Friday, August 23, 2002

NYT on Jaguar. David Pogue gives a rave review to the new Mac OS X.2, AKA "Jaguar," in the NYT: Plenty of other big-ticket features appear in 10.2: iChat, an instant-messaging program that's compatible with AOL Instant Messenger; a surprisingly effective junk-mail filter in Apple's Mail program; a new "clean install" option that lets you reinstall Mac OS X without having to erase the hard drive; a convenient Search bar at the top of every window; desktop backdrop photos that can change at regular intervals, smoothly fading from one to the next; a calculator that offers not only scientific functions but also unit conversions and even up-to-the-minute currency conversions. Version 10.2 also introduces Rendezvous, a behind-the-scenes networking technology that will someday permit computers, printers, palmtops and other gizmos to find and communicate with one another instantly, with no setup or configuring whatsoever. But if you're the kind of person who gets satisfaction from, say, the hushed thump of a Lexus car door closing, it's the little things in Jaguar, the grace notes, that may mean the most in everyday work. For example, you not only get keyboard shortcuts for every important folder on your machine, but they're all consistent and easy to remember: it's always Shift-Command plus A for the Applications folder, F for Favorites, H for your Home folder, and so on. Link Discuss (Thanks, Patrick!) [Boing Boing Blog] 12:17:30 PM    Comment []Trackback []

Thomas Vander Wal grooves on Maslow and information needs. Springing from Lou's post on splitting IA and IT, Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting piece on "Information Needs" reflecting Maslow's famed hierarchy. [ia/ - news for information architects] 12:13:23 PM    Comment []Trackback []

Quick Visio Tips. Boxes and Arrows is running Three Visio Tips: Special Deliverables #4 from our favorite deliverables ninja Dan Brown. Quick, but good. [ia/ - news for information architects] 10:10:27 AM    Comment []Trackback []

The beta of tcp-im is up for Frontier and Radio.  The amazing thing is that this allows you to create services on your desktop that can be offered to anyone that has a supported IM client or a tcp-im enabled version of Radio -- even if you are behind a firewall.  It is going to take a little while to flesh this out, but the core functionality is there. What this will allow you to do: 1) Allows communication via instant messaging between two copies of Radio.  This could be used for instant outlining (the ability to share outlines you create in Radio instantly with people that subscribe), notification of updates to a weblog (instant news aggregation), and more.  It also allows you to publish to your weblog via any supported IM client. 2) Build instant messaging bots.  This means you can build applications in Radio that people can ask questions of via IM.  For example, if you build a database of artist/album titles using Radio and connect it to this framework, people could input "Sinatra" via IM and get a list of albums he recorded.  3) It could, if there was a way to tap into the file attachment function of IM systems be a way to share file directories between subscribed desktops.  This would be great for shared documents, photo albums, and multimedia directories.  If you add a file to your shared desktop folder, everyone that subscribes to it would get it instantly. As you can see, this is a major step on the road towards personal publishing and cross company group collaboration.  Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] 10:07:49 AM    Comment []Trackback []

Ray Ozzie recommends the Casio EX-S1 ultra compact digital camera. (SOURCE:Scripting News)-As a digital camera fanatic who likes to take pictures of absolutely everything, this tiny 'always carry it with you camera' sounds great!And then I discovered the best camera that I've ever owned - the Casio Exilim EX-S1. Somewhat larger than the Eyeplate, it's still comparable to my cell phone, and after a few weeks of carrying it around daily, I have zero regrets, and have managed to grab many ad hoc photos that I'd never have otherwise had - without disrupting the moment. The resolution is perfectly fine for on-screen viewing, it has a great flash, it has ample capacity when used with a 128mb memory card, it beats out even the Blackberry in terms of its battery life (weeks), and best of all, it boots and is ready to snap a picture in sub-one-second. Just works, just right. Strongly recommended. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 9:58:29 AM    Comment []Trackback []

Tech's Most Valuable Temp. (SOURCE:Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog)-Sounds like a great job! Feld and his team, the Feld Group, are regularly called in to clean up tech disasters at some of America's biggest companies. Sometimes Feld becomes the interim chief information officer; sometimes he works alongside a CIO. He or a member of his group parachutes in with half a dozen experts who generally stay onsite for about two years. Their goal is to leave behind an overhauled tech infrastructure and a new management team that will keep the system running smoothly. "We're operations people, not consultants," says the 60-year-old Feld, who counts among his current clients Coca-Cola, Home Depot, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Feld is the "CIO of CIOs," says Vivek Ranadivé, CEO of Tibco Software, which makes applications that link corporate systems. "He has no agenda other than to do things right, to make technology strategic." That's hard. And the reason it's hard, Feld says, is that you have to keep it simple. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog] 9:55:44 AM    Comment []Trackback []