Weblog Without Honor or Humanity

Vista prototype. OSAF
just published a
description of the prototype of their future PIM. The interesting thing
is how good it looks given that the GUI has been written in TK. Most of the
apps I’ve seen so far that used TK didn’t look good, especially on Windows,
where the native gadgets look much different. I guess that means that talent
is more important that the tool. It’s going to be interesting to see what they’ll
achieve in wxWindows.

Are you unlimited? Finally cellular carriers are starting to understand what they need to provide in order to have customers: low price, unlimited data. That’s what Sprint just did. They offer unlimited PCS Vision i.e. unlimited data access for additional $10 per month. Availalbe with Treo. Very tempting, it almost makes it more attractive that T-Mobile’s Sidekick because you can use with any voice plan (With Sidekick you only have one plan with abysmall number of minutes and you pay through the nose for additional minutes), number of applications is enormous (none for Sidekick), it has color. Sidekick has a great web browser and a great physical design but those are the only advantages. Hail Sprint and Danger better release developer’s SDK or else they’ll be left in dust.

Open-source lesson from a stripper. Hear this:

If they’re used to getting it for free it’s going to be hard to get them to pay for it.

People writing open-source software hoping to make money off the software should seriously consider this piece of information. Learn from strippers, I say.

Ray’s vision. Ray Ozzie has posted a document that was “founding document” for Groove. Ray is the guy who created Lotus Notes and is now creating Groove. I’m fascinated by documents like this, they give a little peak into how great minds work.

Corman Lisp 2.0 shipped. As Chris Double reports, Corman Lisp 2.0 has finally been released.
listOfThingsI’mWaitingFor -= 1.

Mitch makes waves.. OSAF makes waves. There are mainstream articles written about it, it gets mentioned in weblogs (here, here, here), their mailing lists immediately attracted a lot of posts. This is a project to watch.

Mitch Kapor strikes again. Or at least is planning to strike again.
Mitch is a pioneer in the software business, he designed Lotus 1-2-3 and Lotus
Agenda. Now he has a weblog
in which he
reveals his plans for the future. In short - he’s planning to write
a PIM (Personal Information Manager). There are a couple of things that
make this project interesting despite the "we’re still thinking" status
of it. First it’s going to be open source. Now, most open source projects fail
to produce anything useful (don’t blame me, blame SourceForge) but this one
might just be different. There are few good signs. The project is driven by
Mitch Kapor. He knows how to make and ship succesful software. He did it, so
he’s not likely to delude himself into underestimating the effor required (and
a lot of people underestimate how hard making software is). He also has a lot
of experience with PIMs (the aforementioned Agenda that he designed was a PIM).
He’s also not deluding himself about making money from the project (I suspect
he’s already a wealthy man and is in a position where his personal goals are
more important that making another buck). It’s also going to be interesting
to see if they manage to write a really good application in a cross-platform
GUI library. GUI programming is hard both technically and conceptually. Windows
and MacOS ship with a good set of basic widgets but to provide what the most
polished commercial applications provide (latest products from Microsoft or
Adobe or Macromedia) requires a lot of effort. Historically cross-platform GUI
libraries didn’t provide enough for the apps to compete with fully native apps.
The conclusion: this project is worth watching.

Joel, man of his word. Joel
Spolsky advocates
writing
functional
specs
in the name of better software. Recently he wrote a
setup program for his company’s bug
tracking system. Someone challenged him to show the specs for the setup
program. And so he
did (direct
link to a spec). Excellent.

No money in blogging. Yes, I’m biased. I like to point to articles that support my opinions. Nothing wrong with that.

Things I’m waiting for -= 2. The source code to Blender has been released. MIT released first courses as part of their OpenCourseWare project. So there are 2 things less for me to wait for. But the funny thing about the list of things I’m waiting for never shrinks. When will next version of Corman Lisp be released? When will Paul Graham’s Arc be released? When will Subversion reach 1.0? When will I be able to buy dual-proc, 80 GB+ notebook? When will reasonably priced, 2 GB MMC flash memory be available? Etc. Every day the list gets longer.