One of the highlights of this week's Web 2.0 Expo was Adobe's "Apollo" runtime. Adobe describes "Apollo" as "a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop."

Web apps and desktop apps have their own unique sets of benefits and problems, and Adobe is essentially attempting to blur the line between these two classes of applications with Apollo. During the keynotes on Monday, Kevin Lynch from Adobe showcased some of the apps that are being built on the Apollo runtime, including a rich client for eBay members, Adobe Media Player, and my personal favorite - Virtual Ubiquity's Buzzword, a collaborative word processor that's just so slick.


When you compare "Buzzword" to existing online word processors, for example, you'll immediately notice the difference. It looks and feels a lot like a rich desktop application, with beautiful typography, fluid text reflow, speedy performance, and most importantly, offline access. At the same time, it has all the benefits of a web application, like being able to store documents in the cloud (with seamless synchronization for offline access), easy collaboration with other users, and access from any machine in the world with a modern web browser.

I had a chance to meet Rick Treitman, Virtual Ubiquity's CEO, on the Expo floor, and he gave a demo of what they've done so far. It's really quite impressive, and they've given a lot of thought and attention to the design of the application.

I've always firmly believed that the desktop and the web are complementary rather than mutually exclusive (the whole "desktop is dead" thing never flew with me), so it's great to see upcoming applications that take advantage of the best of both worlds.

I'm in San Fransisco this week, attending the O'Reilly Web 2.o Expo. I just went to "Ignite" tonight, which is based on the Ignite Seattle series of events hosted by Brady Forrest.

It's a fun event where each speaker gets only five minutes to present his/her topic - twenty slides, with fifteen seconds alloted per slide. Obviously, that means you don't get to hear anything deeply technical, but it's interesting to see the techniques that various speakers employ to get their point across, given such a short period of time. In fact, one speaker at tonight's event actually blazed through 70 slides in five minutes. :)

From tomorrow until Wednesday, I'll be attending the actual sessions and keynotes. Probably won't get a chance to blog in realtime, but I'll post quick highlights to my Twitter stream. There's also an official Web 2.0 Expo Twitter stream, so keep a watch on that too, if you like.

One of the things I like most about Twitter is the ability to receive people's status updates via IM. If I had to visit the page several times a day to check for updates, I'd probably never use the service. Even using a feed aggregator to subscribe to something that receives short updates so frequently isn't very convenient.

Well, here's how you can do the same with Facebook - get your friends' status updates via IM. This should work with AIM, MSN/WLM, and Jabber/GTalk, but I've only tested it out with GTalk so far.

When you go to the Facebook Status Updates page, you should see something that looks like this:


Right-click the "Friends' Status Updates" link (highlighted in the image above), and copy the feed URL to the clipboard. Then, head over to Feed Crier, enter your screen name, IM network, and paste the URL you copied earlier into the Website box. The nice thing about Feed Crier is that you don't need to create an account with them. You should immediately start receiving status updates via IM, and you can stop them at any time by simply sending an "unsubscribe" message to the bot (send it a "help" message for more info).

There. Quick and easy. :)

Now we just need a way to setstatus updates via the Facebook API. There have been numerous requests for this on the Facebook Developers group, so it might happen sometime.

Last November, I installed a Gaim 2.0 beta build as part of what has turned into my never-ending search for the perfect multi-protocol (GTalk + AIM) IM client. Gaim has been in development for a long time, and has matured into a generally solid and reliable app. One of the only gripes I've always had with it is the ugly UI.

Last Friday, Gaim was renamed Pidgin (a clever name!) to settle some trademark issues with AOL. At the same time, a new set of Tango artwork was also checked into the source tree. Since pre-compiled binaries containing the new artwork aren't available yet, I compiled my own build from source in Linux to check out the changes.


I think it looks pretty good so far, and I'll probably install it again on Windows when the final build is released.

Last month, I linked to Jeff Atwood's post on PNGOUT, a free PNG image optimizer that works very well.

Today, Scott Hanselman shows how you can add a PNGOUT item to Explorer's context menu so that you don't have to use the command line every time you want to optimize an image. I think it's a more elegant and integrated solution compared to other PNGOUT GUI frontends out there.


A nice tip that I just had to share. :)