Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. (c) Ruffin Bailey 2001-2021

It's getting hard to tell what is a niche browser and what's potentially a player now. Chimera, AOL on Mac OS X, Mozilla, and Netscape 6+ all use the Gecko rendering engine, and none have a 5% share of the market. I'd hoped AOL would expand Gecko-based AOL on Windows and Apple would use a browser based on Chimera, and we'd have a good group of players that, under the Gecko flag, would at least be on Microsoft's radar.

Konqueror and now Safari, Apple's new browser, use khtml for rendering, not Gecko, however. Though Konqueror certainly must have had less than one percent of the market before January 7th, now with Safari's introduction on the Mac we've got 300,000 or so users added practically overnight, and OmniWeb users are apparently going to join them soon. Every one of those users is, in a sense, a lost Gecko supporter.

(Please forgive the out-of-the-air numbers in the following paragraph. Hopefully they're ballpark; I didn't research them for a blog.)

So now that 10% or less of non-IE users out there have been whittled down into two major camps, making any one voice all the quieter. And who do you think web developers are going to support? Before, you could grab 99% of the market, give or take, by supporting two browsers, IE and Netscape 4.x. The number of people gained by supporting Netscape, even when it was clear they were going to lose the Browser War, was worth it. Now, you've got more than 80% (90%?) using IE, and to add the rest you've got to test at least two different places just to pretend you've got everyone covered. Adding support for Mozilla so that everything Gecko behaved was a shoe-in. Now with Safari to worry about, it's harder to keep all your bases covered.

The bottom line is that if there are too many more semi-successful browser projects, it's going to hurt the alternative browser community as a whole. I'd really hoped Apple would expand on Chimera, b/c that would make Gecko a real player when the new Apple browser becomes the default on the Macintosh desktop, which it seems it quickly will.

And now, a few links I had open last night but would prefer to close out (and save here instead in case I want to come back to them):

Even Woz still uses Mac OS 9
Pretty good review of Safari
"101 Reasons why Java is Better than .NET" -- I personally hate it when people write things like this. It's like writing, "101 Reasons why a screwdriver is better than a wrench." For you guys reading this late at night, note that I didn't say, "101 Reasons a screwdriver [as in the drink] is better than a wench."
Long list of alledgedly buggy IMAP servers, including Microsoft Exchange.
Sending authenticated email with the JavaMail API
rfc 2554, SMTP Service Extension for Authentication

I spent hours today trying to create a simple yet relatively attractive icon for the Digest Handler in The GIMP today. It's nearly impossible. I've got to think Java's got a better way of doing this, but if I make an image that looks good when you alt-tab in Windows, it invariably looks horrible in the top left corner of your windows -- and vice versa. I've trashed the Clothify Script-Fu, and now I'm looking at trashing the text too and grabbing some shareware icon maker specifically for Windows. I'm pretty sure Windows XP allows you to use some pretty good looking icons that other versions of Windows don't, but this is a whole new can of worms. Icons in Mac OS X look great and are big enough it's a pretty easy task in that other OS. I finally told myself that I'm ready for the OS X-first launch (icon-wise, anyhow) and that I'll come back and do some Windows research later.

But what I did want to go on record about is the rumor that Apple is going to start charging for its iApps. Kudos. As I said a while back in my only blog that actually got titled, I want a good, fast, new Mac simply because of the user-friendliness of the iApps, specifically iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto, but also iTunes and even, strangely enough, iChat. The apps are well made and easy to use without having ever touched a single user preferences panel; they just run a little too slowly on my 500 MHz iBook.

The iApps are good. Why should Microsoft get dough from people upgrading Office on their WinPCs (and Macs!) and Apple get nuttin' for its superior digital-hub supporting software suite? There's no reason for Apple to feel compelled to give the full versions to every Mac user. What do you get from the Office suite when you install Windows XP on a clean hard drive? That's right, folks, WordPad (aka, "Nothing"). Apple should be allowed to make money on their software, not just hardware, just like the only other commercial player in the desktop/home PC OS market.

And not only will Apple make more money from software, this is going to sell more hardware. When I got my iBook, part of the savings, so to speak, was that it came with OS X. My old iMac didn't, and it was going to cost me $100 to upgrade. eBay the iMac, buy the new iBook I wanted anyhow, and it's like I saved $100. Now, when I think about upgrading again, I can put the $50 I would have thought about paying for upgraded iApps towards the price of a new tower in my head. Not exactly the best economics going on in my head, perhaps, but it makes me feel better about buying and makes me (and others, I'd imagine) pull the trigger on new Apple hardware more quickly.

I was pretty upset about iTools going to the "buy or bye" .Mac business model. What's the difference here? With .Mac, just to keep your @mac.com email address was going to cost you $100. How much trouble is it to forward mac.com email to a user's "real" account? Next to nothing. Apple would rather hang its users out to dry than make good on their implicit promise that buying Mac meant having this online home [for email, web pages, and other files]. But with the iApps, anyone with OS X gets a quite capable version of iMovie, iTunes, and friends. Do you need to update the iApps to use your Mac as a digital hub? Absolutely not. Apple's not asking you to pay to continue at the level of functionality you're already experiencing the way they did in a straight up chump move with .Mac.

Anyhow, charging for iApps is a good move. As one invited speaker said about the construction workers near where I used to work (we were a pretty enviro-friendly crowd, so construction workers =='d evil, give or take), "They're just trying to make a buck, bless their hearts." And so is Apple. I wish them the best.

title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude.	descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001.
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Friday, January 31, 2003
From a story at Maccentral: The film, video, music and leisure software industries in Europe claim they lose over ?4.5 billion (US$4.9 billion) annually as a result of piracy. Now that I'm starting to take a closer look at the shareware community (since, albeit an embarassing fifteen to thirty days later than planned, I'm joining it), statements like this are starting to bother me. In shareware, there are much too many people claiming that they've lost who knows how many untold thousands by being cracked, but can't begin to let you know how many untold thousands the untold thousands represent, which, of course, leaves them forever untold. But I've missed a step. Here, the recording industry has enough dough to actually venture a guess, but the guess is [I assume] based on adding up the cost for all these people actually legitimately purchase the albums from which their pirated content comes. That's completely bogus, and is the same reason shareware authors think they're losing untold thousands. Look, many of these people downloading mp3s weren't going to buy your danged CDs. They weren't. Certainly not as many CDs as they've downloaded. The cost for downloading a song you don't like it practically nil. You download, listen, hate, erase. It's not lost revenue in every case. And then you've got a few people that'll listen to something online and, on the strength of a few songs, go out and buy a few discs, and the recording companies come out ahead. The recording industry and shareware authors (and I'll probably sing another tune once cracks start showing up) need to simmer down. You might be losing a few bucks, but not nearly as many as you think. posted by ruffin at 1/31/2003 06:59:00 PM

Wednesday, January 29, 2003
Unsupported method to install IIS on XP Home. posted by ruffin at 1/29/2003 08:10:00 PM

Sunday, January 26, 2003
Some email links for the day. Gotmail, an open source project that grabs Hotmail. YahooPOPs, an open source project (GPL) that creates a POP3 compliant server that accesses Yahoo mail for you. Mailforward, a Mac-specific app that apparently helps do something similar to Gotmail. Shareware, $15. jdavMail, a Java-based open source (LGPL) project that accesses Hotmail. Hasn't been updated since April 2002, however, so I think some of the Hotmail changes might bite it on the butt. WebdDAV.org, which apparently is a protocol or the like which has something to do with how some things access Hotmail (haven't read up yet). Why one schmoe contributed to WebDAV. posted by ruffin at 1/26/2003 02:47:00 PM

Some email links for the day. Gotmail, an open source project that grabs Hotmail. YahooPOPs, an open source project (GPL) that creates a POP3 compliant server that accesses Yahoo mail for you. Mailforward, a Mac-specific app that apparently helps do something similar to Gotmail. Shareware, $15. jdavMail, a Java-based open source (LGPL) project that accesses Hotmail. Hasn't been updated since April 2002, however, so I think some of the Hotmail changes might bite it on the butt. WebdDAV.org, which apparently is a protocol or the like which has something to do with how some things access Hotmail (haven't read up yet). Why one schmoe contributed to WebDAV. posted by ruffin at 1/26/2003 02:45:00 PM

Saturday, January 25, 2003
Another bloggeriffic day, I suppose. Just got my app close enough to finished to take a shot at obfuscating the code with Retrologic's Retroguard, an LGPL'd bytecode obfuscator. Not too shabby. Here's a example method post-obfuscation: public void _mthdo() { _flddo = ""; _fldlong = ""; _fldint = ""; b = ""; _fldbyte = ""; a = ""; _fldfor = ""; f = 400; _fldgoto = 400; e = 150; d = 150; _fldvoid = 120; _fldif = 0; _fldnull = true; _fldcase = "kunst"; } Neat. What's tough to believe is that some people actually make code that looks like that. :^) posted by ruffin at 1/25/2003 07:55:00 PM

Boy, I know I'm a newbie when it comes to The Gimp, but I sure wish I'd known about this very simple "trick" earlier. One of my biggest dislikes about The Gimp has always been that it lacked all those neat draw tools that everything from Microsoft's Paint to Apple's Appleworks has that allow you to add circles and rectangles, etc. I could make images I'd already created look that much better in The Gimp, but it was aggravating I couldn't "draw as expected" in the app. Well, I still can't get the "rectangle with rounded edges" I really like using in Paint, but with one extra bit of knowledge I doubt I'll ever go back. In The Gimp, open an image. Choose the "rectangular selection" tool. Make a rectangle where you'd like to draw one. Check what you've got in your "Brush Selection" window, get the foreground color you'd like, and now right-click your image and select "edit-stroke". WOW. Now that's neat. I know anybody who has ever used The Gimp before who is reading this now thinks I'm an idiot, but for someone who's never used The Gimp much, this is a big discovery. Definitely a must-have, weekly-use app now! posted by ruffin at 1/25/2003 12:51:00 PM

If you ever needed a reason to comform to some sort of standard and stick with it, I think the explanation at the beginning of this should do it. Though I suppose if you held any of my code up to this calendar that's been around thousands of years, you really can't complain about the quirks listed on that page. But there are some woofin quirks. New Year's Day has moved, whole weeks have disappeared... crazy stuff. Some interesting history there in the Java API docs. posted by ruffin at 1/25/2003 10:27:00 AM

Friday, January 24, 2003
I'd passed over the POI project at Apache's Jakarta before and wasn't horribly impressed, but it's apparently mature enough now to be featured at O'Reilly's OnJava web site. POI is a way to create and read Microsoft Office docs using Java, which are strange bedfellows indeed. I don't think it'll revolutionize the way many people do business, but it is a nice trick to have in the back of your toolbox (ouch, mixed metaphors). posted by ruffin at 1/24/2003 12:30:00 AM

Sunday, January 19, 2003
What's wrong with GUIs on Java? Well, here's a good start -- from Sun, no less. Prior to Java 2 Standard Edition, JDK 1.4, the AWT focus subsystem was inadequate. It suffered from major design and API problems, as well as over a hundred open bugs. Many of these bugs were caused by platform inconsistencies, or incompatibilities between the native focus system for heavyweights and the Java focus system for lightweights. The single worst problem with the AWT focus implementation was the inability to query for the currently focused Component. Not only was there no API for such a query, but also, because of an insufficient architecture, such information was not even maintained by the code. ... Since Microsoft Windows provides [a way for determining the "opposite" Component involved in the focus or activation change] for free, developers migrating from Microsoft Windows C/C++ or Visual Basic to Java had been frustrated by the omission. (It should be noted that these quotes are from an article explaining how Java 1.4 fixes these age-old problems.) Java is showing its age. I've heard many people, including some that are pretty age-old Java gurus, calling for Java 3 to break backwards compatiblity with Java 2 and below as these and other bugs are fixed. "Throw out the legacy and do it right!" they scream. Well, I'm happy to see that, so far, Sun has stayed the course and kept backwards compat in new releases of the Java VM. I'm not sure that so much as one deprecated method has been completely chopped yet. Let's face it, Java was an attempt to throw out the legacy (C++ and C) and do it right. In many ways Java succeeded, vastly improving over its predecessors, and then in a few ways Sun did no better than to design New Coke. There are some things so broken on Java that somebody could start rolling something new at the same time. A good Swing replacement is long overdue -- of which a new "focus subsystem" could be a large part but a Swing redesign should also include more intuitive modelling systems (for sorting, click events, etc), more robust simplest-case models for GUI widgets, and better GUI speed. SWT, as I've mentioned before, seems to be a move in a better direction, but its platform dependence for look makes me wonder if it's a real cure. Windows.Forms, believe it or not, is an excellent role model. Anyhow, just thought that link was interesting. And that's quite enough programming for tonight. posted by ruffin at 1/19/2003 12:16:00 AM

Saturday, January 18, 2003
Of course sometimes I'm just an idiot. Here's obviously what happened in my preceeding post. I'm embarassed it wasn't more obvious; I'm used to Microsoft spin and should've seen it. MS said, "We're not shipping our JVM with XP. If the user needs to have it (eg, applets in IE) we'll prompt them to download it, but we're not going to guarantee Java programmers they've got our VM to fall back on." To which Sun replies, "Heck no. You're putting the VM in the OS. It's not an optional component. You don't get to download it on demand." That makes more sense. posted by ruffin at 1/18/2003 09:21:00 PM

Well, after posting to USENET, of course, I've dug up some MS JVM info. Here's an interesting bit (from here: In early 2001, Microsoft settled its lawsuit with Sun Microsystems. Later that year, with the release of MicrosoftÂ® WindowsÂ® XP, Microsoft began to distribute the Microsoft virtual machine (Microsoft VM) for Java as a downloadable component of Windows XP from Link to Another Microsoft Site http://www.microsoft.com as well as through Link to Another Microsoft Site Windows Update. For some Windows XP users, this meant that the first time that a user encountered a Java applet in Microsoft Internet Explorer, the application would automatically prompt the user to install a Java virtual machine. This install on demand (IOD) system worked well. In March of 2002, Sun Microsystems sued Microsoft, alleging in part that distributing the Microsoft VM in Windows XP to customers who wanted it via the Web was not authorized by Microsoft's license and therefore constituted copyright infringement. Although we dispute Sun's claim, Microsoft chose to stop IOD as requested by Sun, and did so as of July 10, 2002. Now that is odd on Sun's part. Look (as stated in my usenet post), as a Java programmer I'm excited to have a VM on Windows boxes as long as they run 100% Java Pure code without a hitch, even if it is Java 1.1.4. Better to open up a java.awt.Frame than a VB Form (or something from Windows.Forms) from a Java programmer's perspective. If I were Sun, I'd want that VM on every Windows box I could possibly get it on, if only to serve as a foothold for Java programmers and the Windows OS. [To steal more thunder from usenet post] Heck, now we've got two relatively large customer bases with Java 1.1 VMs on it: Mac Classic and Windows 95-XP. Why Sun would do anything to stop this sort of code from being released (with the ability to silently update the box to Sun's JRE, for heaven's sake) is beyond me. posted by ruffin at 1/18/2003 03:00:00 PM

Why is it that developers love to develop with beta software if possible? I've notice when I've posted a couple of questions to the Apple Java help list that most people there answer the question from the point of view of Java 1.4, which is technically only available to developers that have agreed to an NDA and downloaded the pre-release version. I don't know about other people, but I've been burned all too often with new versions of stuff that I tend to stay about a generation behind when it comes to what I use on a daily basis. Even Sun's Windows 1.4.1 JVM caused crashes on my new Gatewat/WinXP box. I don't have time for bug tests and reports; I just went right back to 1.3 (which was enough of a headache as it is). I'll get 1.4 again once I get more heavily into testing for the first update of my app, but for now 1.3 is plenty for the "home" box. Even more importantly, your clients are almostly certainly not using the latest release of software, much less prerelease software, and some never will! It's awful easy to slap, "Requires Mac OS X 10.2.3 with JVM 1.4" on your application once 1.4 is released, but it's also awful lazy and presumptuous. Test on OS X 10.0, for heaven's sake. It's got Java 2 (which, strangely, is version 1.2 in Javaland), no matter how buggy, and shooting for that lowest common denominator will ensure much better results. I haven't quite figured out what this means on Windows, which usually comes with Microsoft's VM that's around version 1.1.4 but you can't even quite count on that, much less something like Java 1.3 or 1.4. My app's going to have to ship with JVM runtimes in the installer, I suppose, but that increases the download heavily -- and do you force people to upgrade who have Java 1.2 installed already? Java 1.4 has key upgrades like mousewheel and enhanced "JVM-native" drag-and-drop support. I say you don't do any such thing, and perhaps write a quick installer (in what? VB? Then you're distribin' the VB runtime as well on older boxes! sigh Java 1.1.4? Need to research the MS JVM) that checks for a JVM and only dl's if absolutely necessary. Then, of course, I have to test each one of these JVMs to be on the up and up. At any rate, Java's nice, but it's certainly got its disadvantages, like everything else. posted by ruffin at 1/18/2003 02:21:00 PM

Thursday, January 16, 2003
If you haven't seen it already, you should read Apple snub stings Mozilla over at news.com. I think I've seen most people reply to this article much better than I could -- no surprise there -- except that I haven't seen this addressed too well: Apple, which embarked on its browser project in order to free itself further from dependence on Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser, may have balked at using Mozilla because of its ties to AOL Time Warner. I think this just shows that the article's author doesn't understand open source nor programming. If AOL pulled every dime today, Mozilla would still be the most mature, highest quality open source browser/mail/IM (we need a new name for this sort of combo, especially with AOL and MS having products that do this now) package out there. You can still grab it and make it your own at the drop of a hat with its MPL license. And it's still open source, so as long as SourceForge can handle the files, it'll continue to grow -- almost assuredly even more slowly, but will still continue -- just by people volunteering their time to keep this most impressive of all open source projects short of Linux itself going. The second bit, of course, was programming. If I'm going to grab someone's code to create my own browser, am I going to grab something complicated or something simple (or start from scratch?)? Assuming there's an open source project with a license I can handle, I'm going to grab the smallest, least complex but still high quality code-base out there. That's an easy question. That's why my help pages for The Digest Handler (my cheesy app) use this code and not this or this. It's all about being able to make the code yours, b/c when your product depends on it, you'd better know every inch of it if you don't completely trust the people who made it. (Of course the third bit of proof is posted by ruffin at 1/16/2003 06:29:00 PM

Okay, I'm not going to get too terribly upset, but when I read this about an email list I'm signing up for: To receive an occasional message when I write a major new article, please subscribe to my spam-free mailing list. I don't expect it to contain things like this: FogBUGZ 3.0 is now shipping! This is a really huge upgrade; FogBUGZ moves up from being a simple bug tracking package to a rather robust management system that handles the entire development process. Check it out; there's a free online demo. http://www.fogcreek.com/FogBUGZ One last thing. Over the next year I will be writing a column for the Programmer's Paradise catalog (a mail order catalog chock full of programming tools and other goodies). Basically, it will be a monthly shorter version of Joel On Software with all new articles, with a bit of an emphasis on the cool software you can use to make software. If you want to read the new articles, and you're in North America, you can subscribe to the catalog for free at this link: https://shop.fogcreek.com/?147ppct Rest assured if you ever sign up for a "spam-free" email reminder for when I post new worthless drivel to this blog, you won't be getting advertisements within, not even for my own company, as if that somehow made the spam less spammy. posted by ruffin at 1/16/2003 04:35:00 PM

Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Perhaps the neatest feature of Safari, and one that I now couldn't live without, it seems, is the ability to go to pages on your bookmarks bar by hitting Apple-[1-9] to automatically go to that page. Makes the day's surfing quite a bit easier. Apple-1 and I'm at cnn, Apple-2 and I'm at the Washington Post, etc. Okay, okay, Apple-1 & 2 point towards Java tutorials and Apple-6 is to the Washington Post -- Redskins page. But the point stands. It's an easy way to navigate, and I'm sure it's been done before, but this is the first time I've started using it. Very nice. And the browser's fast enough that's one extra piece of my daily suite of tools that no longer makes me thing, "OS X is so danged slow, there's no way I can justify buying another Mac." Soon as they get tabbed browsing and fully realized keyboard transversal of html form elements, it's going to be a hard browser to beat. posted by ruffin at 1/15/2003 07:58:00 PM

Monday, January 13, 2003
You already knew Safari had been released for the Mac, but this is just in from the Apple Developer Connection newsletter: In addition to providing the best web browser for Mac users, one of the goals of Safari is to provide a fast and efficient HTML rendering engine for Mac application developers. Apple is actively preparing a Safari SDK that will be available later this year. Now that's legitimately big news. If Apple can do for OS X what the Microsoft Internet Control does for Windows programmers, namely to create a full-fledged, mature, embeddable browser component, the possibilities for new applications jumps like mad. It's hard to find a Windows client application these days that doesn't take advantage of the Internet control, just take a look at the applications' sys reqs. They almost always require IE 4+ these days, which usually means they've used some of the embeddable control's framework. posted by ruffin at 1/13/2003 09:09:00 PM

I ended the day Googling around for Shareware author info. Here's what I dug up. Download.com charges $99 for you to list there, and at least one guy claims they wouldn't list his product and kept the $99. Great. Search Sites is a freeware (Windows) tool that'll check out popular shareware listing sites to see if your app's listed. Shareware Tracker will go out to 314 shareware listing sites and register your product at the touch of a button (give or take). It's also $89. Sounds like a scam or a great shareware product! The Stanford Web Creditbility Research site. Wack. Page on Google with beta release software, and another site on beta testing resources. posted by ruffin at 1/13/2003 12:47:00 AM

Sunday, January 12, 2003
From Apple's news page: 500,000 Safari Downloads Users have downloaded more than 500,000 copies of Apple?s new Safari web browser since the free public beta was posted on Apple?s web site. [Jan 10] Ha. One way to ensure you have tons of downloads is to release something that's not quite ready for a worldwide test to a ravenously loyal customer base and include bugs so dasterdly (sp?) that all 300,000 of those guys needed to download the thing again before the end of the week. Looks like word's gotten out to 200,000 so far. posted by ruffin at 1/12/2003 11:20:00 PM

Access to blogspot shut down in China, which, of course, means nobody from China will be able to read the timely, informative content we post here. And also means that they can get their work done. Hopefully China's also smart enough to shut down IM clients. :^) Thought it was cute that the Safari people fixed the Version Tracker bug so that version tracker.com will display correctly (at least if you make the window wide enough) in Safari even though the code on the page is bad. Very much like SimCity and Windows 98 as mentioned on Joel's site. Hopefully the newly released Safari beta fixes some of the killer bugs from the intial release. I'm assuming it does and trying it out a bit more. Where are my tabs, Safari-ites?!! posted by ruffin at 1/12/2003 05:50:00 PM

Saturday, January 11, 2003
Sometimes you just know you're barking up the wrong tree. Here's a great-looking, simple, iPhoto-clone for Windows. If I only had five good VB programmers, that coulda been me. :^) I was interested in doing something like the Musicmatch jukebox that sees what you're listening to and pipes in more that you don't have to give it a shot. Might still do that, but it looks more likely I'll start another 8-to-5er after The Digest Handler is released. posted by ruffin at 1/11/2003 12:23:00 PM

Friday, January 10, 2003
I realize I'm way over my daily blog limit, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess why we've seen Safari and Keynote released for Mac OS. First, let's look at the news from the MacWorld Expo again. Safari is obviously slated to be the future default, on-the-desktop browser for Mac OS X. That would replace IE. Keynote is a Powerpoint replacement. That would replace, um, Powerpoint. Currently Microsoft Office for OS X contains four products, namely Word X, Excel X, Entourage X, and PowerPoint X. It's no secret that sales of Office X were not what Microsoft had hoped. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft is beginning to think what many others already have, that the Mac market isn't big enough to give grade-A support. (Before you flame, I think many of these people come right back, change their minds, and support the Mac again, but just take a look at games on Mac, eg. Sales expectations seem to outpace reality on a regular basis.) I'm going to guess that Microsoft threatened to stop producing Powerpoint and perhaps Entourage -- and possibly all of Office -- for the Mac. I mean what hard core Mac user wouldn't still buy Office for their box (provided they were buying it in the past) even if Powerpoint and Entourage disappeared? And if somebody just had to have Powerpoint, well, we know where they could get it, on an inexpensive Windows-powered Intel box down at Wal-Mart. Microsoft would continue selling, and counting their cash from, their best sellers, Word and Excel, and would force people who needed the balance of Office more than they needed iMovie over to Windows. I think Apple responded to that threat. First they responded by courting, briefly and off the record, OpenOffice. Then they took a more realistic look at that huge codebase and figured out they couldn't make it their own. They could, however, turn that little app they'd been using to make Jobs' keynote presentations (I'll call it, "AppleWorks Presentation") into a real Powerpoint replacement with the addition of an in-house Powerpoint filter and some higher quality features. Hey Microsoft! Don't want to ride our backs with sales of Office? Don't! We've got our own office, thank you very much. And, what's more, they could up the ante by completely eliminating their dependence on Microsoft by removing IE from new Macs. Whether Apple goes through with all the way through with it remains to be seen, but I'm pretty confident IE won't be the featured browser in OS X within the year if they can get the Safari bugs out. It's good to see the little guy call Microsoft's bluff, and that wasn't such a long limb after all. posted by ruffin at 1/10/2003 09:08:00 PM

Is this the end of dll hell? Unfortunately no, but at least now you'll know what all the levels of hell are named. posted by ruffin at 1/10/2003 06:34:00 PM

It's getting hard to tell what is a niche browser and what's potentially a player now. Chimera, AOL on Mac OS X, Mozilla, and Netscape 6+ all use the Gecko rendering engine, and none have a 5% share of the market. I'd hoped AOL would expand Gecko-based AOL on Windows and Apple would use a browser based on Chimera, and we'd have a good group of players that, under the Gecko flag, would at least be on Microsoft's radar. Konqueror and now Safari, Apple's new browser, use khtml for rendering, not Gecko, however. Though Konqueror certainly must have had less than one percent of the market before January 7th, now with Safari's introduction on the Mac we've got 300,000 or so users added practically overnight, and OmniWeb users are apparently going to join them soon. Every one of those users is, in a sense, a lost Gecko supporter. (Please forgive the out-of-the-air numbers in the following paragraph. Hopefully they're ballpark; I didn't research them for a blog.) So now that 10% or less of non-IE users out there have been whittled down into two major camps, making any one voice all the quieter. And who do you think web developers are going to support? Before, you could grab 99% of the market, give or take, by supporting two browsers, IE and Netscape 4.x. The number of people gained by supporting Netscape, even when it was clear they were going to lose the Browser War, was worth it. Now, you've got more than 80% (90%?) using IE, and to add the rest you've got to test at least two different places just to pretend you've got everyone covered. Adding support for Mozilla so that everything Gecko behaved was a shoe-in. Now with Safari to worry about, it's harder to keep all your bases covered. The bottom line is that if there are too many more semi-successful browser projects, it's going to hurt the alternative browser community as a whole. I'd really hoped Apple would expand on Chimera, b/c that would make Gecko a real player when the new Apple browser becomes the default on the Macintosh desktop, which it seems it quickly will. And now, a few links I had open last night but would prefer to close out (and save here instead in case I want to come back to them): Even Woz still uses Mac OS 9 Pretty good review of Safari "101 Reasons why Java is Better than .NET" -- I personally hate it when people write things like this. It's like writing, "101 Reasons why a screwdriver is better than a wrench." For you guys reading this late at night, note that I didn't say, "101 Reasons a screwdriver [as in the drink] is better than a wench." Long list of alledgedly buggy IMAP servers, including Microsoft Exchange. Sending authenticated email with the JavaMail API rfc 2554, SMTP Service Extension for Authentication posted by ruffin at 1/10/2003 02:58:00 PM

You know you need to go to bed when... Went to google to see if anyone'd been crazy enough to link to this blog, and sure enough, someone did a few months ago. This blog's name gets some kudos, but apparently the author of the other blog found the content here unremarkable. :^) Fair enough. Except when I dig up some JEditorPane links, I'd tend to agree. Been following links from that fellow's blog for a while now, and stumbled on something linked to off of the cafe au lait site, which deals with Java and is occasionally updated in my few years of dropping by every six months or so. Anyhow, here's the cute, nearly bloggable quote from the page entitled What makes IE so fast?: In other words, instead of sending a SYN packet like every other TCP/IP application in the world, IE would send out the request packet first of all. Just to check. Just in case the HTTP server was, oh, say, a Microsoft IIS server. Because IIS' HTTP teardown sequence looked like this: [slightly technie stuff blanked out -R] The reason for this? Why, to make subsequent connections from IE clients faster. If the connection isn't torn down all the way, all IE has to do is send an HTTP request, with no preamble-- and the server will immediately respond. Ingenious! They probably called it "Microsoft Active Web AccelerationX™©®" or something. You can't help but be impressed with everything MS does to give other MS technologies every advantage possible. This is the kind of interconnectedness I've just never quite seen in the open source world. Of course MS is in the position to do these sorts of things to the point that they make a difference precisely because they already have the lion's share of the market. As I've said for a while now, Microsoft is a bunch of downright super ideas runs through a profit-maximization machine. The latter part is what causes "all of that evil". posted by ruffin at 1/10/2003 01:45:00 AM

Thursday, January 09, 2003
Thank heavens for blogs. Finally started thinking help pages might be a good idea for Digest Handler version 1.0, and started digging around for articles about JEditorPane, the fancy widget in Swing that's created expressly for the purpose of displaying help files in Java applications. I remembered that I'd seen some pretty good examples before of how to make simple browsers with the JEditPane, but I was having a real hard time googling them back up. After a few minutes it hit me that I'd probably blogged all this before. Woohoo! I had. I've always wondered why no-name schomes like myself (as opposed to, say, people who were/are still Mozilla developers and get lured away by Apple to make a brand new browser, who ought to have their own blog) think they can get away wasting bandwidth with their meaningless blogs, but the number of times I've searched the blog for my own benefit has pretty much legitimized the practice in my mind. Anyhow, hopefully once I'm done I can submit the help JPanel with JEditorPane to Sourceforge or the like. Certainly need to clean up my project (the one that helps ports Java to Mac OS 9-) there before the end of the month. posted by ruffin at 1/09/2003 01:37:00 PM

Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Trying out Apple's new Safari web browser. Not bad and very fast, but many pages display a little funky (Safari doesn't seem to support quite as much dhtml as I'd expect) and many features I "need" are missing, most notably tabbed browsing. Though its start-up time might be a touch faster and its rendering speed is noticably quicker, Chimera is still ye olde freakinname browser of choice on Mac OS X. Now let's see if the post 'n' publish button in Blogger works in Safari. posted by ruffin at 1/07/2003 02:39:00 PM

Sunday, January 05, 2003
I spent hours today trying to create a simple yet relatively attractive icon for the Digest Handler in The GIMP today. It's nearly impossible. I've got to think Java's got a better way of doing this, but if I make an image that looks good when you alt-tab in Windows, it invariably looks horrible in the top left corner of your windows -- and vice versa. I've trashed the Clothify Script-Fu, and now I'm looking at trashing the text too and grabbing some shareware icon maker specifically for Windows. I'm pretty sure Windows XP allows you to use some pretty good looking icons that other versions of Windows don't, but this is a whole new can of worms. Icons in Mac OS X look great and are big enough it's a pretty easy task in that other OS. I finally told myself that I'm ready for the OS X-first launch (icon-wise, anyhow) and that I'll come back and do some Windows research later. But what I did want to go on record about is the rumor that Apple is going to start charging for its iApps. Kudos. As I said a while back in my only blog that actually got titled, I want a good, fast, new Mac simply because of the user-friendliness of the iApps, specifically iDVD, iMovie, and iPhoto, but also iTunes and even, strangely enough, iChat. The apps are well made and easy to use without having ever touched a single user preferences panel; they just run a little too slowly on my 500 MHz iBook. The iApps are good. Why should Microsoft get dough from people upgrading Office on their WinPCs (and Macs!) and Apple get nuttin' for its superior digital-hub supporting software suite? There's no reason for Apple to feel compelled to give the full versions to every Mac user. What do you get from the Office suite when you install Windows XP on a clean hard drive? That's right, folks, WordPad (aka, "Nothing"). Apple should be allowed to make money on their software, not just hardware, just like the only other commercial player in the desktop/home PC OS market. And not only will Apple make more money from software, this is going to sell more hardware. When I got my iBook, part of the savings, so to speak, was that it came with OS X. My old iMac didn't, and it was going to cost me $100 to upgrade. eBay the iMac, buy the new iBook I wanted anyhow, and it's like I saved $100. Now, when I think about upgrading again, I can put the $50 I would have thought about paying for upgraded iApps towards the price of a new tower in my head. Not exactly the best economics going on in my head, perhaps, but it makes me feel better about buying and makes me (and others, I'd imagine) pull the trigger on new Apple hardware more quickly. I was pretty upset about iTools going to the "buy or bye" .Mac business model. What's the difference here? With .Mac, just to keep your @mac.com email address was going to cost you $100. How much trouble is it to forward mac.com email to a user's "real" account? Next to nothing. Apple would rather hang its users out to dry than make good on their implicit promise that buying Mac meant having this online home [for email, web pages, and other files]. But with the iApps, anyone with OS X gets a quite capable version of iMovie, iTunes, and friends. Do you need to update the iApps to use your Mac as a digital hub? Absolutely not. Apple's not asking you to pay to continue at the level of functionality you're already experiencing the way they did in a straight up chump move with .Mac. Anyhow, charging for iApps is a good move. As one invited speaker said about the construction workers near where I used to work (we were a pretty enviro-friendly crowd, so construction workers =='d evil, give or take), "They're just trying to make a buck, bless their hearts." And so is Apple. I wish them the best. posted by ruffin at 1/05/2003 06:12:00 PM

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