Occasional Thoughts

Some thoughts of what could happen if that headline above could become a reality.

Most probably you've already heard about Steve Jobs dislike of the Adobe Flash Player. A War that started when it was announced that the iPad will not support Flash and his claims that HTML 5 is superior to Flash (I already blogged about this topic). The current climax is the change in the famous section 3.3.1 of the Apple developer contract that forbids the use of any programming language which is not approved by Apple directly targeting towards the Flash Packager contained in the Creative Suite 5 (CS5). This Flash Packager can create a native iPhone application from Flash code.

This change in the Apple developer license domination eventually forced Adobe to throw away their work in the Flash Packager shortly after its announcement and a refocus on other platforms as written by Mike Chambers.

Understandably this caused quite some uproar and finally Steve Jobs has felt the need to comment on this on the Apple web site. However his Thoughts on Flash contain several falsehoods and half-truth. Jesse Warden has written a long post commenting several of such points. I recommend reading this for the details and I do not want to repeat this. Just some points I would like to highlight and add.

Just in case you are using an HP xw6600 Workstation just like I do and you feel that it is has an awful performance. There is a BIOS update available that might boost the workstations performance.

In my case on the workstation a full project build took over 16 minutes before the update, while my laptop, which is 3 years older,  was able to do the same in just 12 minute. After the BIOS update the workstation did the same job in 7 minutes, so in less than 50% of the previous time.

As I already wrote I have visited the JAX conference last year. Two of the best sessions have been repeated at the W-Jax in Munich and are available online (both in German language):

• Angewandte Architekturkommunikation, Dr. Gernot Starke
• Java Programmierung im Multicorezeitalter, Angelika Langer
  

Congratulations Microsoft for finally introducing some features KDE users already enjoy.

Just saw some Windows 7 screenshots on Heise Online that once again reveals some Microsoft "innovations" that KDE users already enjoy.

Taskbar shows related documents

OK, the first screenshot shows something really new. It associates an entry on the taskbar with documents recently opened with that application. Could be a nice feature. However in general I think the list of recent documents is more useful. Why shall I first start an application to see it in the taskbar and then open a document related to that? But OK... let's give Microsoft one point for that.