22 Jun, 2005
Rabble is reporting in his blog that ODEO has launched! I’ve been eagerly anticipating ODEO since I first heard about them in the beginning of this year. Unfortunately, my invite hasn’t arrived yet so I can’t say much more about them, but thankfully Phillip Torrone has posted an excellent review with screenshots on the MAKE: Blog. Go check it out.
Update 2005-6-24: Either the folks at Odeo saw my blog post, were reading my mind or finally got to me in the list of folks who registered awhile ago because I got my invite yesterday!
After playing around with Odeo for a day-and-a-half now I have to say that the website experience is fantastic (go Rails!) and the ODEO Syncr for the Mac works well — though I’m slightly annoyed since my iTunes consolidates my library automatically and ODEO leaves copies in ~/Library/Application Support/Odeo/Downloads. Unfortunately (or fortunately for you), ODEO’s Podcast Creation tool doesn’t seem to be up yet. I haven’t seriously investigated any Podcast creation tools just yet, though the tool that Adam Curry uses for the DSC sounds interesting (CastBlaster I think it’s called). Anyway, getting back to ODEO, I think it’s a great tool and serves a definite need — though we’ll have to see what happens once iTunes 4.9 comes out with its PodCasting support.
6 Jun, 2005
Wow, this is a bit of a shocker:
Apple to Use Intel Microprocessors Beginning in 2006. This rumor has been floating around the web for a while now and thus far I’ve chosen to ignore it since I, mistakenly, thought that it was false. But Steve just confirmed it at his
WWDC keynote. Personally, I’m not too happy about the switch, but if
Leander Kahney is right then this could be a good thing for Apple.
Now that I think of it, more folks with Mac OS X installed will be much better for all of us — though with Apple presenting a bigger target to the virus writers and haxors, they’ll need to continue to focus on security.
Obviously, Apple doesn’t want to see their HW revenues dry-up, so I suspect that Mac OS X86 will only run on Apple HW (it’s just that the Apple HW will have an Intel CPU inside instead of a PowerPC one). Thanks to NextStep’s support for fat binaries (the executables for multiple platforms stored in a single bundle), Mac OS X applications will have a single instance which runs on both PPC and x86, making it easier on Apple’s current customers (not sure yet how troublesome this will be for developers — Steve says that XCode will take care of it).
Overall, this could be a monumental mistake or an amazing (and risky) gamble for Apple. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Interestingly enough, Apple’s stock is only slightly down after the announcement; atleast the investors aren’t spooked by the switch.
3 May, 2005
Backpack is finally live and available to the public. I’ve already signed up for my free account. As I suspected it is quite a nice web-based PIM (personal information manager) that works quite well with email (both sending and receiving) and sends reminders to your mobile. Though as Russ has pointed out it’s not quite as useful as it could be for mobiles. Still I think that the AJAX interface is quite slick and it really shows off the power of building web-apps with Rails.
1 May, 2005
On Friday, FedEx delivered my copy of Mac OS X Tiger (the family pack since I have a few computers to upgrade). I spent most of Saturday backing up all of our photos, music and data to DVDs. It ended up being a total 5 DVD-Rs and 1 CD-R — it’s amazing the amount of stuff you accumulate in only 18 months! On Sunday morning I installed Tiger then restored our files.
So far, no issues to report of. The 15″ Powerbook neither feels slower or faster than with Panther installed.
Spotlight is quite nice, though now I’m waiting for the next revision (hopefully, as this guy says, we’ll see GPS enabled Powerbooks and automatic tagging of our files with location-aware meta-data). Dashboard is neat, though it seems to me to be mostly a gimic. Though I definitely appreciate the built-in dictionary/thesaurus. I’ve only briefly played with Automator, but it appears to be a powerful tool for scripting actions (and much easier to use than AppleScript). Unfortunately, I hate the look of the new version of Mail. And it appears a bit slower for some reason — I’m not entirely sure why, perhaps it’s just my perception because I hate the UI so much. But Quicktime 7 is sweet, the new H.264 codec is amazing — the quality, the smart bandwidth usage, what else can I say other than it’s great! I haven’t used the new features of iChat yet (though one reason is that I don’t have a G5 to host video conferencing even though I do have an iSight).
In particular, I was looking forward to some of the new developer tools like CoreData, CoreImage and CoreVideo. Unfortunately, due to work and home improvement tasks, I’ve not yet had a chance to check them out.
Overall, I think Tiger is an excellent OS upgrade and well worth the money. Apple is definitely leading the way here — I wish KDE/GNOME would ‘borrow’ some of the ideas from Apple instead of waiting for them to by synthesized through Microsoft first.
23 Mar, 2005
37signals have announced their latest project Backpack (which was codenamed Honey). Since it hasn’t launched yet, details are thin. But I believe that this will fit nicely in between their current offerings: the free Ta-da List and their popular Basecamp project management tool.
DHH states that
Backpack helps you bring life’s loose ends together
DHH also mentions in that same post that Backpack was the reason for adding the ability to receive (as well as send) email to the ActionMailer portion of Rails.
So I’m guessing it’s a psuedo-project management tool for the home user. Useful for tracking tasks and their associated people, actions, etc. Basically, the ultimate personal information manager (PIM) to help you gather your email, contacts, schedules, notes, documents and more in one central location. We’ll just have to wait the month-or-so until it officially launches to find out for certain.
