Apture thoughts

Ok so things new things are cropping up on this here little read blog, but I wanted to take a moment to go a bit meta and talk about Apture. All this popping media is embedded via that slick new Websy Deucy app called Apture. According to its developers, "Apture provides the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences." And lemme tell you it does exactly that, and it does it pretty darn well.

Pros:
Ohmigosh is linking to just about anything easy. While writing I still insert my main links via copy pasta or manually, but afterward I publish the post, turn on the Apture editing interface, and deep to my heart's content. I've even started just dropping a marker ^before and after^ what I want to link and then using Apture to put straight web links in after composing.

Link controls... don't want PDFs popping inline? Turn it off in the Apture control panel. Same goes for all the different types of media. You control whether they do what they would normally do, or do it the Apture way.

User generated link database... I like this feature though its eventual usefulness will be a function of scale I suppose. If you highlight words that other users have linked you can see what they linked them to. I can see this being useful both for what to link to and what not to link to. If eleventybillion ppl have already linked to that piece of media, why not choose a different one where appropriate?

Neutral but I think will be a pro:
Wiki mode... Wiki mode allows other users to add links to your page. It can be a "protected wiki" of only registered users, or it can be the beauty and terror that a true wiki is. Anyone can link anything on your page to anywhere. As Wikipedia founder The Virgin Jimmy Wales showed us... Wait. Stop. You see what I did there? That joke, if it works at all, only works because of Apture. That has nothing to with Apture Wiki mode, but hey, get your own blog.

Cons:
Auto popping first links... A'ight I'm gonna give everyone a hint. Do not pop anything up inline in my browser unless I click on it. No no no, I didn't say mouseover. Mouseclick. The first link moused over automatically pops the link. This is annoying and painful -- like having Burl Ives strapped to your back. This is also a trivial coding change I would imagine (which most likely means I am wrong). An option to turn this off would be greatly appreciated.

Default interface placement... Again a niggly little complaint, but I use Blogger (Hello Captain Obvious) and the editing interface pops and wants to stick right over my New Post button in the top right hand corner of the browser. Ideally I'd stick in the bottom right corner of the browser window next to my Firefox extension buttons, but that's me. I'm guessing it would be difficult for the browser to "remember" where the edit interface was, so how about a "4-corners" option to make it pop in any of the corners the user chooses.

Some wonkiness (see Update)... Occasionally I've had Apture tell me to close my browser and retry. This needs to get fixed. As I get a better idea of when it does this, I'll expand on this, as this does seem to be a bug rather than a feature I don't like. It deserves a bit of research on my part to make I'm just not doing it right.

Conclusion:
Apture, despite some interface issues, rocks hard tasty ab style, and it might change the way you think about composing posts. I know it has done that for me.

Update -- from the Apture FAQ

Q. I get the error message "Could not load panel. (This might be because you have other browser windows open with Apture. Try closing other browser windows and refreshing the page, or restarting your browser.)"

A. On a Mac, the Operating System in conjunction with Adobe, only allows a limited number of Flash instances. To fix this, close other windows using apture or running Flash.

That would be my problem.