I’m sure there is a Windows application out there that sorts desktop files into folders automatically already and if there isn’t then somebody should develop one post haste. I complained about desktop clutter almost three years ago, ouch. It’s been on my development to-do list for some time and this morning after staring at my desktop I decided to ask the rest of the world if such an animal already exists. Here’s a picture showing the problem:

What I’ve been doing for far too long is manually sorting these desktop files by type into folders. Like image files are sorted into a ’screenshots’ folder and .txt files are sorted into a ‘writing’ folder. It wouldn’t be that involved having a program that watches the desktop folder and then auto sorts any file by type (or custom definition rule) into custom directories defined by the user. It could also be run as a scheduled task once a day to clean out the icons of the day and sort into date stamped archive folders also customizable by the end user. Like say I wanted to have the program auto sort each day’s desktop files into monthly folders like July2008, Aug2008, etc., but the default should be to just sort into one folder so one doesn’t have to make too many clicks to get to the file.

If you’re reading this and have the perfect Windows application in mind — freeware, donationware, shareware or commercial — please pipe up in the comments section below with a link. If it’s a commercial or shareware application feel free to use your own affiliate code and if it looks good to me and you’re the first to mention I’ll buy the program through your link. Or write a blog post and trackback in, your choice. If I only hear crickets on this one I may just have to break out Visual Studio and get this done. I need a useful little app like this.

If it does cost money for this application, it shouldn’t cost very much. This isn’t Photoshop. I’m thinking $20 or less. Thank you in advance for the help.

Update 10:16am PST: Wow, that didn’t take long. Major props to Dean in the comments below for pointing me to Belvedere by Lifehacker’s Adam Pash. Now look at my desktop (right). As the screenshot displays in the upper left corner I’ve got the recycle bin (emptied) and four shortcuts to the following directories:

icons - this contains shortcuts to all programs with the word ’shortcut’. Windows, by default adds the word shortcut to each shortcut on the desktop.
screenshots - all files matching .jpg, .gif, .png and .bmp are automatically moved off the desktop by Belvedere to this directory.
software - zip files are moved here
writings - .txt, pdf and html files moved here

My most commonly used programs are stored in Rocketdock which is right aligned and takes up a very tiny amount of screen real estate. I linked to my original post about Rocketdock in the comments area below. This is on the short list of useful programs I regularly use on Windows plus it gives it a little of that Mac flavor.

For Mac Readers, Belvedere is based on the Mac program Hazel ($21.95, just about the price I suggested a program like this should cost). I’m not sure what is out there for Linux, but a desktop auto clean-up program should be a standard accessory in every OS. If anybody knows of something similar that will help Linux users keep their desktops tidy, feel free to use the comments below to share.

Been a little while since I’ve mentioned Chumby.

It still sits to the left of my computer monitor, nestled atop the printer, updating me through a dozen different widgets throughout the day on things like stock prices, my horoscope, what happened on this day in history and so on. To date it’s been used like a $179 billboard, rather than anything that useful or revolutionary.

This morning the New York Times has a piece which discusses the monetization scheme for Chumby (emphasis mine):

Businesses are free to distribute widgets that use information from their own sites, except if they want those widgets to display advertising or sell something. In that case, the only thing that is open is Chumby’s phone line. It expects to be paid a cut of all the money made over its system.

At first I didn’t see as many Public Service Announcements on Chumby, but I’ve noticed an increase. I realize the Chumby can be modified to function as a lighthttpd server which better suits my needs and would use 100% of my bandwidth. I’m thinking about doing that because I don’t really want or need to see commercials in between widgets. That’s too similar to the TV model of content, commercials, content. Anybody else reading using their Chumby this way and want to share your experiences in the comments below?

My original plans were to do some amount of Chumby widget development but since I don’t have and have little desire to pay $679 to buy the Flash IDE, I’ve kept on the fence. There are some open source alternatives to doing Flash development, but they looked a little time intensive. Is there an open source Chumby Flash lite IDE that somebody reading knows about and is using? I’d still like to get into developing some Chumby widgets, but if this calls for me buying the Flash IDE, it will probably be back-burnered.

Also, anybody running Silverlight applications on Chumby yet? I see some PHP 5.25 binaries were cooked up already.

With 3D Online Package it’s easy to generate 3D box art. Just upload a graphic in PNG, GIF or JPG format for the cover, side and top and the server side program generates the graphic that you can copy and use.

Added to the online generators list.

The Crunchies? Please tell me they aren’t going to do this.

I’d say no offense before launching into this rant, but I’m still laughing as I type. It’s so crazy, I can’t stop laughing. The Crunchies? The Crunchies!

Om Malik could be the nicest guy in Sillicon Valley for all I know, haven’t met him but will take Mark Evans word. I have met Richard MacManus and Michael Arrington who both seemed like pleasant chaps in person, but the idea of these three along with Venturebeat teaming up and comparing the small start-up world awards to the GRAMMYs is laughable. The combined readership of TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, Gigaom and Venturebeat barely dents the number of albums James Blunt’s first CD sold.

Gotta love the comment from cweeb: “Come on Om, don’t bend over to techcrunch everyday.”

Malik contends that “the community will have a lot to say here.” Now this is something I have to see. Voting on the internet can so easily be gamed that I’m extremely cynical of any web system ever being fair and I’m a programmer.

The real reason sites offer awards
I understand the giving out awards at a site — or in this case from multiple sites. This has been happening for many years on the web and they usually mean one thing: more exposure for the site running the awards.

A lot of award sites require or strongly encourage entrants to link back to them and promote to their audience — vote for me, vote for me. It’s a guaranteed proven way to manipulate traffic to the website(s) behind the award. On the eve of Google penalizing sites for selling text links, contributing to link farms and link schemes, The Crunchies team needs to be very careful about how they promote their awards.

And let’s not forget that even a worthless program can get a five star award out there. The Crunchies team has a lot of swashbuckling to do in those chilly awards infested waters, arrr!

Will the Crunchies be the Crappies? We’ll have to wait and see when the details of the awards system are published, but they’ll at least be worth a laugh. Imagine what the award will look like? A bowl of Captain Crunch, maybe? Priceless! Thanks for the morning laugh guys.

When it comes to getting excited about new standards or versions of programming languages I tend to take a more reserved approach.

Quietly — yes, I can be quiet sometimes — evaluating the details myself and when applicable trying to put to some real world applications. A practical, pragmatic approach to consider using any new technology. I would rather spend those breaths of air exploring technology that is here and now instead of fighting standards wars. I’ll defer those battles respectfully to people closer to the metal on the issues. I’m a programmer, not a designer, and while yes web standards still matter to me, this isn’t my area of expertise. The other day I discovered that neither is brewmastery (thanks Sterling and Vince). Sometimes it’s better not to venture too far from the nest.

So recently when I heard that the ECMAScript 4th Edition aka Javascript ES4 is causing blood pressure to be raised in a few folks, I look for people more entrenched to see if there is fire where there is smoke. I’ve met Dori Smith, co-author of Javascript & AJAX, in person and she’s one source on Javascript that I trust.

In Dori’s post yesterday, she doesn’t appear too concerned:

Look, it’s always been the case with JavaScript, and it’s one of the things I like best about the language: it’s all about what works in the majority of browsers. If it doesn’t work in the majority of existing browsers, it’s utterly irrelevant. And given that this group has shown an inability to actually ship, it’s even less relevant.

If you think I’m dismissing ES4 too casually at this point, please feel free as always to correct me below.

Google’s latest disruptive move, the OpenSocial API, which they are being careful to couch as not being GoogleSocial and instead an open move for the good of users sort of launched last night. It was like attending a fireworks celebration and seeing gigantic rockets in the distance, but a few people coming out in front of a poorly lit campfire holding sparklers saying, “this is all for now.”

Facebook is claiming they weren’t briefed on OpenSocial, says Techcrunch, and yet there were a couple Facebook developers in attendance at last night’s campfire, go figure.

The developer view
I was excited, and still am about OpenSocial but was disappointed this morning to read first thing from the API documentation: “All of the details are subject to change, but this preview should give you a general idea of what the API will be like.”

The SDK is still not available.

I was under the impression — wrong it seems — that this was what was launching last night. What actually launched was the document and a 57 minute video showing what companies are involved with OpenSocial and a few demos of how it works. If it’s working now behind the scenes why not release the SDK?

There will be three main data APIs: People, Activities and Persistence. The last one generates the most questions. It’s a neat idea for me to be able to save user activity at our sites using the Persistence data API, but unless my initial review of the docs is flawed, this still has Google directly involved, managing the Persistence layer, yes/no? Or will it be the provider, meaning we can save this data on other people’s servers?

our site’s user activity (OpenSocial enabled) -> persistance layer -> receiving site

Currently it appears the only sandbox environment for OpenSocial is Orkut, with Ning maybe launching a sandbox tonight. If we can send information to be saved on other servers that will help with the traditional data bottlenecks and scaling, but could present some interesting security challenges. I’m very curious how this part will work and need to study some real world examples.

As you might tell from my admittedly jumbled thoughts, I’m still trying to piece this together. I wish the SDK was available now so I could point out specific code. There are examples in the API documentation but I’m reluctant to quote something Google admits can — and probably will — be changing. Guess I need to play around with the Orkut sandbox.

The non-developer perspective
And now for those of you reading who aren’t developers: should you care about OpenSocial? Short answer: wait and see which sites become OpenSocial enabled that you care about.

In theory OpenSocial should make it easier for developers to produce widgets to run inside other sites without additional code. This should make aggregating activity for services like Friendfeed easier to deploy, which means you might have more Facebook-like widgets to insert into other OpenSocial-enabled websites. For example, let’s say this blog became OpenSocial enabled and each commenter had a Hmm profile you could add these widgets to your profile page or perhaps take your comment activity here — if it was made part of an activity stream — elsewhere.

One of the best real world summaries I’ve read so far comes from the Tim Lee at Techdirt:

The fundamental problem facing Orkut, Friendster, LinkedIn and the other social-networking also-rans is that people don’t want to sign onto a dozen different social networking sites to keep up with all their friends. They want to sign up with a single site and see updates for all their friends in one place. As long as each social networking site is a walled garden, only allowing users to connect with other users on the same site, the largest sites will have a huge advantage because people will naturally gravitate to the site most of their friends use.

Someday I believe everybody will have their own home internet address — a virtual home address — just like your physical home address. Those who have their own personal websites that they host on their own domains already do have this home to some degree. Sure, some people will continue to rent which is the web equivalent of spending a lot of time at any third party website over your own (MySpace, Facebook, Live Spaces), but buying a domain and sharing your social network there makes sense. Having thousands of profiles at different sites seems more like a marketing thing than something practical. When these also-rans, as Tim put it in the quote above go offline you could still save the data and activity from these former sites on your own home site. That to me is one of the most powerful parts of OpenSocial for users in the future.

Time isn’t always on our side when it comes to the web
As shared here before, I’m reluctant to spend too much time at third party sites because I’ve seen so many go by the wayside over the years and my time and activity there, unless they offered an export function, went with them. OpenSocial could help change this if our favorite sites become OpenSocial enabled and share our activity streams. This way new connections you make at some third party also ran site can come with you without having to sign up to be your friend again somewhere else.

Powerful, indeed, if that’s how it works.

Or for the cynical types: not enough of the sites we spend time at will care to do the extra work to be OpenSocial enabled and share the activity stream, thus making it a feature that was a big deal for trendy web pooh point oh sites and little else.

We’ll know the answer in a couple years, looking back. Kind of wish I had a time machine on this one to know which one to put effort into. I’m leaning toward opening up activity streams for users across as many of our sites as possible simply because it seems the right thing to do. The most valuable possession for any human being is time and we should seek to never, ever waste that.

On Halloween 2007 the Google (disclaimer: I own GOOG stock) juggernaut has pushed past $700 for the first time ($703.93 as of this writing). Tomorrow they will be launching an OpenSocial API at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial which they hope will provide developers the ability to create applications that will run on multiple social networks.

Except for Facebook and MySpace. Facebook employs their own markup language while Google will use Javascript and HTML, similar to what they did with Google gadgets. If you know Javascript and HTML, you’ll only need to learn what API calls to make. It’s a juicy proposal and one that has my mind clicking and whirring with the possibilities. Looking forward to tomorrow to see and start playing around with the OPenSocial API.

As for the stock price? When will Google slow down? I’m not going to even try to guess, but remain curious what others think. The movement from $600-$700 was fast. Yahoo (YHOO) and Apple (AAPL), two other stocks I own, are also doing well. Gotta love how Q4 has begun and hopefully will forget the misery of Q3.

The Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) for this site has been a little messy for awhile and the situation was exacerbated when I added the search form to the header section recently. I think the search form is better there but unfortunately it’s not cross browser compatible code at the moment. One hack badly implemented upon another bad hack.

Here’s how it looks In IE7:

And also Opera 9 the search bar doesn’t align correctly either:

Looks correct in Firefox though:

A little help designer friends?
If you’d like to take a quick look at the CSS and HTML (again, I know it’s messy and needs to be redone) and recommend a working cross-browser fix in the comments below I’d be grateful. I will have more time to look into fixing this myself later today or this weekend. My apologies in the meantime that things are a bit haywire at the moment (and have been for a few days) for Opera and IE browser readers. Looks the way I want it in Firefox, but that’s only for like 40% of the site visitors, the rest are seeing ugliness.

I’m also in the process of moving a bunch of stuff over to our Windows Vista machine. Thanks to some equipment problems not by choice and not timed. Glutton for punishment on my second busiest day of the week? Believe it. Happy TGIF to the rest of the internet, though.

Update 9:06am PST: Using absolute positioning I can get the search form to show up in approximately the right place (as of this update it won’t match the IE7 & Opera 9 screenshots above) but the float right issue remains. Suggestions below still very much welcome.

My goto notepad for awhile has been Notetab. While I wasn’t unhappy with Notetab, I decided it was time for a change and to try out some different Windows text editors. I downloaded and installed Notepad++ open source code editor written in C++ with a pure win 32 API. And yes, it works on Windows Vista.

There is a plugin structure and on the Notepad++ download page several optional free plugins are available.

By default code syntax is color coded with line numbering along the side and spellchecker. Tabbed interface, macros and clean UI. What text editor are you using on Windows Vista?

Good to see yesterday Apple lowering the price of their iTunes Plus DRM-free tracks from $1.29 to 99 cents a track across the board.

They didn’t really have a choice with AmazonMP3 offering a better selection. ARS Technica raises a good point below.

What remains unclear is whether users will be able to upgrade their DRMed songs to iTunes Plus songs for free (since the songs are now priced exactly the same), or whether they will still have to pay extra to upgrade.

As of this writing this morning the iTunes Plus section in iTunes still describes this as an “upgrade” (pictured above) which it very much is any time you leave DRM content for DRM-free. They aren’t advertising the price change yet. I clicked on a few random tracks and they were all priced $0.99. No idea yet if the upgrade will turn from 30 cents a track to free upgrade. Apple has a chance to score some major points here.

Leopard has 300+ new features
And speaking of scoring points, yesterday was also the release of their 300+ features in Leopard which comes out next Friday 10/26, most likely at the customary 6pm release time. This was probably the most active thing people were posting about in RSS. Credit Chris Pirillo with the first mention on Twitter, and he has a nice roundup of his favorite Leopard features. I’m still digesting the list and will wait to comment in detail until I have Leopard in hand and installed which hopefully will be next Friday night.

Led Zeppelin to offer entire library for digital download
Led Zeppelin has announced they will be offering their entire library online for digital download (DRM-free too?) — finally. How long before The Beatles fall into suit? Zeppelin has timed this announcement with their one off concert reunion with Bonham’s son Jason on the skins.

AmazonMP3 developers
Back to AmazonMP3 and related, for fellow developer readers, in the 10/3/07 update of Amazon E-Commerce API, Amazon made available a new search index in the US locale: MP3 downloads. There’s our ticket for incorporating DRM-free music into our applications.

It’s a great thing seeing this DRM-free movement finally gaining legs and moving. Perhaps in a year or two we’ll be able to buy any song and/or complete album DRM-free online.