Legislative crud - iPhone trademark is apple’s.0
rzwitserloot posted in me, apple on January 13th, 2007

I’m back from an excellent vacation, and more about this later.

However, for now, just a quick shine on the ongoing internet armchair debates on who really owns the “iPhone” name - apple, or cisco?

It’s apple’s, and the reason is simple. Fortunately, in this case, Cisco’s clear bungling of the case should make this a slam dunk for Apple’s legal team, but it’s a nice foray into why the whole patent & trademark office isn’t working.

zd.net’s sleuting - read it for all the details.

Now how come the very obvious nature of that sticker wasn’t caught by the USPTO?

Web2.0. If anything, it’s hilarious.1
rzwitserloot posted in Uncategorized on January 13th, 2007

Funny stuff!

Selling the idea.0
rzwitserloot posted in presenting on January 14th, 2007

This brilliant bit of idea peddling analysis by Reg is one of those rare pieces that make you go…

Well…. gee. DUH! I’m an idiot for not realizing this sooner - it’s beyond logical!

I can heartily recommend it.

By the way, for those of you who follow Alper’s dutch blog his entry on negative Netherlands suggests he can really use Reg’s advice here.

Seriously cool java: F30
rzwitserloot posted in programming on January 24th, 2007

Chris Oliver and company at Sun are doing some extremely neat work with ‘F3′ - a descriptive add-on to java (it compiles to .class files) that completely revolutionizes the way you build GUIs. Without sacrificing type safety it makes writing GUIs a total snap, and, most importantly, the F3 code is extremely simple to maintain - a common problem with GUI code, as it tends to be difficult to see the structure when you’re down in the trenches wrestling the code.

His latest Cool F3 Demo on his blog is a fun showcase to check. He’s managed to hack video in there (unfortunately, for now, by way of QT4J, so you need both java AND QuickTime. Mac users can rest easy, it’ll work out of the box on any moderately recent mac) and some graphical effects.

With this, you can no longer say that java GUIs tend to look ugly. At least, this way, there’s nothing stopping you from making them work right and look good.

I’m neck-deep in web building at the moment, but if there’s a graphics-heavy desktop app you need to build, I suggest you have a good look.

The advantages of an open source core OS.0
rzwitserloot posted in apple on January 24th, 2007

Google has recently released MacFUSE, a nicely packaged up mac port of the FUSE drivers; these allow ‘user level’ (e.g. do not require being administrator to install, rebooting, and other nastiness) software to create virtual drives.

Just do give you an idea how brilliant this simple idea is, think of:

A folder which contains, dynamically, all your flickr photos. Each foto can be opened in your favourite photo editor, and when you save, the photo is automatically uploaded to flickr again. Works with any app, as the app just thinks its viewing a folder on your harddrive.

I’m already enjoying the benefits of sshfs - a way to ‘mount’ a directory on another linux, posix, or mac machine (and with some effort, a windows machine), securely, as if it’s on your own file system. If you’ve been looking for a ‘norton commander’ like SCP tool, look no further; just use sshfs and then any random file tool, like finder.

Spotlight, the live and automatic searching tool of mac os x, has a ’smart folder’ feature. You create a ’smart folder’ with a search term, and the contents of that folder represent each file that matches the term, ‘live’ - spotlight iss hooked directly into the file system, so the moment you move, delete, or change a file, all smart folders you happen to be looking at update instantly. Unfortunately, smart folders are really just files; only Finder (the mac version of explorer for you windows folk) ‘knows’ what to do with these.

The MacFUSE guys have slapped together a Spotlight plugin for MacFUSE which creates REAL folders that act just like the smart folders. these you can open in any program, not just Finder.

Clearly, this is the right way of implementing the smart folder system.

Clearly, then, MacFUSE should be integrated into Mac Os X. And having an open source core makes this possible, easier, and more honest. Apple is bouncing around between keeping the core os x open sourced (as darwin) and closing it down for fear of hackers e.g. creating mac os x for non-mac hardware.

Big companies lose.0
rzwitserloot posted in startup on January 24th, 2007

I doubt there is a better example: Nintendo is beating two of the largest companies of the world; Sony and Microsoft, simply by knowing they can’t compete within the rules of the game, so they changed the rules.

I mean, Look at this…

I don’t like game consoles and I really don’t like Mortal Kombat-style games. And yet I see that and I have an instant urge to buy that thing. If I wasn’t strapped for cash and busy with a startup, I already would have*.

*) Of course, there are a ton of shortages so I doubt I’d actually manage to find one, but that’s for another day.

Thus, the lesson is: Don’t play the game of a big company. Invent a better game and fly by the competition whilst they stand there wondering what the heck just happend. Don’t let yourself get discouraged if a big company is trying ‘big company’ tactics (underselling, throwing vast amounts of money at marketing, trying to lock in the market, etcetera).

GWT headsup - plans for 2007 Q12
rzwitserloot posted in programming on January 24th, 2007

This post on the GWT newsgroup lists All plans for 2007 Q1.

Check out #1: making java1.5 language features (foreach, generics, autoboxing and unboxing, etcetera) work in GWT! w00t!

sound in webbrowsers withOUT flash30
rzwitserloot posted in programming on January 31st, 2007

A while ago I developed a canvas-based version of bomberman. It’s a fairly dynamic game, in a browser, no flash.

Unfortunately it uses canvas which doesn’t work on IE6 (or IE7) though it works on the other 3 target browsers (Opera, firefox, and safari). Fortunately, again, google created a toolkit that fakes canvas support using an IE only thing. I haven’t looked at it yet, but it should definitely work.

Aside from that little roadblock, the other big thing that flash can do and vanilla JS+HTML (or so people think) can’t, is sound. Specifically, both sound effects, and background music.

A toolkit called SoundManager 2 is doing the rounds on delicious and company; it allows you to run and control sounds from javascript, but it works by interfacing with flash, which plays the music.

Well, I checked, and you can run sound using just JS+HTML - dynamically!

I’d like your help though: Please check what happends on your own browser. The issues to look at is, obviously: does it work at all, but also: Does sound begin playing immediatly after hitting the button for it? Obviously, to serve as a sound effect in response to hitting a button or some game event, it needs to play immediately.

All the stuff in action (view source to see how to do it, there aren’t many tricks) right here!