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Archive for September, 2004

NYC Property Tax Rebate

Mayor Bloomberg is encouraging city homeowners to apply for the $400 property tax rebate. The text in the press release is slightly confusing:

Most owners of 1-, 2- and 3-family homes, condominiums and cooperatives who live in their homes are already eligible for the $400 rebate and do not have to apply, but those who have not applied for the rebate have until October 15th to apply by filling out a New York State School Tax Relief Program (STAR) application.

The safest bet is probably to go ahead and file a STAR application regardless. The deadline is October 15th.

There is an added bonus for co-op shareholders: The press release states that checks will be sent directly to the individual owners rather than the co-op. Nice.

Bloglines API

Today, Bloglines announced the availability of a webservices API:

The Bloglines Web Services (BWS) let software developers access Bloglines subscription and feed data directly from computer programs. Bloglines uses a RESTful API consisting of a set of URLs, which return data in RSS and OPML formats.

The Bloglines Web Services are currently in Beta test. We are evaluating the usage and results from making these services available, in order to create policies for our full public release…

This makes digesting feeds a bit easier since an application need only speak RSS 2.0 and OPML in order to pull information from BWS. The original site content can be published in any of the feed formats that Bloglines understands, this includes several different versions of RSS and Atom.

Even more exciting for me is the announcement that NetNewsWire and FeedDemon will be using these functions to allow synchronization between their aggregators and Bloglines.

AdiumX IM Client

I’ve been an instant messaging fan for years, but I quickly grew tired of having three different clients open in order to connect to everyone. At work I, and others, have been using Trillian and Trillian Pro for some time to enjoy an ad Free, multi-protocol, IM experience. Trillian is great, but it isn’t available for Mac.AdiumX Screenshot

So, I’ve been using Fire for the better part of a year on the OSX side. Fire is great. Although, it is missing a couple features I had come to rely on in Trillian Pro. The first one that comes to mind is the way that Trillian inserts the last several lines of IMs to and from a buddy into new chat windows. Fire logs messages, but you have to look at them in a separate file.

A week or so ago, I ran across AdiumX, which is another multi-protocol IM client. AdiumX gives me everything Fire did, plus it sports a few other nice features. The user interface is a little sleeker and more customizable than Fire. The tabbed chat windows are a great addition and really cut down on desktop clutter. The integration with Address Book is also nice, it can display a person’s real name as opposed to their buddy name so you don’t have to remember that Mad$kilz872 = Jim.

Overall, AdiumX gets my vote. Of course, if you are a Windows users, you won’t be able to use AdiumX. In that case, I would go with Trillian over anything else I’ve seen or used. All three of the clients mentioned here are freely available for download. AdiumX is free, but accepts donations on their web site. Fire is also free and I can’t seem to find a place to send donations to the developers. Trillian offers a free basic version, and a slightly more advanced Pro version which is worth the $25 price tag in my opinion.

iSubway Update

It has been a busy week at work which equates to a slow blogging week. An updated version of iSubway [iSubway.zip] is available though.

Have a great weekend!

P.S.

Good luck to everyone participating in CM tonight, watch out for the orange nets!

iSubway

The latest MTA Subway Service Advisories (iSubway.zip) are available on iSubway.

I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes or so trying to figure out why Firefox insisted on “downloading” last week’s information from this site even though it did not exist on the site. I deleted it from the download manager thinking that was the problem, but it wasn’t until I cleared the cache that the right version appeared on my desktop. Perhaps each week’s iSubway file should have a unique filename to prevent this from happening.