I spent way too much time today playing around with Flock, a web browser that threatens to supplant Firefox for all-over Web 2.0 goodness. I’m still deciding whether it’s too crowded and busy to do so, but as someone who is constantly checking Flickr and Facebook, its incorporation of friends and feeds into a left-hand column is totally ace. Add to that the ability to click-drag-and-drop a web photo onto a friend icon and send that to them…add to that a Flickr uploader…add to that the incorporation of most Firefox extensions…add to that my being able to blog on the browser from within the browser and…well, it’s pretty cool. Check it out here.
I also checked out this completely free and versatile web-based Vector Graphic maker at Stanford that will convert a bitmap image to vectors for Illustrator. Crazy. This used to be the domain of Adobe Streamline (remember that?) but this does it within the browser, offers three levels of detail and three export options (png, evs, and svg). I ran one of my cartoons through it and it handled the line and color work nicely. See that here.
And finally, maybe this is just me, but I had no idea that a simple checkbox in iCal’s general preferences populated your calendar with birthdays of all that have them listed in Address Book. So I did so.
Tags: web