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JHymn is a lifesaver

That's all i'm gonna say. I picked up an open-box 1GIG shuffle at Best Buy the other day, so i had to install iTunes 4.7.1, and got burned. Luckily, JHymn came to the rescue and made everything hunky dory again. what a great piece of software.

apple to become MVNO?

this is an interesting rumor: that Apple wants to become a mobile carrier. well, it's not really that surprising and all the apple fanatics would welcome it, but is that enough to base a business unit on?

No doubt they'd produce some great phones, but to be honest there's a lot of device manufacturers trying really hard to make combo phone-music players and having a hard time reaching a decent price point - we're still a standard deviation away from it becoming a reality.

why *not* choose an iPod?

as i see more and more ads for the Creative Labs ZEN, as well as other portable music players these days, i can't help but think...why choose anything but an iPod?

file level access is one reason, but price is the big other reason. $50 makes a big difference to many people...

this article in the ny times breaks it down: ny times

Maya personal now available for free

Alias has now made a version of Maya Personal Learning Edition available for free on both the Mac and PC.

For those learning the J2ME Java 3D APIs for Mobile Phones - you generally need 3D modelling software to create any decent models for use in your games or otherwise, and Maya is usually the recommended choice.

I've been meaning to start tinkering myself, so perhaps now is the time.

web2.0 or mac world?

supposedly Apple Macintosh makes up 2% of the total PCs in use... as i look around here at in the main conference room, i would say about 75% of the participants here are using Mac Powerbook G4s, mostly of the 15" variety, although there are quite a few footlongs. i'm sitting here in between Catarina Fake of flickr and Jeremy Zawodny of yahoo, both of whom are using their macs for wildly different purposes, i am sure. i miss my mac, which i had to leave behind at home.

my point is, i think that 2% figure is very misleading; in the web and web development community, apple has at least 50% of the market. at least

iSync 1.5 still doesn't support nokia 7610

rumors were it was supposed to. bummer. sometimes being an early adpoter sucks.

konfabulator and apple

i'm not sure what to make of the whole mess of konfabulator, a really cool applet environment for OS X with a great open developer API, and apple themselves, who seem to have announced this exact idea in the next version of OSX, codenamed Tiger.

we've all seen this done before by both microsoft and apple, putting small independent developers (as well as big ones like netscape) out of business by putting the same identical features into the OS. when the features become free, consumers no longer lay down the $30 for the pay app, and pretty soon the independent developers spend a ton of time on the support tail of software with no future revenue, and thus either wither or move on to the next idea.

on one hand, if confabulator thought they really had something, they should have protected their IP in some manner. but patents are expensive and time consuming, and copyright doesn't always make sense for software. certainly, their API should have been copyrighted (and maybe still can be), as well as their example code and such - but even if they did patent konfabulator, are two independent developers going to have the money and time to sue apple? probably not. also, i never heard of konfabulator until today - i bet they had more downloads today than any other day.

on the other hand, apple doing this is just plain wrong, and crossing the line...but it's their decision, and if it causes ill will and prevents future developers from developing something on their platform, well, i'm sure they know that. (here's what russ thinks. )

so konfabulator's public stance takes the high road... they have a great API, more developer support beyond any other product i've seen, and just a better implementation than what it looks like apple will release - however, whether that's a $25 difference is another story. sounds like they have 9 months to innovate beyond what apple can do or figure out another way that makes people have to have confabulator over the apple dashboard.

it's a fine line. the same will happen for the slews of RSS/Atom readers out there. apple has already announced rss/atom support in safari, and surley longhorn/outlook will also have this feature as well. client developers will need to innovate or provide features that tie their users in. anil dash said the other day that an RSS reader has become the new "hello world" and he's right...it's that easy to parse XML in any modern computer language...but just because some independent developers have some great RSS tools, should the OS companies stay away from this? no way. the OS companies compete against each other. perhaps apple is putting this feature in to Tiger as a response to a feature that will be in longhorn (of which i have no idea).

always remember - make hay while the sun shines, build a better mousetrap, and don't get caught in a land war in asia...and of course, "never go in against a Sicilian, when *death* is on the line."

more readers using the feed:// scheme

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on the mac, adding an RSS or Atom feed is becoming easier and easier as the readers are all starting to support the feed:// URL scheme verus a specialized content type.

this allows you to just click on a feed link and have it add automatically to your registered reader. netnewswire also does this.

my first week of using microsoft office 2004 for mac

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I’ve been using Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac all week... I used to use Entourage exclusively for mail, contacts, PIM, etc – but then changed over to using all the apple tools such as mail, iCal, Address Book, etc simply because Entourage didn’t quite work for me with the multitude of email accounts I had, and tracking my time just wasn’t effective in it.

After using Entourage 2004 for a week now, I’ve once again bounced back to the redmond way of thinking on this stuff. All of Office OS X is generally better but the biggest feature that I think is somewhat revolutionary is the “Project Center” in Entourage which makes it really easy to track everything you are doing on a project by project basis. You can associate all files, notes, email traffic, tasks, and contacts with a project so you can very easily track what you are going to do, and the big one for me is, what I did for whom. You can set it up so email from contacts associated with a project automatically get filed with that project, which again makes it really easy to see an audit trail of everything associated with a certain project. And they did a good job of handling many to many relationships as well which reflects how most of us really work.

back in business with JBuilder and OS X

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actually, i have mixed feelings about this, but last week, while i was sleeping, my powerbook downloaded a new version of java which upgraded from 1.4.1 to 1.4.2. in installed it blindly, having known in the past, this seemed to cause many problems with various Java based apps, particulary JBuilder. Borland gave up supporting JBuilder with version 7, and they are now on 10 (X). I had managed to cobble together some scripts to run the linux version of JBuilder 9, and had a feeling upgrading might cause problems, and indeed it did. after the install, i read the release notes at

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/ReleaseNotes/Java/Java142RN/OutstandingIssues/chapter_4_section_2.html which if you don't feel like clicking, say to :


Radar #3522195

There is no known workaround other than upgrading to JBuilder X. You might also want to contact Borland technical support.


okay down the path of cobbling together scripts for the linux version of JBuilder X....but wait, i notice on the borland site OS X is now supported! okay, well i've somehow skated by without really buying a borland product for years as i migrated from company to company (meaning someone else bought it) and i remebered when i was in high school learning to program and (who i thought was) Phillipe Khan himself sent me a $1000 version of Borland C 1.0 just because i said i was a poor kid and i asked...whew, run on sentence...so long story short, i decided it was time to pay them back.

one problem, you couldn't actually buy the version for OS X that was listed on the product data sheet. so i emailed support....and they actually got back to me:

You will need to purchase JBuilder X Developer and fax proof of purchase of that product to customer service at 831-431-4361 and request the JBuilder for Mac CD.

steve

so i bought, i faxed. and surprisingly, someone from borland called me immediately confirmed my address and two days later i received the installer for JBuilder X.

I've been using it for a day now, and it's great. It's good to be back in business with a great IDE on my mac, and great that borland has started to support OS X again. It seems to have great CVS support built in, and is really the most productive IDE out there, imho.

I haven't tried any mobile dev on it yet, but i was able to install both the SUN WTK and the Nokia Developers kit as addional JDKs...you can then choose a JDK to compile against just by selecting a radio button in your project. Perverification might be a problem, but i'll report back if i can figure that out.