The power of Central by Anticlue

If you haven't taken the time to try Macromedia's new central application, its worth trying out. Jeremy Allaire has posted a recent article that details how central will aid in the Internet 2.0 trend, and Mike Chambers has given details that the presence SDK, AOL instant messenger and ICQ messaging functionality, will be released this winter.

What is Central? Central is almost like a separate brower, that limits where people can go. There is no url address bar, just a Button Bar of the applications (or in central terms pods) you have installed.

I like several of the free pods that have been created for it.

The best is the Blog Reader. Any rss feed can be added to the blog reader, when it is up and running. The blog reader goes and automatically checks for any new posts to blogs or sites. You can also store your entries by cateories. I have the following categories setup, technology, Microsoft blogs, Macromedia blogs, Healthcare blogs, news, and investing, some are defaults of the install others I've added. For instance, I added the technology category then added the rss feeds from MSDN, Macromedia, DevNet, Oracle Technology, CFLIB, and XML Hack. Now the Blog Reader notifies me, in a short time after articles are added to these sites. It is an excellent content update notification tool. Under News, there are default rss feeds installed for the New York Times and CNN. Unfortunately none of our local news authorities have rss feeds from their site, or I would of added them also. Now the app is a little bit clunky, the scroll utility on your mouse won't work with it, and you have to hide the windows tool bar when adding new rss feeds. Also if you have it maximized, you can't access the category or recently updated feeds listboxes. (don't run it maximized). But over all it is a great app.

My next favorite is FiRe. It is a text / xml search and replace tool. See that nicely spaced xml post yesterday. Thank you FiRe.

With Central's ability to provide a rich client interface, separated from the services and data, and the thrust to move central to handhelds also. This is an application worthy of checking out.

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