Archive.
Sunday, April 30, 2000 Link
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I own way too many domain names already, but due to a friend's compulsion for retro technology, I just registered the nixietube.com domain. I guess I share a strange attraction and an oddly obsessive behavior towards obsolete computers and electronic devices with this friend of mine. After all, we did spend a good part of last thursday afternoon swapping components between two Apple Lisa boxes, just to see if one would boot up. Besides, where would the world be without the memory of those glowing high-voltage amber digits staring out at us from calculators the size of sub-compact Japanese automobiles? I'm just paying my due respect.
Saturday, April 29, 2000 Link
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Today at supper, my daughter asked me what an "edit your blog" was. She had obviously been reading over my shoulder while I was typing away in a Blogger window at my computer earlier in the day. I explained that "blog" was short for "web log" and that a log is like a journal or diary. She keeps her own diary, so I figured she would understand completely and leave it at that. Well, she's eight years old and of course she didn't. "Dad?" she says, "Do you know what I thought a blog was? The sound of somebody throwing up." Amen.
Does your operating system make you want to lick it? Need a refreshing fix of gumdrop-inspired interface widgets? Start looking and feeling Aqua all over with the Liquid theme for Mac OS 8.5 and later. It's all the user experience thrills and spills of installing a modern operating system, but without the hardware upgrade. Protected memory and preemptive multitasking not included.
If the Justice Department really wants to take Microsoft to task, rather than doing the obvious, maybe they should take a cue from the Pentagon and just crack down on PowerPoint. They could improve two things in the corporate world by taking this path. It would give competition a shot in the arm, and vastly improve the æsthetics of every boardroom in America.
Tired of wussy little rollovers and weak animation? With PDF Xtra you can now add the chewy output-independent goodness of Acrobat documents to the immense list of media types that Macromedia Director can handle. Unfortunately, not all of the functionality of the PDF format is completely cross-platform. For example, you cannot save, scroll through, or search PDFs when viewing Director files on the Mac, and it only works with Shockwave on Windows. Many feature limitations seem to be tied to what version of the Acrobat software you currently have installed.
Friday, April 28, 2000 Link
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Business documents generated on the fly at hotpaper.com makes for an interesting online service. They've prebuilt everything from resumes to form letters to paper airplane templates. What about corresponding with the kids? Save all sorts of time using the Letter from Santa Claus. You can customize various text elements and then have their system spit out a Word document or an output optimized PDF. My favorite? It's got to be the Bagel of the Day. Extra bonus points for the spiral logo.
Thursday, April 27, 2000 Link
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An extremely good friend of mine left our company today. Disturbingly, the announcement of his departure from was not made by him, but by one of our senior managers. Lately, he had been becoming increasingly disenchanted with the general direction of our project development and certain broad technology decisions. Being ever the skeptic, I wonder aloud whether this event was precipitated by his free will or by force? He is an intense, intelligent, talented, and unearthly tall individual. He also knows our current e-commerce system inside and out. I am going to miss him and so are many other folks around here. Both the development team, and in particular, the culture that permeates this building are going to suffer. This is going to have impact. Right now, part of me is waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Since I was blathering on about quasi-portable computing a bit earlier, let's explore the do it yourself route while we're still in the mood. For instance, have you ever wished you could just stuff the guts of a Quadra 700 into a hard-shell Smith-Corona typewriter case? I know I've felt the urge.
Wednesday, April 26, 2000 Link
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QuickTime 4.1.2 is fresh out of Apple's oven. Among other improvements, it now works with Windows 2000. Actually, it's nice to see that something works with Windows 2000.
The theme for my company's sporadically scheduled TGIF this week is "retro-computing". I'm in a quandary whether to bring a MacPortable, my Canon Cat Work Processor, or the 150 pound rackmount cartridge hard drive unit from the PDP8 stored in my garage. I'm leaning towards the self-contained demoing possibilities of the Cat, and quite frankly, it's as cute as a bug's ear. But the sheer voluminous presence of the DEC hard drive would bring a tear to one's eye.
Then again, there's something truly satisfying about lugging around a 15.8 pound laptop that runs off of lead-acid batteries. Decisions, decisions.
I hate it when companies have to cave in to this type of pressure."If we let every company that writes a tiny, trivial piece of software get a patent license from everyone who wants to have a Web site, then the Web becomes impossible."
Agreed. Frankly, the story of the GIF image format using a patented compression algorithm owned and controlled by Unisys is old news. However, what puts a new spin on the tale, is that earlier this month AccuWeather announced that it was going to stop distributing information using the GIF format and instead use the open PNG format. This is fine and dandy if your browser supports PNG, as most recent desktop versions do, but what about handheld devices? I foresee a whole new business being built around converting PNG formatted pages so they can be browsed on PDA-based web clients. The fee you would pay for this type of service would then kick back to Unisys for use of the GIF creation code. Looking for another curious twist? Unisys operates their own weather information service.
Tuesday, April 25, 2000 Link
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PortSniffer is a freshly updated Mac tool for sysadmins (wink, wink. nudge, nudge.) that will scan a series of ports across a definable range of IP addresses. While this type of software is usually meant for serious network administration related to security and the monitoring of servers, it's fun to play with just out of curiousity. See who's running what on your corporate intranet. Ah, there's the new Hotline server in accounting...
Monday, April 24, 2000 Link
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One of my proudest achievements is not ever being sucked into the world of online chat. Well, that and not ever being pierced by anything except a renegade staple gun. Other than a brief stint with the snarky QuickConference back in the early nineties, I've pretty much ignored all of the IRC and instant messaging software out there. But this is just too trick to ignore. Matthew Peterson has created an IP-based chat program contained within a 19KB QuickTime movie using LiveStage Pro. How? According to Peterson:"QuickTime doesn't have text fields. But, QuickTime is powerful enough that it can build its own text fields. I used a text track as a sprite override to build the text field."
Whoa. Forget about running another sluggish, unstable Java client and dump all those bloated AOL apps. Just fire up QuickTime and experience some of this ugly, but servicable alpha code.
Sometimes, I'm simply in love with the headlines over at The Register. Take this fine example: Privacy Loving Space Aliens Put the Smack Down on SETI. Maybe it's just the use of the phrase "put the smack down". However, the real story here is not about SETI's loss, it's about racial intolerance. A radio telescope inexplicably explodes, and the first thing we do is blame non-terrestrials. How typically human.
Microsoft's buns are smack dab in the middle of the furnace this week, and everybody and their dog wants a turn at cranking up the thermostat. Does anyone believe that something like divesting Office is actually going to happen? As much as I love to see them sweat profusely from every pore, my gut says that they'll get off with not much more than a nasty burp in their valuation.
This review of new PocketPC devices written by Larry Garfield, a dedicated PalmOS user, was passed along to me by someone who recognized my fetish for handheld devices. Thanks Bill. There is still not enough on either side of this fence to make me want to give up my Newton, but there are some interesting observations and usability issues scattered about."The Start button is still alive and well, but has been moved to the upper left a la Macintosh, with a clock in the upper right, also a la Macintosh. There is less clutter on the screen than before, for the most part, although the amount of clutter tends to change depending on the program.
Hey Redmond! Nice to see some real innovation happening here! Actually, it's refreshing to see Microsoft actually being consistently cluttered across all their supported platforms, no matter what size of screen you're using."PalmOS programs naturally give you only the files that pertain to them, and let you sort them by category anyway. The hierarchical file system actually got in the way more than it allowed for organization. Again, the Desktop paradigm doesn't translate well onto the Palm-sized form-factor."
Bingo! This is one of the major reasons why the Newton and the Palm work so well. You rarely need to search for anything, because of the intelligent way the datasoup was designed.
The weirdest thing happened yesterday. As is the custom Easter morning, I indulged in a little bit of the dreaded chocolate from the basket. After about half an hour the back of my mouth started feeling raw. Great, some of the chocolate must of contained a bit of nut residue. I have reasonably serious nut allergies, as do other members of my family, so my wife and I are extremely careful about trace element warnings and the like on food packaging. All of the treats we bought this year were clean as far as we could tell. At any rate, I rinsed, gargled, spat, and then resigned myself to the fact that I would have to live with an irritated throat for the remainder of the day. But it wasn't my throat that was irritated this time, it was towards the back of my palette. I looked into my mouth using the bathroom mirror and noticed that my uvula (you know, that weird hangy thing) was swollen to about four times it's normal size. Here's a picture I found that is fairly close to how it appeared. Note that my teeth are much whiter. It looked like someone had hung a translucent, water filled punching bag from the back of my mouth. About mid-afternoon, the swelling went down and everything appeared to be back to normal again. The same site where the picture originated from had this to say:This is edema of the uvula, also known as Quincke's edema. This can be caused by an allergic reaction or viral illness. On occasion, a bacterial infection will cause uvular edema. Treatment is with antihistamines and steroids if allergic or viral. Antibiotics are indicated if bacterial infection is suspected.
That makes it sound a lot worse than it really was.
Saturday, April 22, 2000 Link
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This may have made the rounds already, but it's news to me. Late Night Software has released a scripting addition that lets AppleScript parse and generate XML data. Previously, these guys created a plug-in for Adobe Illustrator that made it scriptable cross platform. Adobe, obviously knowing a good deal when it smacks them upside the head, acquired the Scriptz product from Late Night, and now includes it with their software. They also produce a sweet little scripting addition for Dreamweaver.
So, is a new version of Microsoft Office for Mac on its way, or not? Everyone's favorite bloatware manufacturer backpeddles after prematurely releasing information about the next big thing on its Mactopia site. Scariest potential new feature? "Word-like" editing using a new integrated e-mail client. This is what I have been waiting for, software that makes it more difficult to send e-mail by encrusting a basic text editing environment with crap like grammatical syntax auto-correction and animated "would you like help composing a message to Bob?" wizards. How much more can they add to an integrated software package before it becomes the executable equivalent to Amazon's tabbed navigation-fest?
Thursday, April 20, 2000 Link
Jakob Nielsen gets another 1,700 words of fame on adobe.com under the somewhat oxymoronic subhead "Web curmudgeon, voice of the user". Hopefully it's not just me, but I really prefer to have someone other than a "curmudgeon" representing my usability fears and online anxieties, thank you very much.
With the recent rash of revamped browsers making their debut, an article at Webmonkey entitled Bittersweet Releases offers a bit of used car lot commentary on the current trend of buffing up the browser chrome, hoping that no once notices that the engines are missing."Through this flurry of activity, though, there is one constant: Innovation is coming at the expense of solid implementation. And that ain't good."
This sounds like a couple of popular desktop operating systems we're all intimately familiar with. Not naming names of course. Ahem. Like I really need three ways to specify the appearance of my animated drop-down menus, when I can't even paste data into the Find/Change dialog box in Excel (...oops, sorry.)
In the self serving, random mention department, I noticed while parsing my referrer log (just try using that line at a party...) that my domain name of the week is "pretty frickin awesome" according to GeekLife. Gosh, I'm feeling so parsed now, I think I'm blushing.
A Million Garages is a interesting editorial commentary on Apple's recent fortunes, the potential threats bouncing up and down on their doorstep, and suggestions on how to avoid any looming disasters. After all, they did just announce a stock split and have all this extra cash to spend. One of the more curious observations..."Somehow, I don't think strategic acquisitions are the reason for all those additional shares. Although Apple has shown a deft touch in identifying opportunities, they arise sporadically at best... Apple should set aside as much as 20% of the extra to establish a multi-billion dollar Venture Capital fund. This fund should be used to support an OS neutral web"
Strategic investment in products and other opportunities through corporate funded venture firms have worked before. Just look at Adobe and its Adobe Ventures LP. They've fed cash to dozens of companies that have enhanced Adobe's core technologies and market positioning. Sounds smart to me.
Wednesday, April 19, 2000 Link
InfoNewt, my news bucket of choice covering left-for-dead digital assistants, mentioned that work has resumed on hacking together a WaveLan driver for the Newton. Hiroshi Noguchi of Driver Labo has already reverse engineered code for previously unsupported ethernet cards, and now he's taking on the same wireless hardware that's used in Apple's networkadelic AirPort. Technically, if this thing works, I'll be able to serve web pages off my Newton wirelessly from anywhere in the office. How cool is that?
German übergeek and street slang is being documented by the publishers of Duden, the official, standardized laws of grammar and spelling. Normally protective and lathered in regulations, it appears that the German populous is now encouraged to add to the lexicon.
Tuesday, April 18, 2000 Link
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I had no idea that Charles Babbage designed a computer printer to work alongside his Difference Engine. Pushing my astonishment aside for one moment, apparently he did design one, and a bunch of historical tech wonks at the Science Museum in London built it from the original blue prints over a period of nine years. Incredible. But wait there's more. The same team previously built a fully working version of the Difference Engine. As with all old technology, I guess the system works better if the peripherals match the CPU.
A gorgeous new type site typophile.com has just been launched that will please even the most persnickety fontheads. Lovingly built with a bucketload of Flash by Jared Benson, and chock full of delicious instructional goodness prepared by the one and only Jonathan Hoefler, typophile.com is aiming to be a vast resource of all things technical, æsthetic, motivational, discussable, and kernable relating to type design and type designers. Yum.
Need a TLA to go with your TLD? You're SOL.
A brand-spankin' new creativepro.com redesign and the mighty swoosh that we all know and love takes over their entire navigation header. When will this madness end? Admittedly, they have done a dandy job cleaning up the joint. Overall page layout and organization has been vastly improved. The notes regarding the new look also have this little gem:"As you're clicking through the site, you may run across broken image links or a broken link here or there. If you find these, we apologize in advance for any inconvenience they may cause, please be assured that our Web team is working diligently to fix them, and it should take us no more than a day or two to have all systems up and running."
Has the "Web team" ever heard of a link checker? Just wondering. Maybe they should read some of the articles on their own site.
Monday, April 17, 2000 Link
Computerworld reports that millions of obsolete PCs enter the waste stream each year. I am convinced that this is the real reason that the calculated market share of Windows-based PCs is so huge. I'll agree that the raw number of Windows boxes is significantly larger than that of the Macintosh installed based, but the numbers are inflated because Macs stay in use longer and are not obsoleted en masse like their inferior counterparts are. Is my bias showing yet? Case in point, the server that this very site runs on is an eight year old non-PowerPC Mac with a measly 28 MB of memory that I salvaged from my employers. I wouldn't trade it for a boxcar full of Pentiums.
Another observation. The design teams at both Amazon and The Motley Fool must be going out drinking together at the same Thunderlizard conferences. Quite frankly, their tabbed navigation bars are so eerily similar, I honestly did a double take the other day. See what I mean:
At least there's some variation in the typeface. But let's face it, when anti-aliased at 12 points and set in all caps on-screen, a condensed roman sans is a condensed roman sans.
This sobering tale of woe was passed along by a reader of the spiral logo page earlier today. How many more hours of work must we lose? How much money must be wasted on consultants. If we can save just one life, one logo... it will all be worth it.Subject: Re: more sprials
Date: 17/04/2000 07:41 PM
I was asked to design a logo for a very large internal site here. I put several together; they said they liked one. About a month later, they spent thousands of dollars to bring an outside designer in to redesign the logo. The redesign was exactly the same, but now had a swirl behind it.
Depressing? Why no, not at all. Is this a sign that the creatives aren't, or that one should put duct tape over the mouth of the customer?
If you look at the logos that were designed in the early 90s, the popular theme was a diamond. The diamond was usually split up into four equally sized quadrants, each of which had a different weight or direction of line to differentiate it from the others. I know this was popular because the company I was working for at the time, JWP, had their logo redesigned in this fashion shortly after I went to work for them in the fall of '92, and when I looked around I noticed it looked the same as everyone else's. Someday I should really find a bunch of examples of that kind of logo. At any rate, JWP went bankrupt sometime in mid '93. Coincidence?
Nicole
Diamonds, swooshes and spirals are unfortunately not the only depressing design-o-matic trends happening under our collective noses. With the help of some of the people digging my site lately, I've been collecting a whole cart load of corporate siamese twins. Just you wait and see.
Ah, there's nothing quite like a link from memepool to test my server capacity. The spiral logo critique not only gets mentioned as a source for the graphically homogenous, but receives a subtle nomination as a contributor to the current trend of "orange" design. Truthfully, I just got tired of looking at blue and purple links all the time.
Saturday, April 15, 2000 Link
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Come to think of it, everyone that uses a Mac should forget both Netscape Aggrevator and Internet Exploder, and download iCab instead. Preview version 2.0 was just released yesterday, offering even better JavaScript support, auto-configurable proxy settings, and resumable downloads.
Earlier this week, Suck stuck a jagged barb into Netscape 6 and other apps that have succumbed to interchangeable interface syndrome in Skin Cancer."Long relegated to the back seat of the software development process in favor of ever-more useless features, usability has recently been chloroformed, hog-tied and stuffed in the trunk."
The fact that the latest version of Mozilla doesn't look like any of the platforms it has been released for is disturbing. That you may end up having to use a third party skin in order to adopt a native OS look and feel makes me woozy. Apple, and to a lesser extent Microsoft, have spent a lot of time and money on creating interface widgets and standards that actually work. They're not perfect. But they're everywhere already, and they're usable.
Shim, my pet stick insect died from old age about three weeks ago. For one reason or another, I hadn't gotten around to cleaning out his jar yet, and a co-worker of mine was still in the habit of misting water into the jar every morning. Well, imagine my surprise when I noticed that there were three brand new baby stick insects walking around the jar Friday morning. Apparently Shim had laid a bunch of eggs prior to passing on, and I hadn't noticed. The eggs must have been lying in stasis, looking very much like the sand at the bottom of the jar, just waiting for the right time to hatch. By the way, stick insects are parthenogenic and do not require a partner to breed.
Thursday, April 13, 2000 Link
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A visitor to my site sent me a link to this image thinking I might enjoy it. I did. Whacked together by Mark Hurst, founder of the Creative Good site, it tries to explain the difference between the current rash of "nt" firms."I think the basic problem is that their names all end in "nt". In fact, there seem to be lots of net-oriented firms popping up with names ending in "nt". After awhile, they all seem to run together."
Remember the good old days when "i"-this and "e"-that were such fresh concepts that we all wanted to make them our own. When exactly did "nt" become a trend? I'd like to blame Microsoft for this one, but they've got enough problems to solve.
It's been around three weeks since I added new victims to the spiral logo critique and quite frankly, that's about three weeks too long. There's certainly no shortage of those crazy swirly contraptions, so I really have no excuse except for a shortage of time to play with them. Fortunately, for all you fans frothing at the mouth for more crunchy logo goodness, the wait is over. Just click, sit, and spin!
Wednesday, April 12, 2000 Link
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Well, smack me upside the head with a patent stick! Amazon gets a taste of their own medicine from Intouch. Imagine... offering music samples online... of course somebody must own that... what were we thinking?
Need a source of low bandwidth newsiness to read on your Palm, Newton, or internet cell phone watch? PlinkIt offers a lengthy list of PDA friendly news, technology, weather, sports, and financial pages. Some are formatted specifically for AvantGo users, but most are plain jane html just like Mother used to code.
Digital Papercut is an online clearing house and exhibition of potentially edgy, obviously low-maintenance, and occasionally high-voltage artwork, cinemania, prose, and other bits of delectable digital content. Operated by a self professed "community of weirdos" who seem to be having fun while it lasts, they are looking for people to contribute their own projects to the mix.
Is this the start of a truly tax-free internet? It sounds a bit too good to be true. Even though House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been quoted as saying, "taxes are an impediment to economic growth. Instead of retarding growth, we must encourage it", what government do you know of actively discourages taxation. None that I know of. Speaking of incongruous statements, another story covering this subject, attributes pro-tax senatorial wonk, Ernest Hollings with the statement that the Internet is not a "sick chicken". Well, there you go!
Tuesday, April 11, 2000 Link
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The new eBay Canada site has just opened up and of course, they've made it way too easy for me to spend more money on piles of crap. Ah, but what fine crap it is. Now, I can finally stop searching for that elusive Huckleberry Hound Smoking Traveler's Pet, and get it shipped fresh from bonny Halifax. No international shipping costs, no customs brokerage charges, no worries.
Monday, April 10, 2000 Link
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Gasp! The happiest place on earth has broken down and is now allowing male employees to sport mustaches. What's next? Unshaved legs? Pimples? Facial scar tissue? Visible panty lines?
Canned eBay searches for your shopping pleasure.
Regardless of whether Metastream ever amounts to anything beyond another overly complex technology for accessing simple information, the death of Metacreations has been all but confirmed. Corel has bought the creative heart and soul of Metacreations or MetaTools or HSC or Fractal or whatever alias you wish to remember the company by. Aside from a couple sideline savior moves by Adobe for Canoma and Carrara, all I can envision in the future for once proud tools like Vector Effects, KPT, Bryce, and Painter is a painful second-banana existence in the shadow of the free clip art bundling hero, CorelDraw!
Alright, enough about me and more relating to Zeldman. The Web Standards Project issued a press release today lambasting Microsoft for dropping support for key W3C standards in Internet Exploer 5.5 for Windows, while finally getting reasonable support for the same standards wedged into the just released IE 5.0 for Mac. It's time to tell Microsoft to either piss or get off the pot!
Once every seven days, like well-lubricated clockwork, I add an entry to my available domain name of the week page. Just itchin' to go IPO, but having trouble latching onto a suitable dot com moniker to your liking? How about a dose of toastedkitten?
I'm starting to feel the pressure after yet another mention of this site by Jeffrey Zeldman, this time in his Second Site column for the Photo District News. Why he seems to single out my design æsthetic as being worthy of mention is quite frankly, a bit beyond me. It's just common sense functionality and legibility winning out over browser choking code. Don't get me wrong, I have enormous respect for the eponymous Mr. Zeldman, and I appreciate his work and his viewpoints. In fact, my approach to design has changed shape in recent months directly because of things he has written or pointed out. And, damn, he seemed to be everywhere these days... he's sort of the web design equivalent of overclocking your motherboard.
I got some fan mail regarding the Spiral Logo Critique the other day. It's feedback like this that really solidifies things for me. It's probably time to start adding the backlog of logos to the page. Where does all the time go?Subject: logo heaven
Date: 05/04/2000 02:54 AM
From: Henrik Lund, henrik_lund@e-i.dk
please please add more - i really enjoyed your site - as a logo design [sic] myself it's so nice to see this and your ratings and stuff - i just love it! - so add more logos - i wish i could give you a swirly logo - but i newer used one - but i will - (just to see if i can get away with it!)
This week is looking good for an update. Stay tuned to the critique.
Saturday, April 08, 2000 Link
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I host a quite few other sites on this server, and one of my friends keeps accidentally overwriting my home page. I noticed that something was amiss again this morning, because he had put up a temporary page in its place. It's my own fault really, since I gave his ftp account basically the same privileges as my main account and his ftp client keep setting the default directory to my root. Oh well, something else to fix on Monday.
My wife's sister is getting married today. On top of hosting the rehearsal dinner at our house last night and reading at the ceremony today, I'm also fighting a nasty nasal passage clogging head cold. Updates may be sporadic this weekend, but then, we all should be outside enjoying the spring air instead of absorbing the RF radiation from our monitors. Right?
Friday, April 07, 2000 Link
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Mmmm, donuts... The Tim Horton's web site lists the following nutritional information regarding their baked goods.Since December 1997, all Tim Hortons products have been completely free of lard and pork by-products. Prior to that, there were only minimal traces of animal fat in some products, however all of these traces were removed at that time. Our mixes are acceptable to the special dietary requirements of most religious groups. All of the formulations of donuts, muffins, tea biscuits and cakes use only vegetable mono- and diglycerides. All donut glazes are completely vegetable based.
I'm not entirely sure why, but I found this level of corporate disclosure both refreshing and mildly disturbing. And I always thought that donut glazes were sugar based. Silly me.
Egads! Post-It Notes turn twenty years old this week. Imagine what the computer revolution would have been like if we only had scotch tape for fastening reminders to our monitors. The entire workplace æsthetic would be different. Great slabs of foolscape draped over the screen. I know I haven't seen the brightness and contrast controls on my multi-sync for years.
Thursday, April 06, 2000 Link
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You know, Macromedia just gets it don't they? Now, if they could just make the interfaces between their various apps more consistant like Adobe seems to be able to do, and then actually decide on one (or even two) standard ways of using pop-up menus within dialog boxes and floating palettes, I might even use them.
The best and the worst thing about Netscape 6.0 or Mozilla M14 or whatever it happens to be called when you download it, is the skins. Because the skins (or chrome as it's referred to by Netscape) are comprised of a billion tiny gif images, the entire package takes up way too much drive space compared to an app that uses standard OS defined widgets. On the positive side, having externally definable user interface elements means that the look and feel is infinitely customizable. Case in point: Alphanumerica has designed three skins for Netscape 6.0, of which one called Sullivan is extremely sweet and (gasp!) usable.
And like all good open source projects, Darwin has a to do list. Support for older Macs you say? My Quadra 950 is just shimmying with anticipation.
Apple just released Darwin 1.0, the open source version of the core operating system found in Mac OS X. It's all ready to tinker with, but you'll need to add a few things yourself, like maybe an interface. Or some sort of graphics architecture, perhaps a couple of usable drivers, and probably an API. Never mind that it will actually compile to Intel hardware. At least you can plug in a free Darwin Streaming Server.
Wednesday, April 05, 2000 Link
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I found this incredibly beautiful, yet utterly useless piece of freeware called Gravité. It makes objects dragged in the Mac OS Finder react realistically to gravity, air resistance, and mouse friction. If you have a Mac, you really should install this and play with it. It is a simple joy to behold.
After tinkering around with Manila and a crazy-assed FileMaker database thing that a friend suggested, I took the plunge into bloggerland. Even though I prefer to have all things server-side (my server-side that is), Blogger is a pretty cool implementation of remote control publishing.
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