Friday, December 17, 2004
Onfolio 2.0 Beta - with Firefox Support
I've installed the Onfolio 2.0 beta which comes with a whole raft of new features.
Top of the list so far form me is Firefox integration - though am I being ungrateful by wishing that it would support Mozilla itself as well, rather than just Firefox which I find to be just a little too dumbed down for my needs. Anyway, the integration does appear to duplicate the power of this tool which was initially IE specific, within Firefox so well done there. (Note that although it does use a Firefox extension, and extensions are cross platform, the extension itself calls into an Onfolio XPCOM component, which is a Windows specific dll, so this does not extend Onfolio to new platforms).
Also new is the Feed Reeder. This was the feature that made Scoble pronounce this application as awesome. (Note that the reader comes configured to offer Scoble's feed by default!) I agree that the feed reader generally beats the other stand alone feed readers I've used - however it's arrangement is very similar to how Bloglines presents feeds, and for the moment the advantages of the online solution are compelling.
The invite to take part in this beta offered the following sensible advice "Before using this version of Onfolio, it is a good idea to back up your Onfolio Collection files, and then back up your collection files regularly during your use of the Onfolio Beta." Unfortunately, that is one of the weaknesses of the product - it produces huge files that are impossible to backup. Essentially what it has done is to use Microsoft's support for producing a file system within a file, rather than storing the data directly in the host file system. This means that the collection file soon becomes too big to backup to either CD or DVD, and any incremental backup strategy is defeated by the fact that a single character change to one item in the collection means that the whole collection needs to be backed up once again.
Top of the list so far form me is Firefox integration - though am I being ungrateful by wishing that it would support Mozilla itself as well, rather than just Firefox which I find to be just a little too dumbed down for my needs. Anyway, the integration does appear to duplicate the power of this tool which was initially IE specific, within Firefox so well done there. (Note that although it does use a Firefox extension, and extensions are cross platform, the extension itself calls into an Onfolio XPCOM component, which is a Windows specific dll, so this does not extend Onfolio to new platforms).
Also new is the Feed Reeder. This was the feature that made Scoble pronounce this application as awesome. (Note that the reader comes configured to offer Scoble's feed by default!) I agree that the feed reader generally beats the other stand alone feed readers I've used - however it's arrangement is very similar to how Bloglines presents feeds, and for the moment the advantages of the online solution are compelling.
The invite to take part in this beta offered the following sensible advice "Before using this version of Onfolio, it is a good idea to back up your Onfolio Collection files, and then back up your collection files regularly during your use of the Onfolio Beta." Unfortunately, that is one of the weaknesses of the product - it produces huge files that are impossible to backup. Essentially what it has done is to use Microsoft's support for producing a file system within a file, rather than storing the data directly in the host file system. This means that the collection file soon becomes too big to backup to either CD or DVD, and any incremental backup strategy is defeated by the fact that a single character change to one item in the collection means that the whole collection needs to be backed up once again.
# posted by zmarties @ 12/17/2004 08:09:00 am 
