TechgnosisWeb Prime

And now, in a complete change of pace from the posts of the last few days, it’s time for some of my tradermarked ‘techno-enamored rants’. I’ve got a couple of techie reviews that I’ve been meaning to post up for some time, and I’ve got some time to kill tonight (my main Net connection’s acting up.. Liberty Cable sucks), so let’s get to it.

I don’t usually hide stuff behind the ‘more’ link (witness the unfettered lenght of my last two posts), but since there’s gonna be three of them, and they’re mostly technophile-only stuff, well, there you go. So click on the ‘more’ link below to read about which Sudoku program I chose to go with for my PocketPC, what’s the best software I’ve found for blogging on the go, and what I think of the latest browser to ruffle the Web 2.0 feathers, Flock.


All right, let’s start with my current gaming obsession, SuDoku. I’d been looking for good SuDoku programs for Glitch, and while I found a whole bunch, some free, some pay-for, two of them stood out: SuDoku Rules and Mastersoft SuDoku. They’re both about $13-$14, and, frankly, they’re both pretty damn good.

Both have a pretty massive collection of puzzles, both have the ability to place both regular numbers and ‘pencil marks’ on puzzles. Mastersoft Sudoku (MS) lets you choose different colors for the numbers you place, allows you to place multiple pencil marks at once, and allows you to move the number-entry field before you make your entry so you can get a good look at the puzzle layout, but for some reason I still felt that SuDoku Rules (SR) had a slightly more… friendly number entry pad. While MS’s entry pad was more flexible, overall it feels like it requires more taps than SR’s, making it feel a bit more clunky overall.

When it comes to actual gameplay, both are more or less similar, dividing the puzzles by difficulty levels. The games do seem to have a slightly different focus overall. MS actually scores your progress, with harder puzzles being worth more points, and higher scores being awarded for solving the puzzles faster. Your score is kept as you keep solving puzzles, and the game awards you with a rank as your total score rises. While MS seems to be mostly focused on the gameplay itself and on solving the puzzles, SR seems to lean more towards teaching you proper SuDoku solving technoques. SR has a very nifty system that can highlight number and pattern checking paths, helping you discover the best ways to stechniqueses.

Other features that set them apart are SR’s number method for choosing puzzles, which allows you to re-play puzzles if you know what their number is. MS, on the other hand, allows you to choose different board backgrounds, changing the look of the game, as well as playing a version of the puzzles with icons instead of numbers, which is quite a bit harder than usual.

At this point, I’d say that choosing one or the other is a matter of taste, wether the changeable backgrounds of MS appeal to you or you’d appreciate SR’s puzzle-solving hints more. But there is one more thing that is very important to mobile users, and it’s what made the decision for me: battery usage. Mastersoft SuDoku is a battery miser, and I’ve played for hours with the battery only going down a few percentage points, no more than it normally does by keeping the screen and backlight on. SuDoku Rules, on the other hand, butchered my battery life. After one short puzzle, it was down 25%. And if I kept it up any longer, it would eat the battery up even more. That pretty much decided it for me: my fifteen bucks went to Mastersoft.

Tech review number 2: Blogging on the go.

There’s a few different ways to blog while you’re on the road, or just not at your computer. Most blogging systems today actually let you make posts over email, so you can post from your celphone by sending a pic or text message directly to that email. But sometimes, you want to make a beefier entry, and tapping something like that out on a phone’s keypad is not quite so fun.

So, you go out and look for a blog client for your PocketPC, and you discover something not-so fun: there really don’t seem to be any. Took me a while to dig out this particular gem, but I’m glad I did: Pocket SharpMT, the best little mobile blog client out there.

While, as the name implies, it was originally designed for working with Movable Type weblogs, it works just fine with my Wordpress site. Once you configure and connect it to your blog, it downloads your selected categories and topics. You can configure it with your own custom tags, separate entry fields for main and extended entries, set whether comments are open or closed for a particular entry, set excerpts, keywords/tags, and even URL’s to ping (for trackbacks).

You can save posts locally as drafts, to main memory or storage card. Once it’s time to put your blog masterpiece online, it only takes 2 taps to upload it. It also has options for uploading pictures, but I’ve never really been able to get that part to work (might be a Movable Type-only thing).

In any case, it’s as complete, or even more complete, than many desktop-based blog clients I’ve seen. However, it’s not quite perfect. It would be nice to be able to store and access drafts that are online, or to be able to view and edit posts that are already on the server. However, being able to compose and hold the blog posts online is quite handy if you don’t have access to a Net connection. Other than that, the only thing I could really ask for is an integrated spellchecker, or the ability to tie into some other spellchecker.

And, finally, Flock.

Flock is a Firefox-based browser that’s still in an alpha state. The idea behind it is to make a browser that integrates flawlessly into Web 2.0-ish social networking apps such as Flickr and del.icio.us, as well as blog posting. i got my hands on the latest Developer Preview 0.5 edition, and gave it a test drive.

Initial impression? Not too shabby, but still needs a lot of work. It replaces your bookmarks with del.icio.us ‘favorites’, tying into your del.icio.us account, and making it dead-easy to add new links to your account, by simply clicking the star button next to the site address. Another click and you can edit the tags too. Once you’ve added a few sites to your del.icio.us account, Flock has a separate interface where you can browse through your favorites, search through them and sort them by tag.

The same browser that lets you sort your favorites doubles as a neat little RSS reader. Search and group RSS feeds as well, and Flock will even produce an aggregate page for all the feeds under a specific tag, so that’s pretty sexy.

The other big feature Flock has is easy blog posting and integration with Flickr. With a couple of clicks, you can bring up a basic blog-posting interface, and with another click, you can bring up a Flickr topbar that lets you browse any user’s public photostream, so long as you know their username. Then you can post the pictures into the blog by just dragging it into the window, which is also pretty nifty. However, it’s the stuff you do before you actually blog that’s most exciting. Flock has this thing they call The Shelf, where you can drag and drop higlighted text or images from any webpage you’re viewing, and it will hold them there for as long as you want, even if you shut it down and bring it back up. Once you’re done gathering materials into your Shelf, you can drag and drop them into the blog window and they’ll be inserted automatically, with proper indentation and attribution linking. Excellent stuff.

Not everything is perfect in Flockland, however, but that’s to be expected in a 0.5 pre-beta product. For one, a lot of people have reported random crashes. Once you set up your del.icio.us account, it asks you to log into it every time you bring up the program. I’d be a bit happier if the Shelf could be integrated into a topbar or sidebar rather than being a freefloating window. It would also be nice to tie it into other services, such as Textamerica for pictures. They’ve still got some ways to go for full integration with social networking services too. A ‘Post to Flickr’ right-click option, maybe integration with online profiles such as MySpace, etc. And, finally, the main thing stopping me from using it more often right now is that I can’t install my Firefox extensions. But, overall, I like where it is, and I like where it’s going. Quite impressive, expecially for a 0.5 release, and they’ve got a lot of room for improvement. Keep an eye on this one.

Well, that’s all, folks. I’m done techno-ranting for tonight. Now it’s time to pass out. G’night!