2005 June | Lazycoder

27Jun/051

Tagging and discovery

inessential.com: Weblog: Comments for ‘Tag subscriptions in NetNewsWire’: “Here’s the deal: services such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Technorati have pages and feeds for things that have been ‘tagged’with various keywords.”

(Via inessential.com.)

Brent Simmons talks about the “Subscribe to tag” feature in NetNewsWire 2.0. This is a great feature. I tried this out this afternoon. But then I realized something. I was having trouble thinking of any Technorati, Flickr, or Delicious tags. How do you discover new tags? I tried the random method. Well it’s not really random. You just type in a few things you think would be tags and see if anything comes back. For example, I typed in “Game Development” and said they were Delicious tags. (The box doesn’t say you can combine tags when you create the subscription but I had a hunch it would be allowed). Voila, I came back with a feed based on those tags. I tried a couple of others with similar success. A “Seattle Jazz Music” Yahoo search resulted in news about some upcoming concerts.

It’s a very underreported feature. One, I think, should be included in all RSS aggregators in the future.

Filed under: General 1 Comment

24Jun/053

WinForms 2.0: Still the Bastard Child of .NET Development

WinForms 2.0: Still the Bastard Child of .NET Development: “If WinForms development at Microsoft is being forsaken to flesh out Avalon,
I’m gonna be severely pissed if some of these basics are missing when Orcas
comes out.
Bottom Line: The built-in WebForms controls are head and shoulders
above their WinForms brethren.”

(Via Robert Mclaws.)

I haven’t done much Winforms development in .NET. After having done WebForms development in ASP.NET for about 2 years now I can say if what Robert says is true, that is the saddest thing I’ve heard in a while.

Filed under: .NET, General 3 Comments

24Jun/050

IE7 looks and acts like Safari

Wow, I just watched the Channel 9 video of RSS in Longhorn and IE 7. One thing that struck me was how much IE 7 looks and behaves, at least in terms of RSS content, like Safari 2.0. Whenever I see similar applications from two different companies that behave in a similar manner, I wonder two things:

1) Who copied who?

2) Is there any real innovation happening or is that the best way to do things?

As far as the RSS related functionality goes, making the browser light up a little badge when there is a feed present makes sense. IE does it a little differently than Safari. I like the way that Safari does it mainly because the RSS icon isn’t always there. It only shows up in the address bar if a feed is present. IE 7′s RSS icon is omnipresent, just disabled or “greyed” (“Oranged”?) out when a feed isn’t present. IMO, it gets lost in all of the other Yahoo, ICQ, Office, and other icons that are stuck in the toolbar. I don’t think I’ve ever clicked on any of those icons.

The way the two browsers handle subscriptions is very similar, again there aren’t a whole lot of ways to skin that particular cat. It shows the “river of news” view of your subscriptions. Allows you to search your subscription, much like Spotlight and Safari do. Where the two browsers differ, and this is pretty significant to me. is how they handle external aggregators.

Safari allows you to designate an external aggregator. When you click on the RSS badge, it opens up the aggregator you have specified (in my case it’s NetNewsWire on my iBook) and lets the aggregator handle subscribing to the feed rather than the browser. IE 7, it appears from the video, allows aggregators access to the “common list”.

So my questions are:
1) Will I be able to designate a default aggregator. If I can, this will prevent the “extension grabbing” that happens a lot with documents.
2) Will the feeds be included in the Longhorn version of Spotlight? Being able to import the Feed details into the metadata store would be cool.

The other big difference between the two is that I’m watching a video of the IE 7/Longhorn RSS technology. If I want to see the Safari/Tiger RSS technology I just open up my iBook.

Filed under: .NET, MacOS, Technology No Comments

24Jun/050

Darrell Norton’s Blog [MVP] : Dynamic languages work closer to how you design software

Darrell Norton’s Blog [MVP] : Dynamic languages work closer to how you design software: “I’m not advocating throwing away .NET or Java, but for solving business problems, when I want to focus on the domain problem and not the implementation in curly braces, End If’s, or angle brackets, dynamic languages are a (good) answer.”

(Via Darrell Norton.)

Darrel Norton has a good post outlining some of the design benefits inherent to dynamic languages.

If you find yourself writing code to work around the limitations of a language or framework (e.g. writing strongly typed collections in .NET or catching useless exceptions in Java) it means the language is incomplete IMO.

Filed under: General No Comments

23Jun/050

Seattle most unwired city

Wireless Internet: Intel Ranks the 100 Most Unwired U.S. Cities: “”

I figured that Seattle would be pretty high on this list, but I was surprised to see my hometown of Wichita, KS on the list. I figured they would still have the equivalent of an old party line when it comes to internet access. But they are listed at #71.

See, I wasn’t just blowing smoke when I complained about the lack of free wireless access in NYC. I’m just spoiled by Seattle I guess.

Filed under: General No Comments

23Jun/051

NeoOffice/J

NeoOffice/J: ”
This is an X-windows-free version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. They just released 1.1 final, the first version that hasn’t had a Beta sticker on it. In exchange, I sent them a few bucks, since I’ve been using this as my everyday office suite for over a year now. (Confession: I still do dip into Excel now and again, but eventually the OpenOffice spreadsheet will catch up with that too.) It’s not as pretty as a real native-bred OS X app, but for what I need, it pretty well Just Works. Recommended for OS X users, particularly those who like C-$2MS.

“

(Via ongoing.)

Trying this out now. Sweet home Alabama, it takes long enough to start up. Maybe that’s just a “first time starting up after install” penalty.

Why do I have a “Hangul/Hanja conversion” item on my menu bar? I don’t even know what those things are. It also opens up to a document by default. What if I want to work on a spreadsheet? Hey, it does have a dock menu. The preferences menu doesn’t open up any preferences? “Tools -> Options” opens up preferences, how un-Mac of them to build that into the “Mac” version. Wow this thing is slower than Forest Gump after 5 shots of bourbon. Lets quit and restart. It’s faster starting up this time.

Verdict: I’ll have to try it on for a week and see how it fits. I really dislike “suites” of anything though. I’d rather have 10 little programs open doing exactly what I want than one big one with a bunch of stuff I don’t need or want.

update Uninstalled. This thing is tooooo slooow.