techno.blog("Dion")

There have been some interesting items that have been on the great newstands recently:

Sun Bonuses

How about if you got huge bonuses even if you company was tanking? This is what our trusted friends in the Sun management team are getting.

Sun’s board and top management approved McNealy’s $1.1 million bonus last week, after the company reported an 85 percent decline in fourth-quarter net income and said it would slash 1,000 jobs–about 3 percent of its work force.

The board approved a $280,000 bonus for Sun President Jonathan Schwartz and rewards of more than $150,000 for the heads of finance, human resources and technology

Apple

Who can take a commodity device, innovate a little, and resell it for a larger margin than anyone else? Only Apple.

Although, maybe this is changing a little. Instead of all of the “we love you apple” talk, we are getting:

One fan threatened to remove his Apple tattoo should the company include the security chip in its new Macintosh products.

There are MANY things wrong with that statement :)

Googzilla

Mozilla.com hit the ‘net this week. Brendan Eich put it out there, and many got right on it.

Conclusion? “Come on. this is just so Google can buy it right?”

Stu Halloway is a wise, wise man :) Even though I read about Growl in Pragmatic Automation, I didn’t think anything of it, until Stu re-introduced it to me this weekend.

For those that don’t know about it, Growl is an open source service for the Mac, which gives you a nice standard way to define user alerts. To start with, on the Windows side, think of the system tray fade away alerts that you get with IM tools, email, and the like.

However, wouldn’t it be nice to NOT reinvent that wheel in every application. Growl gives you the flexibility to do just this. Apps can send messages to Growl, and users can determine how much they care about them, and the look and feel for these alerts (e.g. colors, where on the screen, even items such as “read it”).

This is only the beginning though. If you take this to the next level, Growl can tie into external items. Have a text message sent, an email, a message to a MOM queue, and lighting up a lava lamp (Mike Clark talks about setting up build alerts).

I would love to see a Windows based version of Growl (and other OSes), and have them builtin to the OS’es. We should have one way to access this guy (sending messages to the service), and it would work everywhere. We could even have a JSR ;)

If you want to get all aspecty, you could write aspects that tie into various application code, and inject in these alerts.

Very cool stuff Stu! Growl joins my “I wish it was on Windows list”, sitting next to QuickSilver :)

The iPod’s from Apple keep getting smaller and smaller. Apple just announced the smallest yet with the iPod Flea.

To be honest, I don’t get the Shuffle at all. Maybe it fits some peoples usage, but for me I much prefer having more than a couple of songs, and the mini is hardly large!

We will see what really happens with the iPod Mobile.

Remember when the first talk of Mac OS X came out? There was the whole “Yellow Box”, “Blue Box”, etc etc.

The point was that the OS would run on Intel as well as PowerPC. Everyone thought that would be very cool indeed. But it never happened.

Now Rumors have come up again.

Finally a Mac that can run on nice fast dual processors that don’t burn up?

Bring it on :)

I always knew that Bill Gates was looking at my blog, and I think he saw my joke regarding the Mac OSX RSS screen saver.

Microsoft is heading for more RSS.

Among all of the RSS push stuff, they will be pushing out an RSS screen saver! :)

There has been a lot of discussion spirred on the Apache Project Harmony announcement.

It even gave Hani some ammo other than that from the TSS Symposium :)

I think I know why they are doing this though. It isn’t to do with opensource, nor making a better JVM, or anything like that.

It is all about the Apple!

I polled the group that have put their name to the petition at Apache, and they are all Mac users. These poor people are so sick of the Apple support that they want to write something decent themselves so they aren’t behind the times all the time ;) ;) ;)

I was wondering about anything really KILLER about the new Mac OSX Tiger. Lot’s of nice features, but nothing that really drew me in.

Now I see the ‘killer app’:

Tiger RSS Screen Saver

;)

Apple keeps on trying to make it easy for developers to develop top quality applications. In Tiger they are introducing Core Data, which is a managed object model.

Basically it gives Cocoa a nice simple way to develop a model that doesn’t just map to some database.

Core Data lets you create an ERD with Interface Builder, which acts as a model.

Data Store Formats

In Tiger, Core Data support three different kinds of data store formats to save managed objects contexts to. These formats are:

• XML file format
• Binary archive file format
• SQLite database file format

Each of these formats has its strengths and weaknesses. The XML format is a good testing format as it is fairly human readable. The binary format is not human readable, but provides better performance than the XML format. Both of these formats are atomic

I know that Apple likes you to pay for their point releases. In the past I have seen that the point releases are more than a typical point release.

However, there is still something pyschological about forking out that much money each release.

Tiger has some nice features, but nothing that really makes me think “WOW I NEED THAT”. Maybe I haven’t seen it yet. An automator, RSS in Safari, and others are certainly not it. I will be interested in Spotlight though, and some of the other features.

I think it would be easier to stomach as a subscription model. I am always happy when I see Software Update jump up and grabbing the latest and greatest applications. I appreciate that hardworking developers like me ;) are working on this stuff and need to be paid.

It would feel better if I paid for a subscription for $X/year that granted me access to new features, including new OSes.

But maybe that is just me.

GoogleX. I think an Apple fan had fun in the Google Labs with his 20% time? :)

On the plus side:

• You can fit more items in than text

On the minus side:

• You have to ‘learn’ what a lot of those icons MEAN. Having to mouseover to read the name is painful

It would be nice to have a personalized Google home page where power users can choose icons / text / icons+text… and can even choose which tools they want there etc.