Coty's Radio Weblog

	Friday, November 15, 2002

Futzing with themes

I've been trying out a couple of Radio Userland themes. I started with the default, of course, but I was attracted to the CSS-based themes, Moveable Radio: blue and, then, Discreet Radio Blog: blue. Alas, both of those themes seem to drop entry titles. I like titles, so I've gone back to the default. I'll probably go back to Movable Radio: blue and hand edit it to restore titles, when I get a chance.

P.S. Thanks to Bryan Bell for putting together such attractive themes from which to choose. Turns out Bryan also created the icon for NetNewsWire Lite, which is a great icon for a great app.
comment [] trackback [] 10:36:50 PM

Eclipsing Innovation?

IDEA 3.0 was released recently. it is an awesome piece of work, and it is refreshing to see such a vibrant company (jetbrains) at work, innovating consistently and always coming up with cool new ideas. i use IDEA every day, and couldn't do without it! when the cost of a typical developer is $80-150k a year, IDEA pays for itself in just a few days. the eclipse vs. IDEA debate brings some interesting questions to bear, namely whether these huge IBM-funded open source projects are ultimately a good thing or not. if eclipse continues to copy the innovations coming out of jetbrains and incorporate them into eclipse, does it end up suppressing one of the few true innovators in the marketplace? [what's next?]

Graham makes some good points, and, given the existence of so many free SOAP toolkits, he probably is particularly sensitive to the problem.

Nevertheless, Eclipse is the bomb, IMO, and I'd have to guess it has fostered more innovation than it has quashed. Nevertheless, it and open source projects like it (see Chandler, most recently) do present a challenge for companies trying to make money in the same space.

I don't think the challenge is insurmountable, though. Look at ActiveState, for example. I don't think anyone is going to make money competing directly with Perl, Python, or TCL. However, ActiveState seems to have been able to succeed at creating products around and on top of those free/open source projects.
comment [] trackback [] 10:38:37 AM

Especially for Jeff

BF Interpreter - 0.61

Holding my breath for the 1.0 release.
comment [] trackback [] 9:05:54 AM