There’s a lot of talk going around about Sparkle, Microsoft’s new UI design tool set, but I’ve been scared that this is the end of good user interface design since the second paragraph I read about it:

It’s the rise of the graphic designer!

(from Scoble’s blog)

At which point in time did we start letting graphic designers design user interfaces?  What happened to all the user interface designers?  You know, the ones that think about how to make software intuitive and user friendly, efficient and productive as opposed to flashy and cool looking.

I’ve really come to hate bookstores.  I don’t want to buy books online because I like to peruse them a little before I fork out a hundred bucks to make sure it’s really want I want.  The back cover blurb is only accurate on the good books so you’ve got no idea whether you should trust it or not.  When I walk into a brick and mortar book store though they never have what I want.  I was in Borders this afternoon and their computer section seems to have dramatically shrunk and now has “feature shelves” where instead of being full of books they feature just two books on the shelf, most likely to cover up the fact that they don’t have enough stock to actually fill the shelves.

I’m with Geek News – PDC has been a big build up for an average set of announcements.  I’ve got to stop reading Scoble’s blog, he over hypes everything and then the actual announcements disappoint.  Here’s Scoble’s summary of the announcements:

1. Office 12 demonstrated publicly for the first time. Tons of new features and new UI.
2. Windows Vista features demonstrated publicly, including search integration, new performance enhancements, new sidebar.
3. LINQ (Language INtegrated Query). Cool database stuff for .NET developers.
4. Windows Presentation Foundation/E. “E” for everywhere.
5. Start.com updates released.
6. Atlas (our AJAX Web development toolkit) demoed for first time.
7. Microsoft Max. A new photo sharing and display application.
8. Digital Locker. A new place to find, try, and buy software.
9. New sidebar and gadgets and new Microsoft gadget Site.
10. Coming later today? Sparkle. A new way to build Windows applications.
11. Coming later today? Lots of server stuff.
12. Coming later today? More Office stuff.
13. Coming later today? Workflow stuff.

All in all a pretty nice set of announcements but definitely nothing revolutionary.  There are a couple of things that could have been really excited but got slaughtered by the Microsoft, gotta maintain the monopoly policy.  In particular Windows Presentation Foundation/E – cool, cross platform support that includes all the major browser that’s awesome.  Wait, what’s that?  It’s a subset?  So when I develop my application I have to have two versions – a Windows only with all the cool stuff version and a other suckers version.  That’s great, for Microsoft at least.

If you’re looking for a job in sunny Brisbane, Australia, and the job description below sounds appealing, send me a resume at adrian@ephox.com.

Position Description

Title

Senior Software Engineer

Description

Ephox, a world-leading, content-authoring software provider seeks to employ a Senior Software Engineer for its Paddington office in Brisbane. The position responsibilities include writing technical specifications, collaborate in design/architectural recommendations of overall systems, implement software QA practices and be the technical lead in the Ephox development team. The position offers the opportunity to work with leading technologies and software vendors including content management providers.  The successful applicant may be expected to provide professional services directly to customers or partners both on and off site. They will also be expected to actively participate in other areas of the business including requirements gathering for new and existing products, mentoring and pre-sales support.  

About 5 years ago while I was doing some part time work for my university one of my lecturers walked by, looked at the program I was developing and asked: “You’re using antlr or something like it to generate your parser aren’t you?”.  I wasn’t, I’d written the parser by hand in an hour or two and it worked exactly as I wanted so I saw no need to go back and rewrite it.

Brian McCallister gives a brief synopsis of Microsoft’s 2005 financial statement. I think it pretty clearly shows why people dislike Microsoft:

Regarding Windows sales and profits:

Well, we see a pretty nice top line revenue of $12.2 billion. The fun part of that is that the operating income (profit before taxes and interest) is a tidy $9.4 billion. It is awfully nice to pull a 77% operating margin (profit before taxes, hereafter referred to as “profit”). Regarding Office sales and profits:

In the comments for my post Ant Is Cool, Erik Hatcher points out that Groovy has ant support (see http://groovy.codehaus.org/Ant+Scripting).  While that’s cool and all, I really don’t want to add a new language into the mix just to call out to Ant so not a great option for my case, but useful to know.  What is more useful however is knowing that you can embed Groovy in ant scripts using the Groovy ant task (also via the ant script task since 1.5 or 1.6 I think).

Scoble pointed to this article by Ben Askins comparing Google’s customized homepage and Microsoft’s Start.com.  Unfortunately the comparison was overly complex and missed some critical criteria, so I thought I’d do my own.  I’ll be using a very simple set of criteria, one criterion in fact.

Does it work?

First up, Google.  As the screen shot below shows, it works.

Now here’s how Start.com looks:

A nice clean search engine interface, but unfortunately no customization options.  It seems Microsoft forgot to do any testing using Safari. Oh well. How useful can a start page be if it doesn’t work in all the browsers you want to use?

I’ve been thinking for a while that I should get a cheap car audio system that includes an aux-in jack so that I could use my iPod to play music in my car (FM transmitters are just too unreliable for city driving and I don’t have a tape deck, only a CD player). Reading this article though makes me wonder if I can just get a car audio system that’s specifically designed for the iPod.

I think I’ve reached the point in my programming career where I’m about as lazy as you can get. Fortunately I’ve also started heavily leveraging the power of ant recently as a cross-platform, heavily Java oriented, shell scripting tool.  Shell scripting isn’t really the right word for it though because it’s really the declarative nature of ant files that makes it work so much better than shell scripts, python, ruby etc.  I don’t think about how to do things I just say what I want done and it happens.

Dear lazyweb,

I’m writing a J2EE (well technically JSP/Servlets but no EJBs) webapp which has two goals:

1. Secure authentication is required.  Unauthorized users shouldn’t be able to access anything except a login page.
2. Easy access for authenticated users.  ie: Don’t prompt users for their password every time they open a new browser instance and don’t time out logins.  Prompting the first time they access the system using a particular browser/computer is okay though.  Even prompting once per day would be okay though not ideal.

I realize that these goals tend to conflict to a degree – ie: it’s far more secure to log users out every so often so that if someone gets access to a machine they logged in from they don’t get access automatically. We’ll have to live with that risk and so lets just assume that the systems users are accessing the system from are secure or users are smart enough to always click logout when they’re finished.

On Friday night while strolling along the riverside at Southbank just like on our first date, I proposed to the beautiful Janet and she accepted.  The wedding bells aren’t expected to actually start ringing until Janet finishes uni in a couple of years but we’re very excited to be about telling everyone how happy we are together.