Cafe Bucky

The first thing to get out of the way is the comparison between Panther and Tiger. The Tiger crowd is much sharper:


and the Panther crowd was blurry (from October 2003):


From this alone, we can conclude that Tiger is a better OS.

As is true with any Friday or Saturday evening, Apple SoHo was crowded:


It’s a good thing that there are 2-3 more Apple stores in the works for Manhattan (one next to FAO Schwartz). Apple SoHo is simply too small to handle the island by itself.

I did promise to get a blurry shot:

After half an hour or so of what was a surprisingly boring demo of Spotlight, Sophia and I high-tailed it over towards Astor Place and rang up Susan (armed with a Holga) to come join us for din-din. Susan is at home, waiting for the post Apple store call:

You should know that if you ever go to Astor Place, you must state clearly which Starbucks you’ll meet at, since there are a couple that are catty-corner. The one next to the Downtown exit is, of course, much better. They use better beans, have friendly people, foam the milk better, and count out change a little faster. The one across the street is merely proud to be in its shadow. The other thing to know about Astor Place is that there are hundreds of people milling around waiting for their friends to show up. It’s The Portal into the Lower East Side. The tattoos and piercings get better by the block as you walk eastward …

Here you can see Sophia dutifully studying the Tiger “manual”. I’m, er, people watching:

So we all meet up, walk all over, and end up finding a cool Italian place on 2nd Avenue. Then things started really getting blurry…
	.. seriously .. .

Nah nah nah, just kidding! This wasn’t some booze-fest at CBGB’s. We ambled around in that in-between zone where we aren’t tourists, but we’re not from that neighborhood either. Clutching the precious copy of Tiger, we bounded down to the train:


Time to transfer:


Bleary-eyed, Tiger would have to wait! Moral is: go right home after purchasing, do not head out for a night on the town :-)

Yeah, something to say about Tiger soon. Here’s a little nod to HD-like aspect ratios… My daughter and I have been busy checking out Apple’s new Cat.

Deja vu all over again.

It was October 24th, 2003, that I stood in line to buy Panther. I’ll certainly be at Apple SoHo tomorrow night, if only to keep some sense of Geek Cred. I mean, it would have been all too easy to just order the damn Tiger from Amazon, right? I enjoy a sense of occasion. I’ll even wear my Panther dog tags. To those that understand, no explanation is necessary, and to those that don’t, no explanation will suffice :-)

As I did last time, I’ll be cautious and only install Tiger on an external FW drive. I only have the one Mac here in NY, but have about 5 FW drives - easy call! I can suffer booting Panther outside the house for a little while. The word on the web points to some broken apps and some annoyances. Word to the wise: don’t switch over completely until the first update (or second, or third …), and for gawd’s sake, back up your schtuff!

I’ll try to get some blurry pictures.

I’ve been very impressed lately with what’s happening in the AJAX world. There are so many new pieces of tech out there that are just waiting to be assembled in exciting ways.

Check out an edit-in-place example. Sure the TiddlyWiki does this, but this is also showing all sorts of drag and drop functionality. I especially like the Slideshow Sorter. Also see Walter Zorn’s site

Then take a gander at HoverSmack, which is combining search requests with DIV generation

And then watch Sam Stephenson’s movie, where he goes through the process of converting a form to use AJAX (with Ruby on Rails) in just a few minutes …

Now imagine these elements coming together is more polished, fleshed out web apps …

Another thing I’ll check out soon (I need to be discplined, and get back to my real work, and my WP plugin) is Lickr, which accesses Flickr content in pure HTML and JavaScript.

A good place to find out what’s going on in this space is on del.icio.us

Draggable bits of content…

This writeup is a followup to IFrame Sub-Posts?. There’s some influence from what I commented on in TiddlyWiki Rox. There are a couple of personal desires: have a link go to an intermediary (where there can be several branches to choose from, each with some explanation), and to bring a bit of the Wiki experience into the blog realm.

This entry takes a look at the lifetime of a sub-post. The focus is on a possible plugin for WordPress.

(more…)

I’m going to sound like such a fanboy saying “TiddlyWiki Rocks”. But heck, it does. So check it out at tiddlywiki.com. In a nutshell, it’s a self-contained Wiki within a page.

I came across it while doing research into all things AJAX and XMLHttpRequest-ish. To me, it’s yet another example of how boundaries are getting pushed in all directions in the “old technologies being used in new ways” meme. I realize it isn’t strictly AJAX. The fact that it dynamically updates is where it’s at. It’s impressive.

The goal I’m after is to implement what I was talking about in “IFrame Sub-Posts?”. The TiddlyWiki is a bit of functionality that I find inspiring. The one thing I would add to is the ability to upload itself to a server (which dovetails into my interest in XMLHttpRequest).

These are fun, fast-moving webdev days we’re living in!

Wow, Macromedia + Adobe are merging this Fall. The initial things I’m reading on the Flashcoders list are all over the map. Some think it’s great, some think “better Adobe than Microsoft”, and some think it’s the end of the world.

I haven’t had much time to digest the news. Two patterns that come to mind are:

• This won’t change anything in the short term. Flash 8 will still be Flash 8.
• The Open Source compiler and player projects are going to keep chugging along. The Flash IDE isn’t gong to be the only SWF game in town.

I’m glad I am learning Flash, and it’ll be interesting to see how these two companies create synergy (smooth Photoshop batching to .SWF output comes to mind). Having said that though, I see a lot of renewed interest and possibilities in what is now being called the AJAX approach. I think we’re still taking the baby steps into the RIA (Rich Internet Application) era. It’s going to be interesting to see how “MacrAdobe” or “AdobeMedia” spans the worlds of Print, Video, Simple Online, and RIA. If they decide to make a series of silly moves, the F/OSS community will come up with projects to essentially “route around them”. If they do the right things, we’re better off in that direction. I’m of the mind of “wait and see, and if it turns out to be a bad marriage, the marketplace of ideas will prevail anyways”

Update - 9:40 AM, EST -

Apple buys Adobe!

Nah, just kidding. But for a moment there, it seemed within the realm of possibility, huh? :-)

I am pondering a piece of tech that I would like to have on my blog. It goes like this: some links would bring up an IFrame when clicked. The IFrame is a draggable window which contains arbitrary HTML (more explanation of something, links, etc.) For lack of a better name, call it a “sub-post”. Or perhaps “floating footnotes”.

The feature set, and constraints:

• iframe is launched via an onClick.
• ability to drag the frame (as in, out of the way of the rest of the post)
• multiple possible sub-posts per blog entry
• … and, by extension, ability to have sub-posts active from different entries on a page simultaneously
• work within the context of WordPress

The basic goal of this is to have a little floating frame which acts as an intermediary for certain links and/or explanations. In a way, it’s a nod towards a Wiki, but we’re not going to a whole new page. It’s more like a floating footnote.

I’ve worked on the tooltips code that used to be on AOL.Com, circa 2004 (very messy code I inherited, which would have given a lesser man nightmares :-) It consisted of one IFrame which was normally hidden, but which could be popped up from any one of 11 places. The content would be written to it on the fly. I’m not worried about coding the mechanics of “sub-posts”, but I am thinking most of it has been done already. But where? It seems like an obvious plug-in, but who’s done it?

To sum up, I want a toolkit for making arbitrary draggable IFrames within WordPress. It’s a little bit non-trivial, in that there would be some JavaScript, some CSS, extra DIVs for the IFrame, and extra divs for the content of the sub-posts. The first iteration of this would fold a sub-post into a discrete blog entry. The obvious next step is to have a sub-post become something a little more full-fledged (accessible from any blog entry) - but that one has a lot of architectural implications …