Oren’s Weblog

Ted points out that OSAF now has a group blog where they’re keeping track of what’s happening on Chandler and Cosmo development. This should make it easier to keep an eye on the progress as it happens. I don’t know about anybody else, but I find the clutter of Wikis to be too depressingly similar to the piles of unlooked-at paper in my office.

Dan Gilmor has a short post today in ressponse to a piece from the Mercury News about Trumba, a new web-based social calendaring service. Trumba is the brainchild of Jeremy Jaech, a UW Computer Science MS grad and one of the co-founders of Visio.

Dan’s take is that online calendaring is not yet ready for prime time, and he notes that he’s hoping that Chandler will be the product usable for real people in this space.

I commented on Dan’s post as follows:

Dan -

I’ve been getting increasing number of trackback spams lately. Some of them I don’t understand, as the web sites that are mentioned in the trackback don’t appear to actually be accessible – so what’s the point?

I’d been meaning to install Jay Allen’s wonderful MT-Blacklist since I re-installed Movable Type, and finally got around to it this morning.

Since around 7 am this morning, MT-Blacklist as blocked 63 85 spams.

What’s up with the dramatic increase in animated ads on web pages? I find it almost impossible to read any content while there are things blinking at me in my peripheral vision.

Note to self – stop reading web sites that flank content with animations.

Bye-bye – Trusted Reviews.

So long Eweek.

What? no more news.com?

hoo boy.

Terry Gray points out that Microsoft has announced that Exchange will be able to “push” email to mobile devices. While I’m sure they’ve invented some clever and entirely proprietary way of accomplishing this, Terry sez:

I sure must be missing something… all this hubbub about “push” mail, which sure sounds like what we’ve been calling “online” access mode in the IMAP context for over a dozen years.

Why use a real standard when you can invent one of your own?

So the big news is that Apple is switching to use Intel processors (from IBM) in their computers. There’s lots of speculation as to what the motivating factors are, but as Tim Bray notes: there are a few Really Big Secrets that very few people and no journalists know: one of them is how much box-builders like Apple, HP, Dell, and Sun pay chip-builders like Intel, IBM, and AMD. I bet that when whoever at Apple sat down across the table from whoever at Intel the negotiation was complicated and involved lots more than the per-chip cost.

I don’t think this switch really makes much difference for users of desktop computers, and it shouldn’t be seen as a big deal. Those of us who choose to use OS X on the desktop find that it’s a compelling user experience for a variety of reasons (I wrote about my reasons last year). As long as Apple can continue to build on that user experience and people all over the world can provide good applications for the platform, I believe that Apple will continue to be successful.

There will of course be the inevitable transition pains for application developers, particularly those who write compiled applications in languages like C++ (another reason to like scripting languages).

And, as I wrote to our local Apple rep yesterday, if switching to Intel means I can get a faster and/or lighter and/or cooler OS X notebook, I’m all for it!