PDAs Are Dead; Long Live PDAs04/12/2004 09:59 AM JOEL JOHNSON -- So PDA sales are falling, while smartphone shipments
are up. According to some, like The Dallas Morning News' Doug Bedell,
this means that PDAs are dying. To others, like Brighthand's Ed Hardy
(looking resplendant in dark turtleneck and matching beard), it means
that PDAs, overall, are just...
"From the shore, they look like tiny dots slowly making
their way out past the breakers. They're the software vendors
positioning themselves to catch the Enterprise RSS wave. My, that's a
lot of tiny dots...." [MoonWatcher]
RSS was big in 2004, but next year is going
to be something else. It's killing me that I can't say more, but I
know of two major library vendors that will make big announcements
about RSS in 2005. It's going to be a fun year!
IDG's InfoWorld Names StealthWatch by Lancope - 2005 Technology of the Year for Best Network IDS - StealthWatch Recognized Among Top Technologies Impacting IT in 2005
2005: The year ahead12/30/2004 07:47 PM 2004 closed with a veritable blizzard of mergers and a downpour of
desktop search offerings -- events and products that may well dominate
IT managers? thoughts well into the new year.
Happy New Year 2005
Happy New Year 200501/01/2005 08:24 AM Let me take this opportunity to wish all my readers, viewers and
subscribers a very Happy and Prosperous New Year 2005!
There will be no postings today January 1, 2005
.....
Wow. Dude. 2005. That's fucked up right here. Two thousand and five
years into the Common Era. Which is like only a hundred generations or
something. One hundred tiny links in the enormous chain that includes
my mum, my gran, some weird hairy ape-like ancestors and a few large
numbers of protozoa (among others). At the moment of course it's 2005
in Europe and it's 2004 in America, which means that for the next few
hours we Europeans get to enjoy our flying cars and jetpacks and stuff
before the Americans collapse the wave-function and leave us with
Desperate Housewives and Pot Noodle. It's 3.15am. It's 3.15am and it's
the first day of a brand new year. I'm bored. Are we there
yet?
CES 2005 Kicks Off A New Year Filled With High Tech (TechWeb)
CES 2005 Kicks Off A New Year Filled With High Tech (TechWeb)01/01/2005 06:32 AM TechWeb - The annual convention, held in Las Vegas Jan. 6-9, will
showcase new gaming and telematics products, mobile and wireless
technologies, home networking, innovative electronics, and more.
2005 New Year Driver Pack Official Released (for Live, Audigy 1/2/ZS)
E-filers Abound: Online Tax Filing Reaches Record Year in 2005
E-filers Abound: Online Tax Filing Reaches Record Year in 200503/22/2005 04:54 PM The number of tax filers using IRS e-file is up by 2.1 million from
last year. Growing awareness of e-file benefits, as well as improved
tax preparation services, are related to the increase. [PRWEB Mar 22,
2005]
BE Conference 2005 Registration Now Open; Go to www.be.org to Register for Once-a-Year Learning Opportunity
Baxa Corporation’s Brian Baldwin Selected as Finalist for Ernst & Young 2005 Entrepreneur of The Year® Awards
Baxa Corporation’s Brian Baldwin Selected as Finalist for Ernst & Young 2005 Entrepreneur of The Year® Awards06/17/2005 06:19 PM Brian Baldwin, founder and Vice Chairman of Baxa Corporation, has been
selected as a finalist for the Ernst & Young 2005 Entrepreneur of the
Year® Awards. Nominated this year for the first time, Baldwin is one
of 24 finalists in the Rocky Mountain Region selected from nearly 100
nominations by a panel of independent judges consisting of area
leaders from business, academic and civic organizations. [PRWEB Jun
16, 2005]
What's next for PDAs and smartphones
What's next for PDAs and smartphones02/10/2004 02:41 AM Brighthand overview of fourteen new PDAs and smartphones that are due
out (or rumored to be due out) in the next couple of months. Read...
PDAs For The Outdoors
PDAs For The Outdoors07/06/2004 01:56 AM Geeks are no longer bound to just being indoors all of the time.
Thanks to new PDA technology, geeks can get connected with each other
as well as nature. New PDAs, from one that will allow you to receive
up to the minute information for orchestra goers, to wireless nature
tours, today’s portable technology is nothing short of amazing.
Why more PDAs are coming with keyboards12/06/2003 12:30 AM Article in Australian IT about how integrated thumb keyboards are
starting to show up in more and more PDAs. Curiously, the article
doesn't actually mention a single PDA that comes with a keyboard. Read
[Via SmartMobs]...
Aren't Cellphones Annoying? And What's Up With Those PDAs?
There was a time where I thought my career was going
to be in that sparkling sugarplum factory known as "computers," but
reading columns like this one by Robert J. Samuelson has convinced me
that my career in "journalism" is much more suited to my desire to
string lots of curmudgeonly words together and get paid for it. This
week's insightful column? "A Cell Phone? Never for Me." You fight that
power, Samuelson. (I especially like the part where he notes that he
has also "resisted ATM cards, laptops, and digital cameras." This is
the part where Zombie Thoreau puts down his cell phone and slaps the
wax out of him.)
So that's journalism, I guess. I can't wait until I'm old and can
write columns for Newsweek like, "What's Up With Mustard?" and "Holo
Porn? It's 2D for Me."
Do people really use their PDAs? Part I11/30/2002 04:36 AM A recent Ask Slashdot pondered if people really use their PDAs: I work
in a high-tech industry and I see...
$0 HipTops, non-$199 PDAs, and Storage02/19/2003 02:58 PM HipTops are free with rebates, again, and wannabe HipTop developers
can look forward to the Danger SDK arriving any day...
Sharp's 3D cellphones and PDAs
Sharp's 3D cellphones and PDAs01/26/2004 12:41 PM Sharp's 3D laptops have been out for a few months, but what we hadn't
been aware of is that they've also got cellphones and... Grok Description matches for PDAs in the year 2005 GrokA matches for PDAs in the year 2005
Web-ready cellphones, PDAs are next frontier for hackers, virus writers
What is Frontier?06/27/2004 04:46 AM Bouche la be! 27 Septembre 2001 6:20 - c'est aujourd'hui. Votre vote:
ah bon .. Userland fraternity .. What is Frontier? .. FrontierFrontier
.. Frontiers .. software .. Frontier
CSS3 - The new Frontier05/14/2004 07:53 AM Web Development stands on the edge of mostly unexplored territory
— the mysterious realm of CSS3. How will CSS3 radically change
the way we create websites? More importantly, what bits of CSS3 are
already supported? This article will answer these questions.
Open Frontier
Open Frontier05/17/2004 08:44 AM Dave Winer: At some point in the next few months, there will be an
open
source release of the Frontier kernel. Does anybody remember Domino Go
WebServer? Anybody? Bueller? The thought process that Dave
describes exactly mirrors the thought process that IBM went through a
few years back when it decided to participate in Apache.
The Frontier of Oil Refining
The Frontier of Oil Refining04/04/2005 07:10 PM Frontier Oil is profiting handsomely from being able to process heavy
crude oil. But what's the earnings potential?
It's impossible to overstate the importance of this morning's
privately funded
space flight by Mike Melvill, who piloted SpaceShipOne into a
suborbital flight 100 kilometers high. Neil Armstrong took a giant
step in 1969, but this was just as important.
I have huge respect for NASA, the U.S. space agency. But NASA needs the help of private
explorers and industry, and of people like Paul Allen, the Microsoft co-founded
who funded this mission. We need NASA for the giant endeavors, but we
need privately funded space flight for everything else.
Congratulations to all.
Frontier Dreams
Frontier Dreams05/21/2004 12:50 PM In the back of my mind I’ve been thinking about the open-s
ourcing of the Frontier kernel, and like some other folks
it’s made me dream of software that’s close in spirit to
the early versions of Frontier, before it became the basis for a
content management system.
For those who don’t know, Frontier began life as a scripting
system for Macintosh. But not just another language—it included
an object database and a relatively rich (for the time) library of
verbs. You wrote code in an outliner, which I still think is a
wonderful way to write code.
You used it do many of the same things people use Perl and Python (and
so on) for today, only it was on Macintosh System 7. Instead of using
pipes and Unix-y things for inter-application communication, it used
Apple events. (Like AppleScript.) It was very common to use Frontier
to do tasks that required scripting one or more other applications.
For instance, your script might grab data from a Filemaker database,
format it as text in Frontier, then create a new email message in
Eudora and send it. With Frontier’s scheduler, its
cron-equivalent, you could make this happen once an hour or whatever.
And you might archive the data in its object database and create
weekly reports based on that data.
That’s just a for-instance, of course. The gist of it was that
it made it possible to do custom things that apps like Filemaker and
Eudora would never (quite rightly) have supported on their own.
Sounds like AppleScript, right? Well, yes. But Frontier brought some
things that AppleScript doesn’t have. (The browse-able object
database, the richer library of verbs, the code outliner, the
scheduler, and so on. Frontier is an entire environment on its own,
though an open one, aware of the rest of the system.)
My dream app
First thing—I don’t have plans to work on Frontier.
I’d love to use the results of someone else’s work,
though! As much fun as it would be for me to work on it (partly
because the kernel is an old friend, but more so because I know a lot
of Frontier users who are cool cats) it just isn’t on my path.
However, I’d be happy to make sure my software works well with
people who want to script it with Frontier.
Anyway... my dream app goes back to that earlier vision of Frontier.
To bring it up-to-date, there are a few things I’d love to
see:
Python
Whitespace-aware Python just begs to be written in an outliner.
The language is similar in style to UserTalk (Frontier’s
scripting language), but, key fact, it’s
object-oriented.
The object-oriented thing is a big deal: I’ve gotten so I
won’t even consider writing in a procedural language for
anything but the smallest of tasks. I want objects.
And Python is just plain cool.
I wouldn’t advocate dropping UserTalk, I’d argue for
making Python a first-class peer of UserTalk. There are some
challenges to consider, though. Frontier internally is receptive to
other languages. (Note that you can write scripts in any OSA language,
including AppleScript). But you’d have to make it so Python
could access the object database (to store and retrieve data and to
call other scripts) and you’d want a way to freeze-dry Python
objects in the database.
Cocoa front-end
Okay, obviously I don’t care about classic Mac OS or Windows. I
care about OS X.
When Frontier was written, there were no system-supplied user
interface controls for tables, outlines, and toolbars. And all
applications polled for events (via WaitNextEvent, if I
remember correctly).
The first obvious thing to do is replace a bunch of the user interface
code with .nib files and standard Cocoa widgets. However, I think
I’d retain the existing outliner for writing scripts. (Cocoa and
Carbon can co-exist: it’s not a problem.) But all toolbars, the
object-database browser, text-editing views, and so on would use Cocoa
user interface.
In theory, you’d end up with less code, better performance, and
a modern OS X UI.
Bonus points: custom windows
Sometimes you want to create a mini-application, a custom dialog or
window backed by a script. Frontier has a long history (at least on
classic Mac OS) of supporting this: you could run dialogs from
resources, you could run MacBird cards.
In the year 2004, the thing to do would be to run dialogs and windows
from .nib files. You’d lay out your user interface using
Interface Builder, then run it in Frontier.
How would you handle wiring up actions and outlets to scripts in
Interface Builder? Glad you asked. You probably wouldn’t. One
way to handle this is to give each item a unique tag in IB. Then your
script might have a handler like on itemDidSendAction (itemRef,
actionRef). This would be called when a checkbox was clicked, a
button pressed, whatever. Your script would, obviously, have to branch
on which item sent the action and what the action was. Not quite as
slick as wiring up actions, but it would work.
The other side of the coin is outlets. That’s where tags come
in. To get a reference to an item, you might write something like
itemRef = cocoaWindow.itemWithTag (tag, windowRef). Then
you could do things like set the value of a text field like so:
cocoaWindow.setStringValueForItem (itemRef,
someString).
Double bonus points
Get PyObjC in the mix of
all this, and now you’re talking about something
extraordinary.
Anyway...
It’s possible that there will be an exciting burst of creativity
once the kernel is made open-source. I think that’s totally
cool, it it comes to be. For my part, I’d be happy to answer any
questions I can for people who work on the code, since I know a little
about it.
It’s entirely possible that the things I’d like to see are
not the things most people would like to see, and that’s fine.
(But I can dream, right?)
P.S. A glimpse into the kernel: The first thing you’ll discover
is that, before Frontier was Frontier, its name was Cancoon.
The next search frontier
The next search frontier06/14/2004 04:35 PM Source: cnnmoney - Investors' focus right now is mainly on the Web
search market and the battles breaking out between Ask Jeeves, Google,
Microsoft, Yahoo, and others. But later this year, you'll see interest
shift to the emerging market for...
IT's Final Frontier
IT's Final Frontier03/06/2004 02:02 AM FEATURE: Private IT firms -- especially networking, security and
chipmakers -- must play a critical role in NASA's moon and Mars
missions, experts say. What's more, NASA has to let them.
Frontier and Forking
Frontier and Forking05/22/2004 03:34 PM It’s become obvious to me (and, I think, to folks like Jim Roepcke)
that Frontier has at least two main areas of interest, reflecting its
dual heritage.
On one hand, there are fogeys like me who would love a desktop
scripting system that totally embraces OS X. We look back at Frontier
of ten years ago and say, hey, we want that, only better and
updated for 2004.
On the other hand, there are folks using Radio UserLand and running
Manila servers that would like improvements to the server and content
management features.
(There may be other areas of interest, but these are the ones
I’ve identified so far.)
The fogeys (generally speaking) care about an updated user interface,
support for more languages, support for scripting more applications
(system.verbs.apps.iTunes?), and so on. The idea is a desktop tool
that makes it easier to get more work done.
But folks using Radio and Manila care about scalability, running as a
daemon, a Linux port, separating the UI from the server, and so on.
Those are all valid and important issues.
As a fogey, I don’t even care that it runs on Windows. But if
you’re running a Manila server on Win2K, you very much care,
quite rightly, that it runs on Windows. As a fogey, I care more about
syntax coloring in the script editor than I care about extending the
upper limit of database file size. But if you run a Manila server your
priorities are the reverse.
That’s just to say that this could potentially be a serious
challenge to whoever manages the kernel. There could be pressure to
fork it, more so than most other applications, because of the two
strongly different directions it could go in.
What approach might the maintainers take?
One possibility is something like Mozilla-like. With Mozilla, there is
a base on which different applications are created. Some of those
applications (Firefox) are cross-platform, and others (Camino) are
not.
This makes sense to me, because it allows the deep under-the-hood
parts (the script evaluator, the object database, etc.) to be shared
between these hypothetical different versions of the app.
What I would not like to see happen is a complete fork, where
folks with different visions take it in different directions without
coordination or sharing.
There are so many things I don’t know. Will there be a community
of people that want to work on the app? How many fogeys are there,
really? (Maybe we’re grossly outnumbered.) What license will be
used? Will there be any kind of formal or informal organization
charged with maintaining the kernel? If so, what will be their
priorities, and how open will they be to different visions?
As I’ve repeated before, I don’t plan to work on the
kernel, fun as it would be, since I’m so busy with my own
software—but I like thinking and writing about this story, since
it could be the birth of a really great open source project, and it
has some interesting and unique dimensions. I’m fascinated by
it.
Virgin soars towards new frontier12/27/2004 07:37 PM SpaceShipOne pioneer Burt Rutan gives a glimpse of what fare-paying
passengers can expect when they take their ride into space.
Better Communication Is NASA's Next Frontier04/14/2004 12:52 AM NASA will move quickly to improve communications in the agency after
the release of a survey showing employees are still apprehensive about
speaking up on safety questions.
Banking: The Next Microsoft Frontier
Banking: The Next Microsoft Frontier11/14/2003 11:31 AM It's been assumed that Microsoft's devotion to "wireless industry
standards" makes its White Paper on Mobile Web Services a good thing.
I'll bet the Trojans felt the same warm, comfortable glow about the
Greeks and their Trojan Standard horse.
NEC to use USB On-The-Go in its cellphones01/22/2004 02:10 AM NEC says they're going to start incorporating USB On-The-Go into their
3G cellphones. The big deal about USB On-The-Go, or USB OTG, is that
it...
PDAs in the year 2005
The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: smartphone shipments ids web-ready cellphones, pdas are next frontier for hackers
