In the last week Firefox 1.0 Preview Release and Thunderbird 0.8 were released.

The Firefox release was originally planned for July, but has been postponed again and again. Finally it is here. Two new features of Firefox are really neat. The first one I stumbled upon is that the URL bar has a yellow background while visiting a secure site. You don't need to search for the lock icon in the status bar. This yellow URL bar boldly tells you "You are on a SSL site now". Very nice.

The second feature is called FastFind. Users of jEdit and other applications will probably know this feature as Hypersearch. As soon as you press CTRL-F a search bar opens at the bottom of the window. At first this is a bit irritating and you catch yourself pressing CTRL-F and muttering "Where's that f... search dialog" until your eyes find the search bar. But when you get used to it, it's kind of cool. Nice thing is - the Hypersearch part comes now - that Firefox marks the nearest matching position while you type. So sometimes how can stop typing in the middle because Firefox already marks what you searched.

Another feature which is quite useless to me is Live Bookmarks. You can bookmark an RSS feed and Firefox will change it into some kind of folder that always contains the current contents of the feed. I'm using a real feed aggregator so this is nothing for me. For occasional RSS users this might be quite useful. As Ben Goodger points out this feature is not meant to be a full fledged aggregator. Anyways, sometimes it can be quite useful for aggregator users. Some sites that have RSS feeds available, are quite successful in hiding them. On those sites Firefox might find it in the meta data of a page. In that case you will see a nice RSS icon on the right side of the status bar. Click on that icon, subscribe to the feed, right-click on the feed in the bookmarks menu and copy the feed URL. Would be nice to have another menu item on that icon "Copy feed URL". That would spare me creating the bookmark.

I was using some of the Thunderbird nightlies, so there wasn't that much new for me. Thunderbird now includes Forumzilla. I used Forumzilla some time back and it is quite good, if you like to view your feeds in the e-mail application.

One very nice new feature of Thunderbird 0.8 is automatic remote image blocking which can be switched off for individual e-mails. Earlier it was: View all remote images or none. Some of the ads I get I'm actually interested in. So for them I switch off image blocking. The others stay blocked

After a long wait there are finally news from Squareness. The new release - 2.0 -, which was long planned and takes even longer to finish, concentrates on color theme support.

The new tool - Colorizer - allows you to create new themes in no time. You don't have to deal with theme files and RGB values yourselves. This is all handled by Colorizer. You only have to make your choices and select the colors. The tool contains a preview that shows you how the colors play together. So you shouldn't be forced to deploy the theme, try it out, change it, deploy it again etc. The current preview doesn't show all of the colors and it doesn't show all controls either. This will be taken care of while it moves from the current 0.7 release to 1.0.

The 1.0 release of Colorizer will also add the generation of Windowblinds subskins for the Squareness skin. Colorizer 1.0 will be released together with Squareness for Windowblinds 2.0, which will be updated to use the new features of Windowblinds 4.4

Back to Squareness Look And Feel. Before I began developing the Look And Feel, I have played around with some other Look And Feels like Kunststoff or Metouia. They all have themeing support that is based on the Metal themeing support. This kind of support is good for developers. They can write an own theme class and load it into the Look And Feel. From the perspective of a user who wants to use a Look And Feel with an own color theme on an application he cannot or doesn't want to change the source of, this kind of support is too poor. Therefore I have come up with a new level of themeing support.

There are two parts in the themeing support of Squareness Look And Feel: theme files and theme packages. Theme files are nothing new. Other applications and most likely also some Look And Feels have used them before. They are simple properties files containing name-value-pairs, where the names are the names of the colors and the values are the RGB values to be used for the specified color names.

Theme packages are zip files that bundle one or more theme files and a special file named themeselector.slfts. The special file is the one which makes the difference though it contains only a single line currentTheme=themefilename. Just place the theme package into the classpath of an application that uses Squareness Look And Feel. Squareness Look And Feel will find themeselector.slfts and will automatically load the specified theme file. I place both squareness.jar and themeselector.slfts into my jre/lib/ext directory. A peculiarity of this directory is that all files and folders that reside in it are automatically added to the classpath of any application which is started by this JRE. I think this is the most simple way to bring themeing support of Look And Feels to the end users.

As I am into talking about Squareness now, let's add this small bit: I know I have promised to release a skin for Firefox. It is long overdue, but I have great hopes to get it finished this year. As soon as Squareness for Windowblinds 2.0 is out, I should have enough time to finish it.

Yesterday I got carried away with talking about the dream and fear of robots. I actually forgot to talk about the thing because of which I started writing the blog entry. I will make up for that now.

The thing that really annoyed me about "I, Robot" was the very unsubtle product placements. Ok there is nothing to say against product placement. It adds some more money in the wallets of the movie makers and is generally harmless. Product placement that is done well, is very subtle. At its best you don't recognize it. You simply go to the next shop the next day and simply buy the product you saw in the movie ;) . In this movie the product placements are plainly visible. First Will Smith hears loud music that comes out from an - as to the time the movie plays in - outdated JVC HIFI system. Then he unwraps his new Converse shoes and tells us how those shoes from 2004 are the best. Hey (This Hey is officially dedicated to Kai Rüstmann :) ), I had my load of ads before the movie. I go to the cinema to watch a movie without pauses for ads. I even paid for watching this. That was really annoying. I sure won't buy any Converse shoes in the next several years or so, no matter how good they really are. After this Converse ad and some actual movie content, Will Smith gets into his Audi. We won't see this model very soon on the market. It can drive alone in its autopilot mode or can be driven manually by those who are wary of self driving cars. This all you see in the first 10 minutes. The products and the logos of the companies are re-shown several times through the movie.

But the most astonishing appearance concerning product placement is "U.S. Robotics". I wondered if "U.S. Robotics" actually paid for this. Apparently they must have. On their sites ( http://www.usr.com/ ) ) they have links to some "I, Robot" competitions. I don't think this was a wise move. In the movie USR is the center of the evil. It's the company which developed the computer that wants to enslave the humans. Will this movie motivate you to buy a router by USR? Maybe the router has an uplink to USR and will do some weird stuff with your personal data as soon as it gets the special order. Watch the red light :) . Maybe it's because USR isn't top notch anymore - if it ever was. So attracting attention is all, even if it makes them shine in a bad light.

Yesterday I was to the movies again. Hmm, spending much time in cinemas lately. Anyways, the film I watched was "I, Robot". I was warned that the German dubbing is horrible and some jokes aren't as good as in the original English version. Unfortunately the cinema in Hamburg where you can watch the movies in their original undubbed version, didn't have it on its list anymore. Well, so I had to watch the German version, which wasn't all that bad.

The movie is a nice solid action film without any surprises. The photography is done quite well. The last fighting scene is especially nice. Reminds me of scenes below Isengard in the LOTR movies.

Besides being an action film it's also a science fiction movie and is based on stories by Isaac Asimov. Don't know if Asimov actually wrote the story as it is told here or if only his robot laws and other parts of his stories were an inspiration to the film makers.

I somehow don't like Asimov's robot stories. Someday in the past I lent one fat book full of robot stories by Asimov. I fell asleep really fast and came to the conclusion that I should read something more gripping. Well, maybe only the first story was boring, but I didn't try to find a better one in that book. I gave up on it. I don't want to say that Asimov's writings are all boring. I read the Foundation Trilogy and a good deal of those other books that are connected with it. That was really some gripping bulk of books, but those robot stories: no.

The funny thing with robots is that for over a hundred years now people dream about robots and fear them at the same time. They dream about robots who will do all the tedious work they don't want to do. They dream of robots who will execute their commands and will ever be nice to them. At the same time they fear robots who will grow more intelligent that any human being. Robots who will take over the command over the earth and to whom all human beings will be slaves. So it's a longing for the new that is intermingled with the fear of the new.

Another funny point is, that for a long time now, scientists in this field tell us, that soon there will be intelligent robots who will be capable of doing any work. They build robots which recognize walls and don't bump against them hopelessly. They build robots which fight one against another. That's all fun and nice , but there is not a glimmer of intelligence in those robots. The only one intelligent in this whole play are their makers, who come up with cool algorithms that make the robots look intelligent. Maybe, maybe that's the natural border. The "Till here and no further". I really doubt there will ever be really intelligent robots. As better algorithms are developed, new robots will be build and maybe sometime they will have housekeeping qualities, but nothing more.

That said, I'm not telling you, that you will never be killed by a robot. To build a robot that will kill you is maybe as trivial as taking a gun and shooting yourself a nice round hole in your head. It's a fairly simple algorithm:

• Take a gun into your right hand (some picture recognition work has to be done for this to prevent the robot from mistaking a banana for a gun)
• Seek your target (Some more picture recognition)
• Push the lever while aiming at your target.

That was wicked. You hoped you could go to bed, have some nice dreams about housekeeping robots and forget all your robot nightmares. No way!