First hands-on: AOL's BlueString
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AOL's new photo sharing and storage site, BlueString, borrows a lot of its technology from XDrive. That's a good thing.
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When it comes to music, the Web can be like a giant megaphone that ratchets up the decibel level of buzz to deafening proportions.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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AOL is getting a software makeover, its first since deciding to make more of its services available for free in the chase for online advertising dollars.
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A new generation of Wi-Fi-equipped digital audio players is coming from companies like AOL, Archos, iRiver and Sandisk.
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Also: AOL launches Latino portal. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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For some AOL users, passwords have just become the computing dinosaurs. America Online has partnered with RSA Security to create AOL PassCode, a premium service that secures and manages AOL ScreenNames. AOL PassCode utilizes RSA's SecurID two-factor authentication scheme where a random six-digit numeric code is generated in intervals of 60 seconds from a keychain sized device. AOL claims that this added safeguard provides a second level of account protection. The service is primarily directed toward small business and customers who pay bills and manage funds online. PassCode costs an additional $1.95 USD a month with a one-time service fee of $9.95 USD.
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America Online Inc. on Thursday launched a version of its proprietary online service that includes additional security features. AOL 9.0 Security Edition is the first version of the service
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As part of its reincarnation, America Online Inc. is creating its own software for browsing the Web and playing movies and songs. It's a question of staying relevant in an increasingly broadband world.
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OpenSong is a free software application for managing chords and lyrics sheets (lead sheets), presenting lyrics (and custom slides) using a projector, and much more! Great for worship leaders and musicians! This next release contains quite a few bug fixes, set list printing, proxy support, module loading, a new background image chooser, backgrounds folders, songs folders, multiple themes per song, key field, aka field, key line field, ccli import now imports the new song fields, configurable alert font, live scripture browsing during presentations, HTML song export, and more! Everything has been moved around and optimized. Now with multiple language support. This is a great update to 0.9.8.   You can find the latest release here:  https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=108754&package_id=117409
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Over the last week, I've been writing about the disconnect between flow and rank. Paradoxically, sites that are ranked high don't always deliver a lot of hits when they link to you. On the flipside, there are some sites that are rarely on Top 100 lists, or talked about very much, that deliver substantial flow. Two of them stand out, one a veteran site, and the other a relative newcomer. 1. Daring Fireball is a thoughtful blog written by John Gruber that focuses on the Macintosh. Since I've returned to the Mac in 2005, and have been writing more about Mac issues, I've started getting links from this site, and when I do, they usually send between 1000 and 2000 readers my way. And they're generally interesting people with useful information and ideas. I follow Gruber on Twitter and have learned that he is a Phillies fan and therefore disappointed this year. His posts are interesting there too, and irreverent, which I like of course.  2. A Digg-like memetracker, news.ycombinator.com is in the same league as TechMeme, about 1000 hits for a highly ranked piece. I don't know much about the site, I'm not a regular reader, and I don't know much about the people who visit from this site.
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AOL joins Yahoo!, Google, and Hotmail in offering free email. But isn't it too late?
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A different sort of abstraction layer project has been started up and has already seen a few releases - Forage. As mentioned on Rob Young's blog:    Recently I've been working on a search abstraction library for PHP called Forage. The idea is to bring to search what we've had for relational databases for quite a while, abstraction.    On Friday I put up a preview release with three backends; Solr, Xapian and Zend Search Lucene. At the moment it has the bare minimum of features but there will be more soon. In this post I'm going to talk a little about the motivation for the project and then walk through a short example.    He talks about the need for search abstraction (integration and resilience to change) before getting into an example of some code that grabs the data from an RSS feed, passes it in to the Xapian search engine and stores it before looking it over for thier search terms ("yahoo microsoft").   You can download the library if you'd like to try it out for yourself.
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AOL said Friday it was beginning to beta test a new version of its search product on a limited basis, making enhancements that will benefit those users who have broadband access.
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Paul Meagher has just submitted the link to his latest article over on the IBM DeveloperWorks website - Conduct Web experiments with PHP: Part 1.
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AOL has unveiled a prototype of its revived Netscape browser without half the hype that Mozilla programs like Firefox and Thunderbird have been fetching.
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AOL said Friday it was beginning to beta test a new version of its search product on a limited basis, making enhancements that will benefit those users who have broadband access. The new AOL Search will "go beyond text links."