.
3. The extensions manager doesn't work all that well. I can't simply deactivate or activate extensions as needed. They all run all at once. I make note of how extensions are managed for Macromedia Software. All be it, it's not perfect, but that system works much better.