Long time no blog (again). Well, there's been a bunch of stuff happening at work lately and one of the 'avenues' I have recently been down has led me to check out Macromedia Flex. Remember the hype around RIAs? I've only really just scratched the surface, however, this is a powerful presentation server which pulls data from your defined sources, does its magic and streams nice rich Flash UIs back to the client. One very helpful site I came across while playing with this was Christophe Coenraets'. Now mind you, at 12K I don't know how viable this is really going to be for the kind of projects I work on at the moment, but then there's always OpenLaszlo. This may be a good alternative - I've yet to try it though. Another site which looks like it may have some interesting thoughts on this is richclient.de.
Anyway, be it AJAX or Flash-based (and no, Java doesn't qualify), it looks as though Rich Internet Applications may actually start becoming a reality.
Posted at 08:18 PM CET
More on dynamic web apps: I've started playing around with Firefox's built in XSLT engine and Sarissa, which - yet again - I found through O'Reilly Network. Sarissa is a nice wrapper which abstracts the dirty details of cross-browser coding and lets you get on with what you actually want to do ("only" Mozilla and IE are currently supported though). You can see my first simplistic experimentation with the code here (and if someone can tell me why this isn't working cleanly in IE, please drop me a line). This page demonstrates the use of the XMLHttpRequest object to pull in a chunk of XML, dynamically transform it into XHTML and inject it into the page using DOM.
Jon Udell has also been writing about all this new-fangled stuff...
Posted at 09:34 PM CET
Following GMail, Google Suggest and Google Maps Drew McLellan has done a nice writeup on O'Reilly Network explaining one of the basic concepts behind this new breed of web application. This approach to implementing the client side is a further step towards blurring the line between classic desktop CS applications and web applications - at least from a user experience point of view. People are going to find many cool things they can do with this. I've put the code for the basic example together here if you'd like to try it out.
Posted at 06:17 PM CET
I've just ordered one of these and can't wait for it to arrive. I've been using the SlimServer software for a while now and really love it. For one thing, it's super easy to set up: just run the installer, point it to your music and open the stream in any player on the network. The server is written in Perl and thus will run on OS X, Windows and most any flavour of Linux/BSD. You can control playlists from any device capable of running a browser (or from the Squeezebox, of course). It's also open-source which means there are several really neat add-ons, some of which get incorporated into the full release of the server software.
SlimDevices have done a great job of leveraging the strengths of the open-source community to add value to their product. I wish more companies would do this. Stay tuned...
Posted at 10:52 AM CET
The thought-provoking Telepocalypse has happed across something which I find myself pondering of late: where is the PC going? I suspect we're about to hit a fork in the road. How much more gigahertz pushing will it take before consumers realise that they don't need the kind of computing power to run a small reactor or a particle accelerator in their homes? As things become more networked and pervasive we'll probably see computing power move away from single nodes (though there will be more of them) and towards the network itself - a democratisation if you will. But then there's always the gamers, of course...
In other news, my name cropped up on Jon Udell's blog yesterday. Yikes!
Posted at 10:16 PM CET
I've been wanting to give PearPC - which is now at version 0.3 - a whirl. This is indeed a very impressive piece of work! If twiddling knobs is your thing then I suggest you download it and give it a try. It'll run on both Windows and Linux. You will need the OS X install disks, however. How long before Apple put a stop to this, I wonder...
Posted at 09:53 PM CET
Agile Messenger is a fine little IM app for your smartphone. It speaks all major protocols (yes, Jabber too!) and has seen regular updates over the last couple of months. I've found this to be the most versatile IM client for my P900 - and it just keeps getting better.
Posted at 11:00 AM CET
If you're a web developer or even just slapping together a couple of pages for a personal website, do yourself a favour and get this. The Web Developer Extension for Firefox and Mozilla is awesome.
Posted at 09:27 AM CET
I came across this nifty little tool provided by Swisscom the other day. If you have a mobile account with them this Outlook extension will allow you to send SMS's and automatic appointment reminders to any phone straight from your desktop. The software is free - the service is conveniently charged to your monthly bill :-)
Posted at 12:09 PM CET
This little hack has been out there for a while now, but I thought I'd post it here just to keep a note. Adobe Acrobat Reader - and especially version 6 - takes an enormous amount of time to load. You can trim the startup time down to a couple of seconds by simply not having all the superfluous plug-ins (most of them are useless anyway) loaded at startup. To achieve this, simply move everything except EWH32.api, EScript.api, weblink.api and search.api in the .\plug_ins directory to the .\Optional directory. Enjoy!
Posted at 01:55 PM CET
![[ zeugma ]](images/logo.gif){kind=logo}