As the first development stage (beta, duh) of Apricot narrows down, I think it’s a good time to give a quick overview of what it is and how it will work.

Apricot is aimed at people who want an easy way to setup a quick chat room that they can share with friends, family of work colleagues. Upon registration, Apricot will automatically setup the room for you with the correct name and from day one start a complete history of your chat room.

Everything can be found on the Apricot Home page. Account settings, chat room settings and even your room history. With an AJAX powered home page, your content is presented in fast, intuitive and easy to use interface.

I will give a more in-depth look into the workings of Apricot as launch date gets closer (June 12th), so be sure to check back regularly.

Orange, the first application released under Simple, has a little feature that will backup the list you have made into an easy to read .txt file that you can save for later use. The .txt file will sit on the server for 24-hours so that it will give you time and download it and keep it for later use.

These .txt files are in no way available to the public unless they know the file name, which is randomly generated based on a few calculated numbers. The random folders they sit in is also protected from outside use, and the files are also not linked anywhere other than the current session.

Why am I talking about this? I just wanted to point out that privacy is a big issue surrounding personal data, such as task lists, notes and other information. Sure Orange doesn’t sit on a secure connection, but no information is sent to the server unless the export feature is being used.

Backups of all the list files do happen, this way if you remember the file number and need the list, it can be recovered. I haven’t created a tool for this so if you need a list, just contact me.

I also attended Google I/O this week and all I can say is that Google is definitely a company that’s doing things right. Their passion for the community is just awesome and really helps developers get their ideas into the real world.

I was fortunate to sit in on a few great sessions, the favorite being “The State of AJAX” hosted by Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, talking about how AJAX is being used and how JS libraries are becoming a great part of the JS community. (go jQuery). If you were unable to attend Google I/O, the opening Keynote, hosted by Vic Gundotra, is available on YouTube.

Have a good weekend.

Orgoo is a brand new startup trying to combine a ton of IM, Web and SMS services into a single service. Though it succeeds in bringing them all together, it’s currently limited to what you can actually use. I know it’s still in beta so I’ll let it pass, but they currently only support the bigger IM services, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, GTalk and ICQ. They also seem to have neglected social services, such as Twitter and Facebook’s new chat system.

Orgoo’s mail services supports IMAP and POP, so you’ll definitely be able to connect your email. It also allows importing of contacts from Yahoo Mail, GMail and AOL Mail. Though I don’t yet trust them enough to upload all my contacts to their server.

A few problems I have with Orgoo though, is that it’s not an encrypted connection. So the information you’re entering can be accessed by a malicious 3rd party (damn ‘em), so it’s up to you to trust the site or not. My other problem is the somewhat clunky interface, at times I need to click at least three times until I hit the correct spot (you’ll see in the video.) And just the general interface needs to be cleaned up a little and tightened.

I’ve recorded a short video of me going through Orgoo a little. If you want an invite, just comment on this page.

[ Watch Orgoo Beta Preview (.mov)]

For those of you who don’t know, Google will be having a developer’s gathering May 28th-29th here in San Francisco called Google I/O. A ton of sessions will be held such as ‘State of AJAX’ presented by Dion Almaer (Google) and Ben Galbraith (Ajaxian), which seems really interesting.

So if you’re in San Francisco and will be attending Google I/O, let me know!

So this blog has been running on Wordpress 2.1 for a long while and I haven’t actually upgraded it to the latest Wordpress 2.5. Well, today I did an entire backup of the database running this blog as well as the files, crossed fingers and upgraded.

Everything seems to be normal so far, if you find any bugs please let me know.