Friday, March 14, 2003

Plastic - Best One Liners' My favorites - "Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die." - "Ward, I think you were a little hard on the Beaver last night..." 2:53:34 PM

Flash Applications … Also, most people host Flash applications in a browser today, but it would be really great if people could run these on their local machines. The engineering teams here are hard at work on these things and more -- you'll see a lot of cool stuff coming out to help bring Flash into its next phase of evolution. In the meantime, we publish the SWF format (starting back in 1998) so lots of other people can create software and tools for Flash, not just Macromedia. I'm happy to see that there's a lot of software now to do this, and now that Flash is enabling applications we're starting to see third party solutions such as Laszlo, Screenweaver, gModeler, and others building on it. While we're certain to overlap in some areas, having a lot of different takes on this will definitely foster innovation and benefit developers and end users as these new Flash applications are created! [Kevin Lynch] This all looks very exciting. As an marketer, I see software swinging back to the desktop, and am excited by Macromedia's Rich Internet Application approach. As a developer, I must evaluate various technical options for creating cross-platform GUIs for desktop apps (such as MFC, .Net, PowerPlant, wxWindows, and Swing, to name just a few). It will be interesting to compare Flash-based solutions to these other platforms. 11:17:02 AM

TalkLeft: U.S. Interrogates Wow, can this be true? The CIA has acknowledged that last September, the seven and nine year old sons of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, arrested last week and alleged to be a "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, were seized by Pakistani authorites, and that this weekend, the kids were turned over to the CIA and then flown to America so that the young boys could be interrogated in an undisclosed location about their father's activities and used to get their father to talk. Shocking. Several outlets, including Washington Times, Muslim News, and LA IndyMedia, have carried the story credited to Olga Craig of the London Sunday Telegraph. Interesting that it hasn't been picked up by any of the major U.S. news outlets. 11:05:48 AM

Big Hotel Chains Are Striking Back Against Web Sites Great quote… This is yet another industry that doesn't seem to understand that the internet makes it possible for customers to know more about your business and demand a fair price. Ignoring that doesn't do anything other than guarantee that customers will go elsewhere. [Techdirt] Is your business modeled around your customers NOT knowing how you operate? 10:35:13 AM

Has T-Mobile dropped the Sidekick? Has T-Mobile dropped the Sidekick, Danger's mobile communicator? Amazon, other retail sites, and T-Mobile's own site list the Sidekick as out of stock due to high demand, but we just received a tip that there have been so many quality problems with the Sidekick that T-Mobile has decided to drop it entirely. Anybody know what's really going on here? The other plausible explanation for this: A few weeks ago we heard that Danger was letting the stock of black & white Sidekicks deplete in advance of the release of a new color model. [Gizmodo] My bro Steve said he's been thru 4 (?) Sidekicks, which seems rather ridiculous. They look like they're built to be sturdy, and they market them as rough and tumble ready. 10:27:58 AM

Smart Mob Sensors For Ravers! Recent Master's degree recipient and sometime-DJ Mark Feldmeier's cool new Media Lab project uses inexpensive, wireless motion sensors to give dancers collaborative control of a music environment in real time. [Smart Mobs] Ah, I miss the rave scene sometimes… always lots of really smart people there. 10:25:53 AM

Ragin Platypus Phunny parody of an obscure blog phenom... 10:17:55 AM