Sky Cabs For All!

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/27/avcen-jetpod-t-100-city-flying-taxi-says-naught-to-highways/" rel="self">Engadget... Avcen Jetpods are

..flying cars would volley people between city centers and outlying areas (like airports) in order to reduce highway traffic. Avcen says that 75 of these in London could relieve road traffic of 37,000 return car trips per day all the while keeping things quiet and requiring only short landing strips made of pavement or grass.

Pretty sweet. I’d love to see slightly larger versions of these in operation in the GTA operating as air buses.

DLink's Ethernet over Coax Device

D-Link’s new ethernet over coax device could be a strong competitor to current ethernet over powerline offerings.



Could be a contender, considering I’m still kicking myself over not paying the blackmail fees to my builder to pre-wire every room in my house. At $120 a drop, I only ended up getting two. In retrospect, I should have gotten several more.

The D-Link is set to be priced at $199, a somewhat reasonable price for a starter kit.

Ars Android Summary

Ars has their expectedly well-written summary of the recent Android showings at Google I/O.

While not a direct competitor to the iPhone, it is definitely going to be a force to reckon with in the smartphone space. Especially if your name is Microsoft. Just today, on an important business call, with a fresh battery, my Windows Mobile phone died on me in mid-sentence... a very embarrassing situation indeed.

Mr. Rogers, WHERE IS MY iPHONE!?!??!

The Story Behind the Revision3 DDOS Attack

The outcome of the forensic analysis of the Revision 3 DDOS attack this past Memorial weekend is complete, and there’s actually a twist. I just hope the perps get sued by Revision3 and charged by the feds.

RapidWeaver 4 Out

RapidWeaver 4.0 is out today. Thankfully it’s a free upgrade for 3.6 users.

The interface is a little slicker, and the publish works WAY better than its predecessors. So far so good.

Leopard 10.5.3 Address Book Syncs with Google

At last, half of the Google Sync equation meets the Macintosh.

The Address Book in Leopard 10.5.3 now syncs with Google Contacts. Unfortunately, the catch is that your Mac must have synced with either an iPod Touch or iPhone in the past for the feature to show up.

I hope that puts Spanning Sync and BusySync on notice, because $60 for an iCal syncing solution to Google is poppycock.

Delicious Library 2.0

Delicious Library, the application that created a moniker for an entire generation of pretty Mac applications (the Delicious Generation), has been reincarnated as a Leopard-only version with the 2.0 release.

For those Mac users who have been hiding in a cave for the past few years, Delicious Library is a media tracking database with a whizzy and beautiful user interface. Delicious Monster, the company behind Delicious Library, is probably most well known for a Wired article in 2005, about running the entire business out of a Seattle coffee shop. The most notable feature of Delicious Monster (at the time) was that it could turn your Mac's iSight into a UPC bar code scanner and suck a pile of metadata from Amazon.com. Very cool stuff.

So basically, Mac users who wanted to keep track of their books, videos, DVDs and CDs could keep track of them quite easily. Of course a spreadsheet would do, but a spreadsheet isn't sexy like Delicious Monster.

As someone who has hundreds of CDs and DVDs sitting in a half dozen crates in my basement, I still can't convince myself to use Delicious Monster. I managed to get a license for 1.x in the first MacHeist bundle, and I still haven't gotten around to installing it.

A couple of things have changed since Delicious Monster first came out. There's a notable shift towards digital media. I myself have not purchased a CD since the iTunes music store came to Canada. While dead tree books aren't going anywhere, there's a huge shift towards electronic books. And as for movies... well, there's a shift towards going digital there as well. 

Another key change is the movement towards applications in the cloud. You can track all of your media on an unsexy spreadsheet on Google's servers, and be pretty confident that it's backed up remotely.

To me, there's no longer a compelling practical reason to use Delicious Library, unless you get a kick out of the process. Delicious Library is a wildly successful (and well-made) product in spite of my reasons against using it. And there's the rub. Delicious Library, for the obsessive Nick Hornby-esque characters among us, makes being a pack rat frivolous and fun. And for some, that's reason enough. 

Four Illustrator Wannabes Reviewed for the Mac

VectorDesigner, Intaglio, Lineform and Zeusdraw are all examined in a comprehensive review.

Myself, I have licenses for VectorDesigner and Intaglio (thank goodness for MacUpdate and MacHeist bundles), and I think it's a tall order to put them in the same league as Illustrator. Seeing how I can't justify buying Illustrator, they'll have to do. For the record, I actually use both of them, because each application has its own set of deficiencies that make having just one of the applications insufficient.

Kudos for not spanning the article across multiple pages.

Via daringfireball.

OLPC 2.0

The new mockup for the next incarnation of the OLPC is pretty damned zexy.



Looking like the love child of an iPod Touch and a Nintendo DS Lite, such a device could have incredible promise if it ever does come into fruition. Unfortunately, it's not coming out until 2010, so it looks like the Eee will own the market before the next OLPC can even make a dent.

Video: Programming for Cocoa

As I mentioned in a previous post, Scott Stevenson is probably one of the best writers for teaching you how to program for the Mac. Recently he held a 90 minute presentation that is available for download. It took me 3 sittings to get through the entire presentation, but it's an invaluable primer to Mac programming.

There is an incredibly insightful part of his presentation when he talks about Design (1:16:23). The thing that has always stricken me about Mac software, whether they be from major vendors or one man shops is that there is a deep-rooted commitment to usability and quality. 

The sad part is that this attitude is far from pervasive in the Windows development world, particularly in the area of enterprise software. In Kim Vicente's book "The Human Factor", which I'm currently in the midst of reading, Vicente talks about two views of the world, Mechanist and Humanist. From the perspective of software design, most of the software in the Windows software takes the Mechanist view, which is design driven by functionality. Software on the Mac, at least to me, generally takes the Humanist view, which is software developed around the user. 

In any case, the video is worth watching by anyone who fancies him/herself a programmer, as there are several nuggets of information that are universal.

A Week Without Firefox Redux

Well, I survived a week (and a bit) without Firefox, and I have lived to tell about it.

I only experienced one major hiccup, because one of the sites I visited did NOT support Safari, and wouldn't let me in (that would be Enbridge's Gas part of their site). I was already on hold with them at the time, so it didn't end up being too disruptive, although it was quite annoying.

The hardest thing to live without was the Google Toolbar, but it wasn't nearly as painful as I expected. Am I going to go back to Firefox? I'm loathe to say No, because the add-ins and extensions are quite beneficial. Better GReader has sped up my ability to clear my Google Reader queue, and I found that I was slower this week in Google Reader. What I can say, however, is that I'll be using Safari a lot more than in the past. Maybe enough to even get Saft.