A coworker and I went to the Battle for the HeArt last night in downtown Minneapolis and it was great. It was all about defining a new type of creativity because what was working, no longer is. People are blocking ads on the internet, switching channels during commercial breaks and not really paying that much attention to advertising. So, a new way of thinking is being created.

What it all boiled down to was interaction. If it’s not interactive, it’s not going to work as well.

Why wait for in-line spell checking abilities in Thunderbird when you can have them now?! AusDilece has created a few Thunderbird extensions and one is the ability to check spelling as you type! Granted, I hear this feature is in TBird 1.1, however, why wait when you can have it now?!

I’ve been running it for a few hours and it’s working great.

First off. Firefox has a security update that just came out. Minor update, but you should still upgrade to Firefox 1.0.5. Nice to see they are on top of things.

Also, Download Squad is reporting that you can run Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla applications off a portable flash drive! How cool is that?! Now you can take your favorite browser or email client with you wherever you go. No need to install it on computers that you don’t have privileges to. Haven’t tried out Portable Firefox myself, but it sounds very cool. Ohh… someone just pointed out that it’s PC only. Oh well. Still sounds cool and can’t be that hard to do on a Mac.

We got a new friend for our kitty. Ok, so our kitty doesn’t care for the new one yet, however we hope they will get along in time. Chunk is a cute little 10 week old kitten. Orgionally found in Las Vegas, he made it’s way to the humane society in Golden Valley, MN with the help from some nice folks. From there we found him and brought him to our home.

Google announced three different extensions for Firefox yesterday; Google Toolbar, Send to Phone and Google Suggest.

So far I’ve installed the toolbar and it works pretty good. Comes with a spell check feature that is quite nice and handy. Plus it has AutoLink and a form filler which I haven’t played with yet. Except for the fact that it seems a little slow opening new windows, it seems nice. Not sure if it can replace Groowe though as it doesn’t have any delays and many more features. Groowe just needs this spell check functionality.

Granted it’ll be a while until it arrives on my desktop, but the Firefox team has began adding Aqua elements into their web browser. Checkboxes, drop down menus and buttons are on their way. Users probably won’t see them until next year, however it is something to look forward to and something that I’ve been waiting a long time for.

For the latest and greatest information on Firefox Mac design, check out the Boom Swagger Boom blog. They even have information about Firefox for Intel Macs.

Lets try this again. The Groowe Toolbar for Firefox was modifying my 404 errors yesterday. I was very annoyed because 1) I couldn’t figure out how I was getting to this new 404 page, and 2) couldn’t turn it off. However all is well now. Milos responded to my issues and corrected them in just minutes of me emailing the Groowe developers. They’ve since made some updates to the 404 site also so that people know how they got there.

So, I’m no longer mad at the Groowe Toolbar. It’s very cool and coming along quite nicely.

I recently switched over to Thunderbird on my iMac G5 at work and I’ve been loving it ever since. I’m not finding to many missing features and there are many more features that I probably haven’t even found.

Some of my favorite features include…
• Saved Searches (smart folders)
• Send Message Again as New
• Labels
• Check spelling before I send
• QuickNote Extension
• Smilie Inserter Extension
• Contacts Sidebar Extension
• Themes (even though I love the default)
• Great Keyboard Shortcuts
• Next - Previous Message Buttons (edited)
• HTML Formatting Bar
• Little Attachment Window. However, how can I open that without first browsing for a file? I’d rather it be open all the time so I can drag and drop.
• How the dock icon only shows new messages since I last had the application as the front most application. However, it gets confused every now and then with new messages and such.

In celebration of iTunes hitting half a billion songs sold, Apple is giving someone 10 free iPods to share with their family and friends. How cool is that?! Forget those free iPod schemes, just keep buying from the iTunes Music Store and you could end up with ten.

Hummm… what would I do with ten? And which ten would I pick? I’d have to go for one of each. Just to have one of each you know. Then I’m sure I’d have more than a few friends popping up asking me what I was gonna do with all of them. Ha ha.

We went out to see War of the Worlds last night and I give it a B. Enjoyable, but lacking.

I was all excited to see it and so was Christi. We went with two other people and had a good time. The movie had a great beginning. I love the weather so that helps. The only thing I really didn’t like was the ending. Just seemed like it wasn’t done well. I liked the actors and action and everything else, but the ending was a let down for us. The two other people we went with didn’t like it at all, but we enjoyed it. It just didn’t leave us satisfied.