Thursday, February 17, 2000

Once it's installed you can right-click in any Web page to add a link on the home page of your Manila website.

This reduces another multi-step process to click, edit, click. Less work for you, more good links for your readers.

MSIE5/Win-only. The next Big Goodie will be cross-platform, cross-browser, I promise.

Thanks to Garret P. Vreeland for a great site and user interface design, as usual. It's a total pleasure working with Garret.

The two people are Sheila Simmons and Brent Simmons, wife and husband. We wanted pictures of people in the Manila Express user interface. Young, relaxed, nerdy, happy (even nutty!) Web people, to convey the spirit of Manila.

Let's Have Fun!

***pikeRenderer

Frontier: What is an Outline Renderer? "Outline renderers are not new, they date back to Frontier 4.x, in 1996, almost four years ago. Amazingly we've never had a web page that explains how they work."

Samples: pikeRenderer. "We decided to go all the way and emulate MORE's rules-based renderer, but instead of using a cumbersome dialog interface to specify the rules, we use XML, in a new and elegant way."

As usual, full source is included.

***Other stufff

Tomorrow's feature is not a Widget.

MIT: Software Patents Tangle the Web: "By law, no invention can be patented that has already been patented by someone else or has been published prior to the time the patent is filed; in the language of the legal system, such patents and publications are known as prior art. A key problem is that software programming—especially in its early days—was famous for its lack of a published paper trail and for the informal exchange of code and techniques among programmers. These poor 'non-patent' records, combined with the PTO's late arrival to the software game, mean the agency examiners who scrutinize applications often have tremendous difficulty establishing exactly when an invention was first made."

That's why sites like Outliners.Com are so important.

Bloomberg: "Microsoft Corp. would be willing to open the source code for its Windows software to competitors if that was all it would take to settle the antitrust case filed by the Justice Department, Chairman Bill Gates said."

One of my favorite ETP sites: Montana News Daily. Montana is an interesting place. Great editorials. Famous people doing silly stuff. Did you know Charles Kuralt has a secret life? Did you know that women in Montana have fewer heart attacks? It's a well-done site, makes Montana sound very interesting!

News.Com: PointCast sends its final push broadcast. "Push technology was seen as one of the first 'killer applications' on the Internet. PointCast delivered information automatically to a PC according to programmed preferences, eliminating the need to surf several Web sites to gather specific news or material."

baseball.editthispage.com. Let's Go Mets!

There's already a great discussion about Pete Rose on the baseblog.

We're getting a new stadium in SF this year. Finally!

University of Kansas: "The Pony Express from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, was established in 1860 to meet the growing demand for rapid communications with the West Coast. The service was a spin-off of the Central Overland California & Pikes Peak Express Co. of Leavenworth, which already held the weekly U.S. Mail contract from St. Joe to Salt Lake City."

WSJ: Payback time. "We’re going to eat and eat and eat," Mr. Ballmer said. It may take a while, he said, but "all they can do is lose. They have no upside. They’re on the downside of the slope, baby."

NY Times reviews "Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire".

Remember my coffee cup from yesterday? Well, it made it into the Manila Express™ user interface. Yesterday it was a nobody, now it's a star!

Suck: "Everybody I talk to has a hard time not laughing. I was on Good Morning America this morning and watched Charlie [Gibson] read the thing off the TelePrompTer. He got this horrible smirk on his face. Everybody seems to think the whole thing is hilarious. But I didn't think it would spread beyond the 500 or 600 people on the server."

Dave Farber: President's Cyber-Security Advisors.

Now that discuss.userland.com is performing well (again) we've been getting visits from the turd-droppers.

Linux Newbies: Death by X.

MacWEEK: Apple's new hardware. "The 400MHz model, with 64MB of RAM and a 6GB hard drive, sells for $2,499; the 500MHz model, with 128MB of RAM and a 12GB hard drive, will set you back a hefty $3,499."

10/29/99: "BTW, watch out for the "nice" ones. I've seen this over and over. It's a personality trait, just like every other personality trait, developed as a strategy, to fit into whatever family you were born into. Often nice people end up rising to the top, but what do they contribute?"

Over at Pyra, news that Derek Powazek is joining their team. Pyra is the company that does Blogger. The sites it generates are easy to use and don't do weird shit like opening links in other windows, and obscuring the lower-left corner of the browser window (the place where you're supposed to see the URL of links before you click on them). So who's zooming who? Will Powazek start thinking like a Web application developer, or will Pyra become an art shop?

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