October 29, 2006
Adobe Labs and Eclipse RCP
Today I found the Adobe Labs site, which is where Adobe releases all of its beta preview software for testing and trials. There are also some developer tools such as the XML Toolkit, which allows for metadata to be stored within files. Currently XMP supports these file formats: JPEG, PSD, TIFF, AVI, WAV, MPEG, MP3, MOV. Also of interest on this site is the new Flex Builder application. What is interesting about this application is not so much that it is a new application for building Flex applications but rather than it has been developed using the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) framework. This is following a general trend for more and more applications to utilise the power of the RCP framework. For a list of some of the already developed RCP applications have a look at this page.
Links
Adobe Labs Site
XMP Toolkit
Eclipse Rich Client Platform
Adobe Flex Builder 2 for Macintosh
October 03, 2006
Midnight Inbox: Getting Things Done (GTD)
Getting Things Done (GTD) is the name of a personal time management book that describes a series of actions around the concept of creating lists to get things done. This has been picked up by the Mac community and there seems to be an almost cult following with GTD. We are now starting to see OSX applications that support the GTD principles. One of the better applications that has almost made the 1.0 version milestone is Midnight Inbox. This has to be one of the nicest designed applications that I have seen for a while, with close attention placed on typography.
Links
Wikipedia Article on Getting Things Done
Midnight Inbox Home Page
Cool OSX Apps Site
I have been subscribed to the RSS feed from the Cool OSX Apps site for quite some time now. It is a great little site that points out all the well developed OSX applications for the mac. In addition the site is well designed and has regular updates. The archive is also something else as it provides a live view of the articles against a timeline.
Links
CoolOSXapps.net
ALE: AJAX Linking and Embedding
Zimbra, the developers of one of the best Open Source communication platforms for the enterprise market, which runs completely within your browser has developed ALE. ALE is short for AJAX Linking and Embedding and is a specification on how to develop applications that can allow rich content be embedded within other pages all of which run within the web browser. Zimbra uses ALE in their advanced email client to allow content such as a table to be embedded into an email message in the browser, which can be edited, in place, still within the web browser. This specification is only for the most advanced AJAX developers as the specification is extremely void of content and really needs some work. However, even though the specification is thin the overall concept is extremely powerful and if taken up will allow for even greater capabilities within web-based applications.
Links
Zimbra Article on ALE
ALE Specification
