Simon Brocklehurst thinks so, and I agree with him. Microsoft has a long history of promising to support other platforms and then coming up short or dropping them quickly. We used to joke at Microsoft that cross platform meant both Windows98 and WindowsNT.
What do Americans think?
Op-Art: Who Do You Think We Are? – New York Times
Nothing earth shattering here, but interesting none the less. Assuming that they used a decent mechanism to gather the data, Americans are super liberal!
Entourage hang fix
In an earlier post, I was complaining about how Entourage would just go away for 15-20 minutes at a time. I’d searched the net for info on how to stop it in vain. I’d cleared out gigabytes of messages without a noticable difference, but then looky what came across my RSS feed yesterday!
Macworld: Mac 911: Stop Entourage background churning
I just turned it on. Hopefully this will do the trick. BTW, when I turned off the “background” integrity checks, it said that it wouldn’t happen when the laptop wasn’t plugged in. Yeah, that wasn’t true for me.
Flex, WPF/e and the new war for developer hearts and minds
Scoble starts a discussion (Why do a reader only for one publication? (Adobe vs. Microsoft for developers)) and Ryan Stewart picks it up (How Adobe started winning developers)
I think we’ve got some fun coming on and we developers are going to be in the catbird seat as Adobe and Microsoft fight it out for our loyalty.
disclaimer: I worked for Microsoft for 8 years and I’ve been working for Adobe now for 3 years, but not directly on any of the technologies I’m writing about.
C# was first launched when I was at Microsoft and I was pretty skeptical because it seemed such an obvious attack on Java and at the time I wasn’t that interested in Java. Real Developers write in C++.
Then I left Microsoft for a start-up where our chief architect convinced us to write our system in Java, and I learned it, and I found it pretty powerful for some things. My development team was able to build a fairly complex system very quickly with few bugs by taking advantage of the richness of the language and supporting libraries like JUnit. It reminded me of Common Lisp. When you got used to writing in Java: if you needed some functionality, your first impulse was to look for it in the language itself instead of writing it from scratch. Most often it was there.
Then, I left that start-up for another start-up founded by a former softy like myself where we embraced .Net 1.0 ’cause we were using all other MS technologies and we were writing a grid-type app. I liked .Net and C# even more than Java because it was so integrated with the OS (as long as the OS was windows, which it was in our case).
Now, I’ve taken a Flex class and I have to say that I’m really impressed. It really does for RIA what C# and Java did for server-side programming. Also, it is nice to finally have a more programmer-oriented approach for developing SWFs with a real IDE! I think that C# was also really good for rapid application development and prototyping as well, but Flex is much obviously better. As someone who works on both Macs and Windows, I definitely dig that cross-platformness and symmetry.
WPF/e is really interesting, but I haven’t gone into depth with it. Why not? Well, at home I have macs only now, and at work I have my actual job to do (in C++, natch). After looking through the docs and stuff, I can’t really see how you’ll be able to author cross-platform stuff with it since it seems so crippled on other platforms. I have to say that the strategy seems pretty much like “protect the windows platform by making the tools for windows only and the experience crappy on other platforms while still talking up how we are cross-platform.” Kinda similar to the original .Net story.
I’m also concerned that this stuff could get dropped or have less contribution if MS ever does (or doesn’t) win out. (Blackbird, Windows Media Player for Mac, IE before FireFox, etc…)
The one good thing is that the competition will push both Microsoft and Adobe to continue to develop better tools and that makes us developers the absolute winners here.
cool soccer video
some fun with C#
The only problem I had to deal with in my quickie switch from interland to dreamhost was changing the Unit Circle store from ASP pages to something else (I haven’t decided if I’m going to do a Flex thing, a zencart thing or a PhP thing yet). The first hurdle I had to deal with was that the old store used an Microsoft Access database backend. I’ve switched 100% to macs and my old PC was dead, so I couldn’t load the mdb file on my home machines, at work we don’t have the full office license, so I couldn’t use Access on my work PC. I searched around the web and found some shareware that theoretically could convert from MDB files to other types of files, but none that I tried worked very well (if at all). What I did have on my work machine was Visual Studio. On a whim, I opened up the server tab and tried adding the access file AND IT WORKED! I could browse the tables, but there was no way in VS to export them. So I wrote up a quickie C# app, which I’m posting here. Ya know, for the kids.
Some caveats:
- I haven’t written C# professionally for a couple years.
- I haven’t added the code to actually grab the table list from the access file and enumerate those. It is left as an exercise for the reader.
- It doesn’t handle quoted values in table values explicitly (it passes them through, but any CSV importer will get confused).
- I wrote it in about 20 minutes.
- In other words, don’t judge my coding skills from this.
By the way, I had formatted the code using the C# code formatter on Manoli.net which is very cool, but it completely screwed up my blog layout due to the <pre> statements and long lines. So I put it in the separate page.
Support for sculpture gets into show, sculpture does not
This happened last year, but I hadn’t heard about it before. An artist in England submitted a sculpture for a show. The judging panel considered the support for the sculpture as a separate piece and liked it better, so that go into the show instead.
Greg Pattillo doing Inspector Gadget and Axel F
celebration of cool iTunes feature turns to fear
So, I screwed up some files in my iTunes library. No prob. I grabbed them from my backup. I just dragged the whole album of MP3s into iTunes. The files got copied in and then I removed the duplicates. I had one AAC-encoded album that I did this to. For this album, iTunes only imported the tracks I didn’t have. At first, I thought that this was really cool. iTunes knows that I already have these tracks, so it didn’t bother. Then, I thought ITUNES KNOWS I HAVE THESE TRACKS. So, is there some sort of GUID in AAC? Is that GUID registered anywhere? If I encode my tracks as AAC and give them to you, can they be traced back to me? If this was some simple filename/filesize scheme, it would have caught the MP3 duplicates as well.
fun with yahoo pipes
Yahoo Pipes is a cute and visual way to mix webservices and RSS feeds to produce something powerfully easily. Sort of a OS X Automator approach to webservices. Very fun. I’d been wanting to make a composite feed of my various blogs, and I was looking at doing it in php. Possible, but not a ton of fun. I did it in Pipes in seconds.