As much as I love Apple and freely admit they make great products, I also have concerns with Apple’s closed-system approach. While there are some valid points to Apple’s ‘let us do the driving’ philosophy, I think users are better served when technology platforms are open.  So how cool would a Google tablet be?  After all, if they want to beat Windows at its own game, what better strategy than ripping off an Apple idea?

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I have held my tongue as far as comments on Apple’s iPad — there is more than enough other chatter from other quarters.  But a recent article in the New York Times, The Media Equation – To Deliver, iPad Needs Content Providers on Board – NYTimes.com caught my eye in a comment on book publisher’s response to the platform: Read the rest of this entry »

I recently read Jaron Lanier’s new book You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.  It was a gift, and while I hadn’t heard anything about the book, it looked promising.  Lanier is an early internet pioneer counting early work with virtual reality (and coining the term itself) among his accomplishments.  And the basic premise of the book — essentially a contrarian view of the current state of internet culture — is interesting.  A regular practice of challenging common assumptions and examining choices made along the way is healthy.  Unfortunately Mr. Lanier’s arguments are poorly supported, and often based on inconsequential or incorrect assumptions.  I’m not going to recap his whole argument here — check out the linked articles instead.  But here are a couple of points inspired by ideas exposed in the book: Read the rest of this entry »

Client asks “can I list multiple authors on an article in our CMS?” After a quick search and a little playing around I could give my standard WordPress answer “it turns out there is a plug-in for that!”  The Co-Authors Plus plug-in nicely met our needs.  We list both the author’s display name and the Biographical Description in the author tag line with the meta information at the head of the post.  And based on the suggestions in the plug-in’s readme.txt file I created the following function to generate the display:

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I attended an Apple sponsored presentation yesterday on using the Xcode IDE to build iPhone and iTouch apps.  It was a very well done presentation, and had me almost ready to rush out and buy a Macbook and iTouch to get started building cool apps — certainly easy to see why Apple App building has become such a popular past time (and big money maker for Apple).

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A recent Baseline article starts with the tag line “Global enterprises must develop a business process framework to ensure the success of collaboration technology implementations.”  Overall the article makes a number of good points — but it also left me feeling a little uneasy.  The whole social networking/collaboration workspace seems so dynamic I wonder if the typical time cycles of an enterprise decision process can keep pace with rapid technology growth and end-user expectations.

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