Thursday, September 19, 2002
Palm to launch first OS 5 product Oct. 28
This should allow Palm's to catch up to many of the features that have been available on PocketPCs for the last year, including video and music playback. This article indicates that the first wave of new Palm's will simply be a preview of what is to come in 2003 when Palm really starts rolling out the goods.
6:56:36 PM 
What Does the Future of News Feeds Hold?
Rob, a co-worker of mine, went to download DailyComic today and instead of getting a download page received an explanation as to why the creator had to stop providing it. DailyComic, if you haven't tried it, is an application that allows you to pick a comic and date from a very large list and it goes and gets that comic to display in a window. It great because you don't have to navigate some site to get simple comic strips. Of course accessing comics in this way allows you to circumvent the very thing that is making their web publication possible, advertisements. This is one of the first instances I have heard of such an application being told that this could not continue, but there are many such applications out there. I use Watson on OS X all of the time to grab data from the web. I generally have no idea what sites the data is coming from and I don't really care. There are parts of the baseball tool that are coming from ESPN and MLB.com, but I've never visited these sites to look for the same data to verify this. I can get weather, movie listings, addresses and more without my eyeballs ever touching the sites from which they are derived. Apple's new Sherlock 3, which provides many of the same services as Watson, does tell you on each tool where the data is coming from. Many news sources are providing feeds that contain nothing more than the headlines and perhaps summaries. This seems to work well as it can lure people into a site that may not have visited it before, but it sure places a lot of importance on the writing of these short text snippits.
The future of this idea is extremely interesting and at such an early state, but it's fascinating to think about all of the issues that content providers must wrestle with as they provide these news feeds to be used by other sites and third party applications.
6:46:37 PM
Sad? Perhaps...
I just had one of the greatest moments of my web developing career. I've been playing around with this theme trying to get something that I was really happy with and that displayed well in different browsers, rather than just looking "correct" in my browser-du-jour. I popped the page up in Internet Explorer, then Chimera (Mozilla) and not only did it look presentable in both, they were IDENTICAL!! In many ways, this has been a sort of holy grail that I've looked for for a long time. After years and years of designing for a primary browser, then going for good enough on the others (even when "good enough" was very very close to the primary), I have created something that presents itself identically to all users. If you find this to not be the case, please don't tell me. :)
3:40:30 PM
Here We Go Again
Maybe the flakiness that Radio has been exhibiting has been more of a OS X issue than a Radio issue. I sure wouldn't have a hard time believing that. It seems that my troubles began with the installation of X.2 and have mostly subsided with the installation of X.2.1. Here's hoping that things are mostly reliable from now on.
3:26:56 PM
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