More Offline Toys

Today I’m trying out Blogjet. In contrast to ecto, it has a somewhat simpler interface more reminiscent of a browser than an email client. Like ecto, it offers WYSIWYG:

Both seem like they would work fine for faculty.

I’m also playing around with a 1GB U3 USB key drive. U3 is a standard for making it easier to install and run applications off of the key drive. I currently have Firefox, Thunderbird, Skype, and MacAfee Antivirus installed as U3 applications. If that’s not enough, then there are lots of “portable” apps that don’t install as slickly as U3 apps but work just fine off a USB drive. For example, I keep my GreatNews feed reader, the Nvu HTML editor, and the Bleezer blogging client. (It’s not quite as slick as ecto or BlogJet, but it’s cross-platform, it runs on a key drive, and it’s only 3 months old.) I’ve even installed LAMS on it. With all that, I have about a half a gig left.

So, to recap, we have the following capabilities:

• The ability to monitor hundreds of RSS posts a day—easily as many as the number of content submissions you’d have to read in a full online class load
• The ability to publish rich content
• A full HTML editor
• Text and voice chat
• A full course environment

I could easily add audio and photo editing capabilities too. And OpenOffice—though that’s a hefty 300+ MB. In short, I could run a class off of this baby.