Software Review: Synergy
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This application allows users to share one keyboard and mouse with multiple computers running at the same time, even if the computers use different operating systems. And the best part? It's free. By Lee Underwood. 1003
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TechWeb - Now with easy customization and process integration, will utility apps dominate?
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User-generated IT support I have lived through re-orgs, outsourcing and off-the-shelf applications being shoehorned into niche markets by over-zealous management. The latest trend in software, though, is for user-generated mashups.â¦
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Works 8 adds utilities to productivity suite that delivers all the basics.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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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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By Mark Kellner, The Washington Times  Jan. 30--GRAPHICS SOFTWARE 'SMART' AND EASY: Every once in a while a  software program comes along that really grabs me.
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In an article published today for CIO Magazine, Jet Propulsion Laboratory software engineer D. J. Byrne writes that the cultural synergies between open source software developers and space technology engineers have made it possible for his team to execute complex software projects without the hassle of all that government oversight and procurement paperwork.
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aTunes is a powerful, full-featured, cross-platform player and manager, with audio cd rip front-end. Currently supported formats are mp3, ogg, wav, wma, flac, mp4, ape, mpc, mac, radio streaming and podcasts.   The aTunes, Jajuk and Jukes audio player projects are pleased to  announce the start of close collaboration on shared ressources. The  three projects aim at providing full-featured cross-platform jukeboxes  for advanced users. As a first result, the Jukebox Power Pack has been  released. It contains the three applications bundled together. Jukebox  Power Pack is the fruit of the first collaboration efforts. Included  with the package is the excellent album Kogani from Suerte. It  symbolizes the spirit with which the software is created, namely  collaboration in an open and creative environment. The Jukebox Power  Pack is able to run on all Java 6-ready platforms, including Microsoft  Windows, Linux and Sun Solaris. Jukebox Power Pack can be downloaded at   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=161929&package_id=242026
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The trials and tribulations of application dependency in a virtualized, hosted world.
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Company releases two new products: VMware Fusion for Mac lets Windows applications run on the Mac OS; free VMware Player 2 runs virtual appliances on Windows or Linux.
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Open source is changing the game by making software free.  About time.
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The eagerly-awaited Ubuntu Studio has been released, adding another entry into the expanding list of multimedia-optimized Linux distributions. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but interested readers can peruse some installation screenshots or check out the latest news and information on the Ubuntu Studio Wiki. I plan to review the distro in a future column, along with an update on the latest version of the venerable PlanetCCRMA, but in this entry I'm focused on another very exciting new release. Ardour 2.0 is now available for download. This version is a significant improvement over the 0.99 series (1.0 was never released), with many new features and enhancements to performance and stability. The following article profiles the new Ardour as I employed it for three projects, all involving the program in the processes of composition and arranging as well as the more typical tasks of recording and editing. I've described each project in some detail, and each description includes a link to the final audio output.
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PÃ¡draic Brady continues his series looking at the creation of complex views in the Zend Framework with part six today all about gathering together the thoughts and ideas from the previous articles into a cohesive whole.   Part 6 now takes our previous fragments of theory and attempts to stitch them together into a cohesive whole - a description of a possible end solution. Yes, I know code talks loudly, and we'll get there with an almighty bang in Part 7 (which I promise is no more than a week away). Until then it's more verbosity.   He suggests a list of six terms to help get everyone on the same page when talking about the complex views:   Includes Partials Dispatches Layouts Placeholders Response Segments   Since these terms would mean nothing without proper definitions, he provides a few paragraphs on each explaining what they are and, where necessary, using code to illustrate the point.
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One code to bind them all Hereâs a question: is Runtime Revolution the cross-platform application development tool for people who just want to get things done?â¦
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Match your gadgets with the right software to really feel the burn. By Mathew Honan from Wired magazine.
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Cameron Olthuis wants to share the tools that he finds th emost useful with the entire web, so he's posted them here on his blog.   His list includes libraries from all different technologies, not just PHP. Several are Javascript-related, but it's always good to have a complete toolkit on hand when trying to tackle some of the more difficult things.   Included in his list are things like:  Moo.fx - a Javascript effects library Swat - an open source web application toolkit PEAR - the PHP package repository Mochikit - lightweight Javascript library    Be sure to check out the post and its comments for more great resources!