For those interested into building location awareness into their apps (and have MSDN sub IDs) this is a sweet deal: MapPoint sub free for MSDN users. You get access to their staging environment for a year and upto 50k commercial webservice transactions. (via the Early Adopter weblog)
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Summer is icummen into Chennai.
Gmail’s 1 gig free sounds good, and I hope the service is reliable. What’d really kick ass: a desktop app communicating over HTTP to my Gmail account (like Outlook Express communicates with Hotmail). Dredging through long conversations over a browser will not be fun, I assure you (anyone tried really long threads on Google Groups?).
[Update: I have since joined the Gmail beta program, and the innovative "conversation view" notwithstanding, I stand by my statement.]
Sun and Microsoft kiss and make up. McNealy’s barbs will be missed. While I don’t expect any letup in the competitive rhetoric, an officially supported RMI to System.Remoting bridge would be very nice to have.
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From the access-ramps dept: Toggle Keys is a killer Windows Accessibility feature that works very well for touch typists who keep hitting cAPS lOCK bY mISTAKE (as when touch-typing on a different keyboard). To switch it on, use Control Panel | Accessibility Options, Alt+T, Alt+A, Enter.
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Chris Anderson responds to Wesner Moise’s concerns about Doc/View in Avalon. Chris is right: it’s too early in the Avalon dev cycle for frameworks to be written on top of it (anyone who remembers the genesis of MFC knows this), but this makes it imperative for the architecture group at MSDN to get out and spread the word before v1 ships about architecture patterns that make developing rich Avalon-based document editors easy.
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Incidentally, one of the reasons Dave’s pages have the visual “mix” that he talks about is that his editing environment is a very capable one. Radio/Frontier IMO has probably the best outliner in the world, and Dave is really able to reap the benefits of its rich UI to show off Scripting News to a level of polish mere Radio/Blogger/MT-wielding mortals can never achieve. Even rich clients like w.bloggar IMO constrain you to a per-post view of your data, while Dave’s outliner gives him a page-level view of what he’s writing, giving him a unique ability to create flow as nobody else quite can.
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Dave:
What if you just want to link to something, should that require a whole post with all its attributes? It’s a matter of user interface in the end. If MT made it easy to post and update a news item that was link-blog-like, people wouldn’t need to invent a way around it. But that would break the relationship between the feed and posts. Oy what a mess. … they’re working around the model of longish posts with lots of visual overhead (a model also implemented by Blogger, Manila and Radio, so this isn’t a dig on MT).
As Dave says, it is a matter of interface in the end. Smart templates (hide the title when the post has none, tweak spacing for untitled posts, etc) and a bit of CSS can work magic on sites like the Scobleizer, which contain occasional lengthy posts and masses of links.
In Movable Type, for example, I’d love to see:
<$IfNotBlank$><$MTEntryTitle$><$EndIf$> <$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>
…but MT can probably not grok IfNotBlank yet.
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SharpReader’s the first aggregator I find I like enough to be using continuously for over a week, after playing (over time) with Radio 7, Radio 8, NewzCrawler, Syndirella, Amphetadesk, RSS Bandit and Bloglines. As a result, I finally have a real, honest-to-gosh OPML blogroll for the sites I like to frequently read.
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While others are busy hyping Avalon, Indigo, WinFS and XAML, Jason Nadal has the right idea and writes about Monad. This is worth watching since the lack of a good command shell (no, cmd.exe still doesn’t qualify) is one of my biggest gripes about Windows, and a programmable shell would be very useful indeed.
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(Via Slashdot) Gator forces site to remove Spyware label. Interesting. I don’t mind if someone installs Gator to hear about shopping bargains. The reason I don’t like Gator is that it arrives surreptitously (no, a IE do-you-want-to-install-GMT dialog is not good enough), and eats up RAM and CPU cycles on the user’s PC even when no browser is running.
For an example of a tracking application done right, check out the Google Toolbar– in its advanced mode, it does send data back to Google, but no sane person would call it spyware.
The day Gator stops using drive-by and pop-up downloads to distribute their product, I’ll stop calling it that name. Until then, in my opinion, Gator remains spyware.
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