2005 September | Lazycoder

13Sep/050

PDC 2005 keynote

IMO, this keynote is no where NEAR a revolutionary as the PDC 2000 Keynote. The PDC 2000 keynote really did represent a shift in the way you programmed the Windows platform. Everything since then has just been little featurettes compared to the announcement of ~~The Next Generation of Windows Services(NGWS)~~..ooops…I mean the .NET Framework

Filed under: General No Comments

13Sep/053

Office 12 looks like iTunes

Check out the screenshot of the “ribbon” in Office 12.

Those of you that like the “flip feature” in Vista, may want to check out Expose in OS X or one of the many Windows clones.

But I’m not going to point out each and every item that Vista copied from OS X. The marketing folks at MS are expecting people to make those comparisons. They’ve pre-trained their minions to ignore those comparisons. I’m just excited that Windows is FINALLY getting a lot of the features that I love about OS X in the actual OS instead of as third-party tools.

update: Here’s a screenshot that shows the similarities between the new look of Office 12 and iTunes new look.

Brent Simmons (of NetNewsWire) had some great comments when the new look of iTunes made it’s debut. My favorite was the comparison to NeXT. He also notes some trends that he’s seen in the latest OS X apps. From the looks of Office 12, maybe those design trends aren’t specific to OS X? Notice the margins bounding the Word window? According to John Gruber, this new look is so bad-ass that it doesn’t even have a name. The only thing that O12 is missing is the combined title-toobar. Well, that and getting rid of the Aqua buttons. But I kind of like them.

Filed under: .NET, Apple, General, MacOS 3 Comments

12Sep/050

Free-As-In-Beer Rails Hosting

Free-As-In-Beer Rails Hosting: “ Strange but true: RailsPlayground.com is offering free (as in beer) hosting with the following features:

20 MB disk space
500 MB/month bandwidth
1 MySQL database / 1 PostgreSQL database
FastCGI Ruby on Rails support
Other languages: PHP 4.4.0, Perl 5.8.7

The service is supplemented with a support forum and a blog. According to the site, there’s no setup fee, no monthly fee and no ads will appear on your site.

(Via The Farm: The Tucows Developers’ Hangout.)

Wow, this sounds like a great idea if you want to play around with Rails and put some apps out there for people to play with.

BTW, if you aren’t reading the Tucows developer hangout you’re really missing out on a lot of great information.

Filed under: General No Comments

7Sep/050

iTunes 5 and iTunes phone

Boy it’s a big day if you’re an iTunes fan. Steve Jobs announced both the iTunes phone from Motorola and iTunes 5. They also announced a Harry Potter iPod, which ships with the Harry Potter books in audio book format. I’m still not completely on the iPod bandwagon, at least not a full fledged iPod. I love my shuffle and that’s pretty much all I need in a music player. If they ever release a “Jazz essentials” iPod, crammed full of Jazz albums I might break down.

I heard the announcements and thought, “I wonder when they’ll be available?”. Too many years of Microsoft announcements have dulled my thinking I guess. Apple doesn’t talk much until something is shipping. Microsoft just seems to talk a lot.

edit:Almost forgot about the iPod nano, their flash based iPod that everyone was expecting.

Filed under: General, iPod No Comments

5Sep/053

Makeshiftworkstation.jpg

Makeshiftworkstation.jpg

Originally uploaded by SKoon.

My makeshift docking station. My iBook is “docked” in the picture. Since I’m going to be working from home for a while after my daughter is born, I thought I should set up some kind of workstation in my work shop.