Funny bias, Apple has. When discovering an unknown PC in the network, Mac shows an icon of an old, grey monitor with a blue screen

Just found a web site creation app that’s exclusively made for mac and promises to be simple while extensible: RapidWeaver. The new version 4.0 has just been shipped, so I’ll definiteley give it a try.

Coming from Dreamweaver and being more the hands-on coding guy who did not yet find the right editor, I’m waiting for something that closes the gap between pure WYSIWYG and the textpad approach.

RapidWeaver is quite promising since they seam to have chosen the proper ingredients: clear separation of content and style (XHTML and CSS clearly separated), templating (they call it “Themes”), an easy way to publish only updated content, extensibility by plugins, code snippets,… just to name a few.

And: It just looks beautiful on a mac. For many software engineers, this is not a major focus, but a nice and handy UI makes you so much more creative and productive. I’ll keep you updated about my experiences.

Meanwhile: Give it a try yourself!

A friend forwarded a link to a Ars Technica article on app development comparison between Microsoft and Apple. The tag line with that came with the link already gave the impression that it won’t be a Pro-Windows article.

Coincidence, that my request got responded by a typical MS .NET application server error message?

To give you a little taste of what I’ve seen on my spontaneous backpacker trip through Switzerland, France and Spain, I’ve just uploaded some of the highlights. Will take some time to prepare and upload the rest, I guess.

Sorry that the gallery is temporary offline. Last week I saw that my flickr pro account expired which I didn’t want to extend through an unsecured network during holiday travel (you know that I did my experience with this).

I just extended my flickr Pro account, so this shouldn’t happen again before 2010

[Update] Gallery online again! Found out that the gallery bug was nothing that flickr would be accountible for. A weired glitch that occurs about twice a year was the reason: MySQL database corruption on the flickr cache table. The error looked like this: “Can’t open file: ‘flickr_cache.MYI’ (errno: 144)”. A “REPAIR TABLE flickr_cache” did the job and now it purrs like a cat again.

Can you believe that: there’s no Saturday train from Paris to Stuttgart with a single place available (except for 1st class for €210)! The buses don’t serve the main routes Saturday as well. Knowing that I will have to leave Toulouse with the night train to have a chance getting back to Germany on hitch-hiking.

Just enjoyed the last sun here before getting back to where snow and rain seam to feel comfortable at home…
It’s a pitty that Garorock was sold out you guys have fun!

Sitting on Plaza Santa Ana I realize that finally I arrived. It’s holiday, Je suis en vacance, esta es vacansas (this is not spanish I guess, but it sounds like it).

I could be walking around here for days, interrupting wherever I can for a hand full of Tapas, una cerveza de barril and café con leche.

Enjoying that right now
and will take the train to San Sebastian tomorrow morning to further get to Toulouse on Friday for the Garorock Festival.

Life is good, I’d say!

Whow, I forgot how great backpacker travelling is! Have been taken to Lausanne last Thursday to revisit the beautiful city I’ve been studying in in 1999. From there, hitch-hiking to Geneva (cool party;)), next day with train to Montpellier, France.

Didn’t expect to find such an amazing city with a great young crowd willing to party all night long (bars close at 1AM which is arkward but clubs are busy til morning). The beach is a great place to chill, take the bus 28 from Place de l’Europe.

Sunday, Herman from Barcelona took me to Figueres. Dali museum is a great place to spend the afternoon, but be careful to not make your way through it with all the screaming school class excursion folks.

The night train brought me to Madrid where I’m just about to start my second day and with it the second half of my vacation.

It is incredible how many people you meet and how many things you can see on a backpacking tour! Except for a stolen battery charger for my camera (well, it’s not essential but still hurts me) every part of my trip got me surprisingly great people and impressions.

That’s it for now - I’m curious to see more of this beautiful, busy, sunny but windy city…

There’s still no support for Sony CS-1 on Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Quite disappointing. I’m waiting for a solution, since the current situation renders this cool device useless for Mac users of the latest OS version.

The device is not recognized at all. Therefore Parallels or VMWare Fusion cannot come to the rescue. All you can do use a separate PC. Well done…

Follow-up: 44377447

Hello Gerrit,

Thank you for contacting us regarding the status of Bug ID# 5640571.

At this time, there isn’t any new information available for this issue. I have checked with engineering, and the issue is still being investigated.

We will do our best to keep you informed as new information becomes available. Please be sure to regularly check the seed or release notes for potential or related fixes that might affect this issue.

We sincerely appreciate your patience and thank you for your support.

I still find it quite astonishing, how Apple managed to enter a completely new field with the iPhone. Do your own interpretation of the sales figures. For some people, the iPhone is a big success story. For others it doesn’t sell the way it was foreseen.

No matter what the sales figures say, I won’t be too wrong when I state that this new device changed the way we look at mobile phones today and the near future. Again in the history of computers and adgets, Apple managed to make a statement that raised our expectations tremendously. Just to pick a few of the features that excite me:

• The touch interface: Makes us forget about hardware buttons as I missed them on my T9 phones and as I liked them on the Nokia Communicator 9300; Gives us completely new ways to browse lists, pictures, zoom in and out,…
• Functional convergence: Hop from your addresses to the according pin on Google Maps, Search a shop in Google maps and directly make a call or visit its web site from the pin’s context menu. Did you ever think that it can be that easy before iPhone?
• SMS history: We’re using chat software like Skype, iChat, ICQ, AIM,… for years now. The step to organize the SMS history the same way the well-known chat history works, is not a big step. What’s the big deal about displaying it as a conversation?

Don’t get me wrong! These features have one thing in common: They are not rocket science. With most of the best ideas, they are simple in general. But There has just got to be some one to come up with them. This time, it was Apple. Again.

What doesn’t amaze me is the fact that it was not Sony, Nokia or Motorola who came up with those ideas. It had to be someone who was able to think outside the bun (and never had made any experiences in the mobile phone sector yet). Existing players either were to blind for completely new solutions or were afraid of the huge step they would take. Of course, it is quite a risk to come out with a device like the iPhone.

Is this risk an innovation killer for the major players? Is Apple the only one who can sell those things? Is this the only company that can (pretty well) keep secrets until the spots turn on for Steve Job’s key note speeches?

Published quite a while ago, I still want to share a great article with you. It depicts some details about the iPhone history and gives you an insight on the challenges for developing a mobile phone. From the business as well as the technical perspective.