Bright Eyed Mister Zen
Kimbro Staken's thoughts on technology

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Saturday, August 17, 2002
 

A couple great Cocoa apps. NetNewsWire a very cool RSS aggregator and MacJournal a pretty slick journaling/note taking application. Even cooler, both are freeware.
5:34:37 AM    comment

I love Mac OS X Cocoa apps and really don't care much for most Carbon apps. Because of this I'm on a quest to convert all my software to Cocoa. It's going to be tough, but Cocoa is what Mac OS X was really made for. One thing I really want to dump is Microsoft Word. So far the best Cocoa replacement looks to be Okito Composer. It's a nice simple word processor that works on RTF files. It probably only does 1/100 of what Word does, but for me it might be good enough for most uses. I'm definitely not a power user of Word because I hate it so much. Okito Composer isn't quite stable yet, but it does look promising. Hopefully there are enough Cocoa fans around to buy it so that the author can keep improving it. Also I really hope they don't strive to match the epitome of software bloat (i.e. Word) feature for feature. I'm sure I'll have to keep Word around to open .doc files that people insist on sending via email, but I sure don't need it's bloat for the simple documents that I create.

Pricing for Okito Composer: Free version - free, Lite version $29 ($23 pre-order), Pro version $79 ($39 pre-order). Final release sometime this fall.
3:11:06 AM    comment


So what happened with Liberty Alliance? It's been a few weeks since they released their specs. Did anyone even notice? I took a look at the specs and they didn't look as bad as I expected. Of course, I'm not interested enough to actually study them in any depth. Is anyone working on open projects to support this? Does the licensing even allow it?
2:21:30 AM    comment

Computer programmers rally for open-source bill. Nando Times Aug 16 2002 4:48AM ET [Moreover - Open source news]

Is this a good thing?
2:13:30 AM    comment


If like me you have been thinking more about the realities of moving to Mac OS X 10.2 next weekend, you may want to take a look at Jason Snell's Macworld Review: Mac OS X 10.2 "Jaguar". It offers a good overview of the new OS for those of us who haven't been playing with pre-release versions.

[Mac Net Journal]

I haven't actually decided when to get Jaguar yet. I'm a little worried about whether or not my printer is going to work. It's a Samsung laser and barely works with 10.1. Buying a new printer is just not in the budget, especially with the cost of Jaguar. At least I can get it for the educational price this time, but even $69 is more then I want to spend on software right now.

BTW, if you're in the market for a cheap laser printer for Mac OS X. Do not buy a Samsung ML1210. It works, but printing is horribly slow. It works much faster under Windows XP which bugs the hell out of me.
2:10:07 AM    comment


Being free, but confused.. Joe GregorioI took the GNU GPL and LGPL Licensing Quiz and only got 4 out of 9 correct. I don't know if this quiz is such a great idea, after doing so poorly on the test and reading my mis-interpretations of the licenses I'm pretty leary of using the GPL or LGPL for any project. [Found via diveintomark] [Sam Ruby]

I tried this too and got 5 out of 9. It's always quite disappointing to find a cool piece of software and then discover it's licensed under the GPL. It's even worse when it applies to infrastructure bits, especially Java. This is why Apache is so strong, the infrastructure bits are truly reusable. GPL is not only a killer for commercial software but also for truly open software like that under the Apache license.
2:02:40 AM    comment



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