Sunday, January 13, 2002

"The problem with all the Mac tools announced by Jobs at the show is that the Web publishing functionality is weak.  What's needed?  A CMS for a robust personal Website or Weblog.  That is the flaw in Apple's hub strategy - weak Web publishing tools.  All this great content but nothing that helps you publish anything more complex than a simple home page.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog]" Yep, Apple is focusing on publishing content specific to the tools that they have. Doing it more generally is hard. How many years has it taken to develop Radio 8.0? But a fully iTools, iApp aware Radio could sell really well, and would probably offload most of Userlands traffic from weblogs.com to Apple's exceedingly fast mac.com host. A sufficiently well integrated, yet easy (the easy still needs work, guys, but you're getting there) app could get a keynote mention. It means building an unbalanced product - Windows Radio users wouldn't get the same benefits, but your Mac market could expand considerably. 10:46:45 AM

Do you use OS X? Get LaunchBar. I've been running it for about 2 hours now and I can't believe how much better X is with it. I'm gonna buy it on Monday. 12:39:25 AM

Not progress toward my iTools tie-in, aside from getting more important matters out of the way, but I got Radio tied back into my work sites now. I manage my Manila sites using both the standard Radio site management stuff and the Webedit suite. I built a pile of scripts that renders Frontier tables as html tables. It's different than the usual stuff in that I can reorder the columns, specify table attributes, and so on. Nothing special, but one of Manila's great weaknesses (well, most html editors, actually) is handling tables well. Webedit allows me to check out my table data, edit it on my sofa, and stuff it back up to the server. Not bad. Since I've recently written a bunch of code to make a sort of uber-xml storage server in Manila that works directly in user accounts, syncing data with my Filemaker stuff, and tying in with prefs.root (it's lovely, really) I'll probably go in and rewrite my table code to work with xml/opml instead. In time, I'd prefer to toss together a simple Applescript Studio companion tool to Radio that provides 'Edit this Table' functionality, passing xml around as needed. I could kill Webedit at that time and simplify things quite a bit, I think. Needless to say, it's a necessary component to what my wife and dad are looking for. Overall, things are going swimmingly. 12:34:34 AM

© Copyright 2002 Robert Cassidy.