Inspirational Technology

Inspirational Technology
Kimbro Staken's views on Mac OS X, XML databases, and other inspirational technologies.

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Monday, January 14, 2002

Apple debunks Mac myths [MacCentral] This is good to see, but they didn't address the one thing I hear everytime I talk to people about Macs, the price in comparison to PCs. Apple needs to start an all out effort to address this particular issue. They are extremely competitive in certain parts of the product line now, but I still hear all the time how Macs are too expensive.
6:46:47 PM

The Radio RSS feed feature is very cool and I'm so happy to have access to RSS news feeds again. I was a big time user of my.netscape.com before AOL destroyed it by taking away all the RSS feeds. Never really found a good replacement until now. I loved My Netscape, but Radio does an even better job. With My Netscape you could track maybe 10-15 or so feeds comfortably, with Radio you can probably track a couple hundred depending on how often they update.
10:53:34 AM

You'll see white-on-orange XML buttons on almost all Radio weblogs, and on other sites around the Internet that support a really simple syndication format called RSS. This is the main format that Radio understands and produces. Another Mobius Strip thing. We invented this format in collaboration with Netscape. Our work started in 1997. Anyway they're there for a reason. When you see a white-on-orange XML button it means "this site can be a feed for Radio's news aggregator." Here's how you access it. [Scripting News]
10:31:04 AM

Ahh, feels almost like home now. I think I'm going to stick with Radio. Now if I can just scrape up enough pennies to afford a license.
I need to get out of Arizona so that I can actually find an interesting place to work and get my toy buying back in gear. It's a complete technology wasteland here.
10:18:14 AM

I going to start hacking in my old xmldatabases.org look to this site. Ugly and boring though it may be. I'm sure I'm going to make quite a mess for a bit.
9:13:21 AM

Microsoft takes Web services to the Office [IDG InfoWorld] Wow, they're actually going to use UDDI for something. Will it be useful though?
8:30:42 AM

Here's a screen shot of radio post editing the previous post.
There's an obvious problem with apos entities and I'm going to guess other XML reserved chars. Hopefully it won't be too tough to fix.
7:53:09 AM

RadioPost is now a functional app, at least for the simple app that it is. It allows you to add weblog posts to Radio via a native Mac OS X Cocoa app.
Here are the main features.

Add a new post to Radio

Repost the last added post. Makes it easy to edit the post you just added, since I seem to do that all the time.

Use any service enabled app to set the initial content for the post

Spell checking

Resizable edit area

Keyboard shortcuts. command-p to post, shift-command-p to post and publish, command-n for a new post, plus the usual edit shortcuts that all mac apps support..

The biggest thing that is missing for posting is to be able to specify categories for the post.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it yet, well other then use it myself that is. If anyone is interested I can probably release it in some form. The biggest problem with that, is that it needs some custom Radio scripts to work and I'd want an easy way to install them.
I'm also thinking about writing a more full featured app called BlogFront that would replace most of the Radio web interface. I know it kind of violates the philosophy behind Radio but I really prefer a native interface and the Cocoa environment is a great way to build one.
7:44:56 AM

Borland demands users pay for license audit. [The Register] Somebody really needs to knock the lawyers back to reality, this stuff is just stupid.
4:08:18 AM

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