Category: I care about…

Apple’s Research & Rip-off department

Peter and Apple's Copymachine

This whole thing is pretty interesting, especially when you’re as big as Apple and you have as dedicated a following as it does. And when your caché is innovation and constant coolification, you’ve always gotta deliver something wicked to knock ’em dead.

But, one supposes, those ideas need not come from within, and, when you’re Apple (or Google or whomever), looking to your community for ideas is probably as sure a bet as any for coming up with something you’d not thunk up (or at least not yet ripped off).

And so while Jobs gave his keynote at WWDC yesterday pointing out Redmond’s failure to deliver on Vista while OSX continues to steam ahead, I found it interesting that many of the features that they’re selling this upgrade with can already be found in the Mac developer community.

Take for example:

Now, don’t get me wrong. Building these features into the OS means that lots more people will get the benefit of these tools that many of us early adopters have already discovered. And, given Apple’s engineering and design pedigree, oftentimes that means that the Apple versions will be more stable, in some cases more useful and almost certainly more pretty (though not always).

But, it also means that a bunch of independent software developers who rely on selling these small but potent tools that Apple has now co-opted will lose business, not to mention get no return on the hard work, money and time spent building these tools. All Apple has to do is summarily drop a few of these features into a major dot-release, crank up the hype machine, and poof, more developers out of work. As Marc put it, what kind of ecosystem is that?

Unlike the open source community, where developer’s names are attached to the patches and contributions that they make to a project, Apple offers no such credit, and, in turn, takes all the glory.

And, if you read me much, you know that I’m a big proponent of open source, of open standards, and open formats; I also tend to see patents and trademarks as belonging to the litigious and anti-cooperative capitalist elite who can afford such protections, forcing the small business innovator to choose between either doing what she loves or taking the steps to protect it — as the cost, time and passion pursuing either makes both rather mutually exclusive.

And so it is yet another manifestation of the digital divide — of those who have the money and the legal departments to protect their innovations — or sue or pay off those who innovate for them — against those who live from registration to registration, making an independent and meaningful, yet staccatic economic, existence.

Update:Menuet developer Phill Ryu comes to pretty much the same conclusion, but with a few different examples.

WordPress makes a move towards hAtom, gets upgrades

WordPress login

I missed WordCamp this weekend (owing to the fact that I was presenting at Wikimania) but there seems to have been some good announcements that came out of the event.

For one thing, the hosted WordPress service added a few features, one of which is a $15 premier service that lets you edit your CSS. Blogger offers this service for free, but heck, WordPress is still independent and needs to have a way to bring in some dough — and as this is a highly desirable feature, will probably lead to income for the Automattic folks at least a fraction of what Cyworld is pulling in with all their custom digital paraphernalia and trinkets.

So but that’s not all… no, Andy Skelton announced (from what I hear) the availability of a new skeleton theme called Sandbox that is designed for themers. If you’re on WordPress.com you can go enable it now, as I have (it’s totally basic, so I imagine that you’ll see a lot of styles start to appear for it) or download it to put on your own blog.

I’ll actually be doing this once I return to San Francisco.

Why?

Simple: Sandbox is the first known theme to support hAtom.

Why does this matter?

The same reason why hResume matters. And then some. It’s because it not only puts more of the power of publishing into the author’s hands, but it also removes the need to RSS or ATOM.

Let me say that again: because the Sandbox theme is marked up with hAtom in its HTML, there’s no need to supply an alternative link to RSS or ATOM because the page itself is able to be read by newsreaders.

Or, will be. In the meantime, we can use Chris Casciano‘s script for NetNewWire to allow client-side subscribing or server-side transforms to convert any page into a subscribable document.

The potential here is immense — if Matt’s able to move the entirety of the WordPress.com theme base over to hAtom, we’d have quite the playground for an HTML-based syndication format, removing the overhead of generating RSS or ATOM feeds. Instead, you’d subscribe to a website and its content, not some anti-DRY format.

Update: Bill Humphries has released a version of Kubrick that supports hAtom.

Chris Casciano’s microformats hacks

In case you haven’t been watching, Chris Casciano has been pushing in some potential…ful directions lately (“potent” just seems wrong in this context) with microformats. First he releases a script to extract microformats in NetNewsWire then he creates a tool for subscribing to hAtom feeds (which basically allow you to subscribe to an properly marked up HTML document instead of nasty-looking RSS).

On top of that, he pushing the envelope for microformats support in Camino. Not too shabby.

Keep track of this stuff in my Microformats Ma.gnolia group.

MySource, the next social worknet?

So it’s funny, but there are now two projects already that are being hosted in Google’s new open source environment that I want to “join” (requests are already in to the creators)… I wonder if, like Flickr groups, you’ll eventually be able to “join” GC projects — and be able to contribute and so forth…

This still doesn’t deal with the need for tools to enable non-code-writers to get involved in open-source (as is the goal of slow and effusive CivicForge) but the simplicity of the GC site makes it much more attractive to folks like me, who can’t stand the clutter and obnoxiousness of SF.

Oh, and in other news, SF is now allowing you to use external SVN repositories for your projects. Accelerated by the Google announcement? Methinks so.

Announcing VibeKit, the NetVibes desktop application

VibeKit

It’s pretty incredible when you can dream up an idea or an improvement in your flow one day and have it in your Applications folder the next, but that’s what happens when you run into cool kats like Chip Cuccio, the developer of Gcal and now VibeKit.

I got this message tonight:

http://www.odeo.com/flash/audio_player_standard_gray.swf
powered by ODEO

The point of the app is pretty simple: give me a stand-alone dashboard for all the web apps that I need to get to quickly that don’t have dedicated desktop-side apps (like PBWiki or Blinksale)… and that keeps me posted on what’s going on so that I’m not constantly switching from my Gmail tab to NetNewsWire to 1001. And so on.

VibeKit iconOh, and good news, it’s open source and supports Sparkle framework for software updates.

So get yourself a NetVibes account and download now (Universal binary)!

WordPress 2.0.4 rolls, Veloso joins Automattic

AvalonStarPress

Good stuff over at WordPress, with a security and “stuff” release, and a new addition to the Automattic family: Flockdotcom designer Bryan Veloso (aka AvalonStar).

First project for Bryan: implement Shuttle with support for Canvas.

Oh, and don’t forget to rub elbows at the upcoming WordCamp.

Tom, say it ain't so!

The Demise of MySpace Tom?

Tom, I know we haven’t always seen eye-to-eye but you were my first friend on MySpace, and so, in my book, that made us BFF.

But it troubles me, Tom, when I read today that the government has passed US House Resolution 5319, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). The act looks at how much a “commericial social networking site and/or chat room”:

  1. is offered by a commercial entity;
  2. permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information;
  3. permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users;
  4. elicits highly-personalized information from users; and
  5. enables communication among users.

Clearly this is aimed at MySpace!

So Tom… when I went to your MySpace page to see what you had to say about it… you’d been deleted! If this act is about “deleting online predators” well, I can only hope that this was a mistake, but… I’m afriad that, Tom, there’s simply no way we can be BFF if you’ve been deleted.

For whatever reasons.

I hope you understand.