Evan Sims

Digsby is Nifty

Jim alerted me to a new all-services-in-one IM client a couple weeks ago, but I only got around to trying it out last night. Digsby is a refreshing take on a heavily bloated, over saturated and more or less stagnant instant messenger scene, and reminds me a lot of the clients of olde, when chatting was about chatting and not about sending ridiculous fucking animated vibrating god damn windows to each other. Digsby keeps it simple, clean, no nonsense; and I really, really like it. It has built in email notifications (including the all important Gmail), and appears to support Adium themes (don’t quote me on that; they might have just been ported.) What’s more, it integrates with a number of popular web services, including Facebook and MySpace, so you get alerts from them too. I hear they’ll be adding Twitter support soon too, but the Jabber Twitter client works beautifully in the meantime.

If you like glitz and shine and fairy farts- not that there’s anything wrong with that- this isn’t the messenger for you; but it is feature packed, accessible, and very fun to use. Give it a try, and check out their blog for more details. Be sure to let me know your impressions here in the comments.

The only feature I really want to see is a “Now Playing” status update, because I like to pretend people give a damn about what I’m listening to.

Greatest. Rock. Video. Ever.

Robert Scoble rocking out in a feather boa? Pretty sure I had a dream about that awhile back… best not to ask.

Animoto

Alright, so I came across this rather interesting new service called Animoto this evening. Playing with it just a bit, it seems pretty nifty; it’s a Flash-based music video (slide show) creator that lets you upload your own music, and either upload photos or import them from Flickr. There’s not that many customization options, which is kind of disappointing, but I think a lot of people will find some fun uses for it. It’s easy, anyway. That’s what matters most. One downside I see immediately is that you can only produce 30 second clips for free… they’re not going to attract too much attention with such a limited constraint. Expect that to get increased soon.

That was a quick video I made from a song I ripped out of my iTunes library (non DRM, obviously) and imported from my EverQuest 2 screenshots set on my Flickr account. Pretty nifty. Check it out.

iPhone SDK (finally) announced

And I’m shocked to say, it was totally worth the wait. This is exciting as hell— Apple really seems to have listed to the developers and gone all out on a professional, robust SDK and platform upgrade to really make it attractive to customers and developers alike. What I’m most pleased to hear is how they’ve gone with a very Microsoft XNA-like route in giving developers a free SDK to develop with, very inexpensive licensing terms ($99 for freeware/hobbyist and lower end commercials apps), and implementing an onboard applications store. Plus, freeware apps can remain freeware; great news.

I wont go over all the details you’ve undoubtedly seen fifteen times in your RSS reader this morning, so I’ll just link those of you who aren’t up to speed to the Engadget coverage. Likewise, those of the programming percsuation might want to head on over to the Apple Developer Connect and grab yourself a copy of the free SDK.

Ziff-Davis files for bankruptcy

Wow, this is pretty crazy. So apparently media power house Ziff-Davis is somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion dollars in debt, so they’ve decided to throw in the towel and file for bankruptcy. Ziff-Davis is the parent company to popular magazines and web portals like 1UP, Electronic Gaming Monthly, Games for Windows and PC Magazine, among others. Of course, ZD has been responsible for a lot of other really cool things too. It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes things up.

Image provided by Nicole Lee.