Steve Jobs goes Crazy and the Net Freaks Out!

While many people were watching the return of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson's awesome win at the Masters, the Internets were freaking out about Apple's new license agreement for iPhone development.



The story was originally broken by Daring Fireball here. And has been commented on and expanded at the following sites. All three posts are awesome and I recommend you read each.

• Has Steve Jobs Gone Mad - Why Does Everything Suck Blog


• Why Apple Did it - Daring Fireball


• Steve Jobs Responds to Adobe - Mashable

Adobe has been developing a tool to allow Flash developers to compile Flash applications for the iPhone OS.  Thus, Flash developers could completely bypass Apple tools or compilers to create their apps. By changing the license agreement, Apple has made this Adobe tool illegal on the iPhone platform. It also limits development to Objective C, C, C++, and HTML/Javascript on Webkit. So any cross platform compiler written in Ruby, or .Net would also be illegal. So as you might imagine, this has angered developers who were planning to use these 3rd party tools.



In my mind Apple has a point. They are trying to provide a simple, stable device with consistent interfaces. Nontechie's do not care if the platform is open or closed. Regular folks don't care about multitasking. They just want their phone to work all the time. PCs crash, phones don't. By tightly controlling design and development, Apple can meet their stability and design goals.



Google Android provides the open alternative to Apple's approach. Right now it is messier and probably not as good. But it is open, and that allows developers to iterate and improve. Over time, it seems possible that it will match or surpass its closed adversary.



Developers, customers, and the market will determine which approach is best. It is going to be an interesting fight.

HTML 5 Video Should be Open

There is a battle brewing over which video format should be used in HTML 5. CNet has the details here.



Ogg Theora definitely seems like the way to go. Open standards deserve open and royalty free tools like Ogg Theora.

Open Office - Frame Replacement?

Well I haven't posted much this week because I have been working on a new book template for work. In the past we have used FrameMaker to created our guides. But for our next round of updates, we are gonna use Open Office.

So far I have been pretty impressed. I seem to be able to pretty much do everything I did before in Frame. Create master documents, have paragraph and character formats, create Tables of Contents, running headers and footers. You name it. If I have some time, I'll try to post to tips for those out there that would like to create big thick books too!

Loading All the Styles from another Document with Open Office 3

I'm working on some new book templates at work. One thing you need when building books is the ability to copy all the styles and formats from one document to another. This allows someone working on a template, to pass all their updates to another author. FrameMaker does this quite well. So does Open Office. Detailed steps can be found here. Check out the second section toward the bottom of the page.

Silly Chrome OS Posts

Ok, now its getting annoying. I keep seeing all sorts of new Chrome OS posts and articles pretending to provide new information on the new OS. Instead, it they are usually just another opinion piece stating how "Chrome will destroy Microsoft". Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves? Maybe we should wait for a public Alpha for Beta version of the OS before predicting the demise of Windows. I too am intrigued, but it would be nice to have a little more info on the subject.

Komodo Edit

Komodo Edit is a free open source editor created by the folks at Active State. These are the people who create the ActivePerl and ActivePython distros.

There are versions of the editor for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It is based of the Komodo IDE which is a much more full featured development environment. Anyway, the editor has a really nice feature set.

• Supports the concept of projects and allows you to keep multiple projects open at the same time.


• Tabs for each file you are editing


• Good syntax hightlighting


• Built in HTML preview


• And many more I have not discovered yet.

Definitely worth checking out if you want a cross platform editor.

Free Clip Art?

Need some free clip art for your site royalty free and without strings? Check out http://openclipart.org. They seem to be the most legit site out there. All the licenses for the art are clearly listed and explained. No pop-ups, pop-unders or other bovine feces.

Software Suffocation

In an interview with Technology Review titled The Problem with Programming, Bjarne Stroustrup states

A lot of thinking about software development is focused on the group, the team, the company. This is often done to the point where the individual is completely submerged in corporate "culture" with no outlet for unique talents and skills. Corporate practices can be directly hostile to individuals with exceptional skills and initiative in technical matters. I consider such management of technical people cruel and wasteful.


If this is true I wonder how many CIOs and CTOs would agree or disagree with a statement like that?

I have found that the following options help to alleviate the suffocation.

• find some non-work related software project to do either at home or, with prior approval, on the job. Most good managers realize that 'play' time is important to health and well being.
• For example, whilst riding the train to/from Chicago, I wrote a Sudoku problem solver in C++ using dancing links. Solving Sudoku puzzles has absolutely nothing to do with electronic trading or does it?
• Perhaps join an open source project (check w/ your supervisor to avoid breaking that conflict of interest document you signed!)
  
• ask to be put on a non-production prototype project where your talents and ideas may be beneficial.
• wander around the office (sea of cubes?) and find out what others are working on and see if they need help (assuming you are not shackled to your cube and have a few personal CPU cycles to devote).

Agree? Disagree? Let me know how you solve your Software Suffocation problems.