Wednesday, February 16, 2000

In other words, if you want to do a WAP site, Manila is the best choice. Easy, powerful, inexpensive.

Spicy Noodles: WAP, The Story So Far.

BTW, we're supporting two open standards, WAP and WML, which are subsets of HTTP and XML, respectively. As far as we're concerned no one needs to render the content. If you do, you can pay $20K to GeoWorks. Let me know how it goes.

Hey, we got a nice mention on XML-HACK. Thanks Edd!

We have two Killer Widgets lined up for tomorrow.

News.Com gets the Eazel story about 18 hours after we did. I also talked with Mike Boich today, we set up a lunch at Jing Jing later this month.

Today's picture sequence follows a white coffee cup, first at work, and then relaxing with some friends.

EditThisPage.Com: Let's Have a Meeting!

Dan Mitchell says De Anza College is the perfect location. "We have everything you would need: rooms from large to small with network access and projection systems. And we are in a good location close to freeway access."

Jeremy Roschelle says SRI International is a likely choice because it's a "non-profit in Menlo Park with a long history of augmenting human capabilities thru tools. I think we are particularly relevant because of the ideas of Doug Englebart." Excellent! What an honor it would be to present our work at the home of Augment. Let's have the second meeting at SRI.

James Harris says UC-Berkeley is a fine place for such a meeting. "Phil Greenspun gave a talk at the Haas Business School several months ago to a packed-out audience."

This is worth a special note. In the last few days two websites, BlackHoleBrain and NetDyslexia, have been outdoing each other in coolness. Very very entertaining. Keep it up!

All I want for Easter is a Baseball Blog.

Dale Dougherty: "If you're going to invest in building a corporate portal, don't buy a ready-made solution. Find someone who really knows your company inside out and can work well with people inside and outside your company. Create a Weblog for your home page to manage the flow of information that passes through this gate, using recommendations to increase interactions with a widening circle of people, inviting customers to come inside and helping your organization stay in touch with what's happening outside."

It would be great if someone wrote a Manila review for WebReference.Com.

Everyone wants to know what comes after the Dancing Hamsters?

Builder.Com: How to Plan, Execute, and Report on a Usability Evaluation.

Perl.Com: RSS and You.

MacInTouch Special Report: Macworld Tokyo 2000.

Misnomer: "How can companies do (nevermind ask) what's best for the Internet when they have stockholders who demand short-term results?"

Answer: "Sell stock to people who want to invest in the Internet along with you. Make your shareholders agree to the Ask Not principle." The VCs are starting to clue into this. See the next story..

Reuters: Silicon Valley Merger Mania. "Industry veterans say the telltale sign of a startup created for the express purpose of being acquired is excessive spending on advertising and marketing. Less apparent, with these companies, they note, is a woeful lack of investment on more substantive matters, like product development."

I don't think there's an Internet Bubble. I do believe there's a Quality Bubble, and it might be mistaken for the IB. A lot of very thin companies are making lots of money. Just like the Denial of Service problem, it was always there, but it took a while for the wakeup call to come.

Globe and Mail: Thomson takes aim at the Web in divesting newspapers. "Thomson Corp.'s sale of its entire newspaper operations apart from The Globe and Mail will free up resources for its burgeoning Internet-related businesses." Comments.

Fast Company: Built to Flip. "Come back with an idea that you can do quickly and that you can take public or get acquired within 12 to 18 months."

Xappeal.Org: MacOS X DP3 Aqua Screenshots.

You know what this made me think of? The original Mac OS guy, Andy Hertzfeld; and one of his successors, Darin Adler (he did Multifinder, and was the development lead on System 7), working on user interfaces for Linux at Eazel. This is such an important direction.

Andy and Darin also worked on General Magic's HyperCardish user interface called "Main Street". As it turns out it was a little ahead of its time, off in a cul de sac. This time around, if they're doing what I think they are, they're actually *on* Main Street, and competing with their long-ago employer, Apple.

BTW, at the intro of Darwin I asked Avi Tevanian why they weren't building on Linux at Apple. I still don't understand why they aren't. It seems Andy figured it out. I hope they're doing good work at Eazel. (BTW, Susan Kare, who did all the icons for Frontier, is also at Eazel. For some reason I think of Susan Kare when I think of Susan Kitchens.)

This looks like a page Manila could help with.

Andy Hertzfeld: "Steve Jobs kind of came bopping by my cubicle saying OK you're working on the Mac now. And I said well I have to finish up this Apple 2 stuff I'm doing here. No you don't that stinks that's not going to amount to anything you gotta start now. And I said well just give me a few days to finish and he said no and what he did was he pulled the plug on my Apple 2 that I was programming just losing, losing the code I'm working on and start taking my computer and walking away with it and what could I do but follow him out to his car cause he had my machine he plopped it down in the trunk and drove me over to this remote building, took the computer out, walked upstairs, plopped it down on a desk, well you're working on the Mac now."

Andy, Darin et al: Please consider working on MacBird.

Mac user Howard Hansen adds another installment to his Linux diary. "KDE also has a real propensity for collapsing windows down to the titlebar only, ala the MacOS windowshade. I like the feature. I just wish it didn't happen on a single click."

Three new verbs finally add FTP to the standard Frontier distribution.

Washington Post: Genetic Savings and Clone: "People may not be ready to clone themselves or their relatives, but the era of a truly nine-lived cat may be at hand."

Apple has a page on Frontier! Not bad. It could use some updating. Thanks!

NY Times: Portrait of a Newer, Lonelier Crowd Is Captured in an Internet Survey: "The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend with real human beings."

Dan Gillmor is best when he's outraged. Same with Doc.

Read the banner on the bus.

Press release: Apple Enhances iBook Line. "Featuring double the memory and hard drive size, all three new iBook models come standard with 64MB of memory and a 6GB hard drive. iBook Special Edition features a faster 366 MHz PowerPC G3 processor and, like iMac DV Special Edition, comes in a stunning Graphite-color enclosure."

Susan Kitchens on the new Powerbooks. "Yippie Skippie! I want one of those," she says.

WhoIs.UserLand.Com works with the new multi-tier registration system.

Derek Powazek used to complain about weblogs, now he's got one. Suggestions. Lose the scrolling textarea, stop obfuscating the links, and btw, it's really tacky to open a new window on every link. About SalonHerringWiredFool.Com, all the pubs know we're doing it. It's a new technology called syndication. They get flow, they like it.

Looks like I hit a nerve over in PowazekLand. OK, yes, to answer your question, you do need design help. Your site is the most brain-damaged weblog I've ever seen. "Design" does not mean "Do it differently from everyone else." Derek, you don't even know how to do a friggin email link. Learn, you're still young, there's time!!

Kate: "My Dad says I shouldn't criticize other people on my site. He's right, in theory. But in practice, what I don't like is just as much a part of my personality as what I do like." Exactly.