Nosce te ipsum

By way of Slashdot

The Register has an article detailing a significant omission from Microsoft's new Virtual Earth application. Apparently the satellite image view of 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA shows a large empty lot, whereas Google Maps shows the sprawling Apple campus. Hmmm, I wonder if the Google campus is missing too?

Follow the Slashdot discussion.

Microsoft did a really nice job on their newly announced Virtual Earth product which is purported to be MSN's answer to Google Maps. What I find particularly amusing about this particular story is that it reminds me of the various escapades in the late 1990s between Microsoft and then rival Netscape. Upon certain milestone software releases, there was a back and forth ordeal of the engineering teams taking trips in the middle of the night to steal the mascot of the respective team at the other company.

Both NS & MS stole the Big Blue E and Mozilla mascots and proudly paraded them on their company campuses but only after an adequate number of cans of spray paint and taunting slogans had been painted across the mascots. (Ironically, while doing a quick search for a few pictures from this era, the top few pages on Google returned stories about IE being hijacked by spyware). After much digging, I was able to find a poor quality image taken on the lawn of the Netscape campus back in the version 4.0 days (circa 1997) along with an accompanying article.

Back in the days of the infamous 'Browser Wars', they certainly were interesting times. Each new version of the browser would leap-front it's predecessor in terms of speed, stability and most importantly functionality. Major innovations were happening almost every version, things like DHTML, Frames, Java, Plug-Ins, Active-X, (and who can every forget the blink tag, etc. So as a web developer, you'd be constantly put in a situation where a new version of one of the major browsers would come out, introducing some very compelling technology and you couldn't wait to try it out on some project you were working on. Forget about things like web standards which quite utterly didn't even remotely existing at that time -- you really needed that animated bouncing Java guy on your home page and it didn't occur until later than your latest, greatest website was unusable by a large percentage of your audience unless they also happened to be using the newest version of the browser. Thankfully, the industry and (hopefully) most developers have matured to the point where we now have (almost) web standards and now a days, the pages include links to validation engines to show compliancy instead of the old 'Best View with Netscape at 1024x768 with these 5 plug-ins installed). In looking back on it, it's almost as if the web succeeded in spite of itself and the hell we used to put our users through.

The big irony today is that we no longer have these large significant browser releases that change the world with their new bells and whistles but instead, the innovation is taking place on the server. Innovative changes bring us sites like del.icio.us, OurMedia, Google Maps, Skype, Technorati, just to name a small few. I guess the big point here is that even though the web is maturing and becoming more and more ingrained ito our daily lives to the point where it isn't easily removed - even at this point, the true programmer/hacker spirit of playfulness and pranks lives on, even in the biggest of tech super powers like Microsoft by making the entire Apple campus in Cupertino literally disappear from the face of the earth (in their application at least) with a few select keystrokes. Touche! (the image to the right shows the Apple Campus at 1 Infinite Loop as seen through the eyes of Google maps)

A bit of perspective can sometimes be a powerful thing. Having recently spent some time helping a friend rebuild his fairly PC which had just been completely over run with spyware and ad-ware to the point where is was nearly unusable because of the numerous browser hijacking apps that had taken up residence in his registry. I was happy to help a friend out, but it felt like a complete and utter waste of time technically because 6 months from no (if not less), he would no doubt be doing the same drill once again.

While we were doing the install, he got his first hands on experience with a Macintosh as I brought my Powerbook along and it didn't take long before he was starting to ask questions about the OS, repeating many of the old, no longer relevant myths about PC vs Mac, etc. The truly great thing about a modern Macintosh is that it really does speak for itself and there is no substitute for just using one. Considering that we had a at least an hour remaining on our Windows re-insall, he started to get more comfortable with the Powerbook and his curiosity really kicked in. He then asked if we I thought we had enough time to configure the Powerbook to use his WiFi network so that he could try using it online. I told him that we didn't have all day but if he would click on the little 'radar like icon' in the menu bar and simply select the name of his home WiFi network withy a password, that might help and within seconds, he was online and quiet surprised how easy that task was.

While toying around with the OS, he happened upon Expose and also the F12 key (for Dashboard) and was intrigued by all of these mini-programs that looked so elegantly designed. Truth be told, while I like the Dashboard and have even designed a few widgets for fun, it's one of those OS X features that I just haven't dwelled on enough to really get excited about it. I keep up to date with Dori's Widget site and since the release of Tiger, there has been a huge amount of progress made in the world of Widget Development! Half an hour later, my friend showed me one extremely cluttered screen that he had managed to pack full of just just about every widget he could get his hands on and proceeded to 'enlighten me' about how incredibly cool all of these little applications are. As he dug further, he learned that although Apple had provided the framework for Dashboard and a place for the widgets to live, it was really the community who is building and further developing the technology. It really is amazing to think that you could take an idea and literally run with it and within a very short period of time, without any massive amount of programming knowledge, your widget could be running on the greatest OS on the planet, as well as being advertised right up on Apple.com to a potential audience of millions of people. The thing holds true of Podcasts. It is utterly mind numbing to think that you could take your home recorded podcast and have it sitting in the iTunes store, right next to some of the biggest artists in the world. There really is no real-world equivalent of this kind of access to markets. When you really think about it, Widgets and Podcasts are just a few of the areas where the community is helping Apple to develop their technologies, another prominent example being Darwin.

I was indeed impressed to see just how far it has all come in just two months. Apple has set up a very prominent area of their website to showcase and promote the technology as well as an area for the Top 50 Dashboard Widgets. Many of these widgets take advantage of parts of the web that are just are new as Dashboard itself, such as Google Maps and Wikipedia. The Widget categories are all over the map, ranging from information sources, games, utilities, communication tools, entertainment, etc and it's growing every single day. As of today, there was over 800 Widgets available for download, with is up from the original 15 (?) or so that Apple originally shipped with Tiger.

Perhaps the single best quality about Widgets is that they can be developed by an absolute beginner with nothing more than a basic knowledge of HTML -- all the way through being developed by the same folks who are writing very high end web applications and services. As more and more people begin to explore technology, I personally can't wait until more Flash developers jump in and show us some fantastic new Widget interfaces ideas. The bottom line is if you haven't really played much with Dashboard yet, put aside your perceived biases and jump right in, there's a lot of fun to be had. As with all things tech, use some common sense and only download widgets from places and authors that you know and trust (or just stick to Apple's dashboard page if you aren't sure). Back to my friend, I don't think he really wanted to give me back that Powerbook in exchange for his Microsoft Windows box back after his brief affair with Widgets, but I told him that he should check out Konfabulator for a bit of Widgety goodness on his PC until the day came when he had his own Macintosh. Ironically enough, today it was announced that Yahoo! has acquired Konfabulator. Congratulations to the hard working folks at Konfabulator who after really taking a beating by Apple, have moved over the Windows platform and been successful enough to catch the eyes of a big player like Yahoo! God's delays are certainly not God's denials.