There’s an amazing new version of the ECF plugin for Eclipse that allows for remote Collaboration in Eclipse via the XMPP (Jabber, GTalk). Just log in to your GTalk account and start sharing editors with a friend.
You can see this in action in this video.
A review by Matt Stephens of JavaFX points out exactly what I think are some of its shortcomings. If I were to highlight the craziest part of all that Matt agrees with me on is that the mid-game switch in syntax, after books were being written on the subject, damaged the usability of tools, damaged the value of books (made them near worthless), and damaged the usefulness samples out on the web. Folks pull up samples and they don’t compile. Folks get a book and its syntax descriptions no longer match. Folks pull up tools and either have an old version that won’t compile new stuff or vice versa.
Additionally, JavaFX has seen two JavaOne conferences come and go with no formal release. Take this in contrast to the ever climbing version numbers of Silverlight and Flex and you can see that Sun is late to the game with a weak solution that keeps getting modified and doesn’t have concrete tools or books out yet. Draw your own conclusions based on those facts.
Lastly, if you love to give up your privacy in even more ways, then Project Hydrazine (you know, that deadly gas from the spy satellite that came down unexpectedly last year) will let you spill your usage guts to Sun.
Final quote from Matt:
“A bigger problem for Sun in the short-term is getting JavaFX – the building block for Hydrazine and Insight – out the door. A year since announcing JavaFX, Sun had nothing to offer JavaOne but shipment dates and shaky demos based on Java SE 6.0 update 10, which kept crashing during the JavaOne keynote.“
Comments like that must really irk Sun..
There’s a new Linux competitor to QuickSilver in town. It’s called GNOME Do, and it just reached version 0.5.
It offers the same quick keyboard shortcut commands that QuickSilver does. Noun-verb-directobject goodness abounds.
If you’ve never used QuickSilver on the Mac, use it for a week, and you’ll never be the same again. The keyboard takes on a whole new power.
Here are some excellent books on marketing by Seth Godin that I’m also done reading. At first you’ll say, “I’m not a marketer, so why would I read these?” One quick read through these books will change forever how you look at things that are marketed to you every day. It will make you a cynic about most ads, and also give you an entirely new vantage point on whatever you job is and how you “market” it to other people, perhaps without even knowing it. He also has a web site and more useful / very insightful blog. Even his video of his talk at Google is pretty good, though a bit longer than it should have been. I love his story about, “If cat food were being marketed to cats, it would come in one flavor, MOUSE! Instead, it is being marketed to people so it comes in flavors like Grilled Salmon. Because of course, cats in the wild start open fires and GRILL the salmon they catch in the river.“
I can hardly believe this work/exercise unit is truly in production, but sure enough, it is…
And although I can hear you runners out there getting excited, you will be dismayed that it maxes out at 2.0MPH. They are trying to be hip marketers with this YouTube video, but somehow, I just can’t see any of my coworkers crying out for this, nor getting an employer to pay for it.