Though it may seem like everything has an RSS feed nowadays, lots of sites still lack the feature, leaving RSS fiends with no option but to actually surf the web (blasphemous!). Fortunately, there's Dapper: The Data Mapper, a web service that will take information from a site and package it in the form of your choice (RSS feeds, Google Maps, iCalendar, and more).
In order to create a "Dapp," or Dapper app, navigate to the Dapper site and click on "create a new Dapp." The next few steps are very interesting, requiring users to answer a variety of questions regarding the source of information. The answers will depend on the format you choose and the information you'd like to collect. Options include RSS, Dapp XML, Google Gadget and others. The process of creating a Dapp should be pretty easy if the user understands the concept of RSS.
It may seem like RSS feed creation is the most obvious function of the service, but it's in the more complex stuff that Dapper shines. You can, for example, have the latest YouTube search results for a given keyword appear in your iCalendar daily. The possibilities certainly aren't endless, but there are a lot of them.
So you have a nice playlist growing in your iTunes library, but what happens when you're out on the road and all you have with you is your mobile phone? nuTsie is here to help.
nuTsie is a music client that streams in your iTunes library. Well, as our friends at EngadgetMobile have pointed out, the nuTsie system actually reads the names of your tracks and matches them to whats on nuTsie's server. With this in mind, your main computer does not have to be left on, and the nuTsie application does not require you to upload music anywhere. All you have to do to get started is upload your iTunes Library.xml file to nuTsie's server under your account.
Performance for this service is said to be pretty good, with extremely good connection speeds. Just watch out when you close your clamshell phone, some have been reported to shut the nuTsie applications right off. The service is free to use during the public beta period, but the list of compatible mobile devices is pretty slim at the moment.
Mac users seem to always get it last, and this upcoming version of Office 2008 is no exception. The team at Microsoft has been testing the next version of Office for Mac which is scheduled to be out in the middle of this year, and luckily adds some features that Apple fans have been missing out on.
Office 2008 has been finally released in a private beta test version for Mac users to test on Intel and Power PC setups. This release has taken longer than Microsoft's normal schedule of 18-24 months for new Mac versions of software releases. The current Mac version of Office is 2004 came out in April 2004. Mac Office will also finally get support for XML file formats, which was added in the Windows Office 2007 version. Office for Mac will also see an application called My Day, which give quick access to calendar items. Other improvements include improved page layout in Word and Excel with ledger sheets.
An Office alternative that more and more users are getting turned onto is the new OpenOffice 2.2 which has recently been released.
Could there secretly be a Mozilla desktop environment in the works? We could always use another competitor in the marketplace, and we would love few things more than if that competitor were the Mozilla Foundation.
There's a discussion over at the Mozilla.dev.planning list that has stirred up the idea of building a Desktop Environment. The whole environment would be based on XUL (XML User Interface Language) and could become a reality much like extensions to the popular Firefox, Thunderbird, and the Minimo Mobile Browser product lines. Only time will tell if this discussion evolves into the build of the next generation cross OS desktop environment.
Google recently launched their beautified personalized homepage themes. These themes provide a nice contrast to the once boring whiteness of the traditional Google layout. But lurking deep inside the XML there stands some interesting tidbits. The "Easter Eggs" that Marissa Mayer hinted about not that long ago are scattered about the themes, and appear at certain time specific interval. Two decimal places past Pi (3.14) as a matter of fact, will see a new skin overlay appear at 3:14 AM local time on top of your selected theme, and stay there for one minute.
The XML files for the overlays can be found here, with the time changes noted inside:
Many states and organizations are passing laws or setting mandates to use open, documented file formats approved by international standards bodies. Currently, the worlds most popular word-processing document format, Microsoft's Word "Doc" doesn't meet that requirement. Losing MS Office customers as large as the state of California would be a huge blow to Microsoft, so there is obviously strong motivation to get the ISO on board with what MS is selling. We've reported before on potentially more sane alternatives which exist to Microsoft's bloated and unwieldy XML format; Can we help it if the ISO doesn't read Download Squad?
Oh, how I love free things. Especially free pretty things. And I'm the kind of person who things Flash charts and graphs are pretty, so I present amCharts and PHP/SWF Charts. amCharts is a relative newcomer that creates attractive Flash pie and donut charts based on data you put in a text file in either XML or CSV formats (which makes exporting from Excel easy). It's very configurable, allowing you to specify colors, border, tilt (for a 3D effect), labels, fonts, backgrounds, and so on. amCharts' creators promise bar, column, and line charts this spring.
PHP/SWF Charts is sort of amCharts' big brother. It's been around awhile longer and features more than a dozen different chart types and nearly unlimited configurability. As the name implies, PHP/SWF Charts uses PHP to load data from dynamic sources, but it's not required--there's XML/SWF Charts that will load data from a regular XML file. With its advanced features comes more complexity, of course, and the learning curve is probably greater, but if you need, say, a stacked 3D column chart, it's the way to go.
As I mentioned, both charting tools are free, but not totally free. The free version of amCharts will put a small link to amCharts.com in the corner of your charts, and PHP/SWF Charts will direct users to its web site if they click on it. For a single-site license amCharts will cost you 45 Euros (about US$60) and PHP/SWF charts will cost you US$45. "Enterprise" licenses for unlimited sites cost 245 Euros (~US$322) or $550 respectively.
Do we still care about Corel's WordPerfect? Is there anyone out there that actually still uses it? Maybe I'm wrong but even people that have no idea about software still tend to use MS Word. Dell did at one time did bundle the app with some of their systems, but not any more. Anyway, Corel might trying to generate some buzz as they will be adding support for Open Document Format as well as Microsoft's Open XML to WordPerfect, starting sometime in mid-2007. Corel is not disclosing any other developments that might be built into the next version of the software, but says it will keep the public up-to-date on their plans. Is WordPerfect on a move to become a player again in the Office arena? They did announce that Firefox bundling will be coming down the pipes. Hmmm..
One thing I didn't know about AIM Triton before now is that the whole thing is built on AOL's Boxely, a toolkit for building full-fledged desktop apps with JavaScript and XML. This probably sounds familiar, especially if you're familiar with Mozilla's XUL (which Firefox is built on) or Microsoft's Avalon/XAML. Boxely was created by notable Netscape and Firefox developer Joe Hewitt. Hewitt has since left AOL, but Boxely is alive and kicking, and is now available as a free download from AOL. If you want to quickly get an idea of what Boxely is capable of, I recommend downloading the OCP (Open Client Platform) Preview from the Boxely web site and checking out the ocpSamples folder. It contains a bunch of demo applications that show off its various features, from windowing to animation to graphics. In a the third of three posts (1, 2) about Boxely's genesis, Hewitt writes about what sets Boxely apart from XUL and Avalon, and I must say between that, the Boxely documentation, and the demo apps, I'm definitely going to be checking it out if I ever decide to write a Windows app. I am in whole-hearted agreement with Hewitt when he suggests to AOL, "If you were to port Boxely to OS X and Linux, and maybe, oh I don't know, open source the library, I think you'd have a real winner on your hands!"
Apple, Barclays Capital, BP, The British Library, Essilor, Intel, Microsoft, NextPage, Novell, Statoil, Toshiba and the The United States Library of Congress have all approved the Office Open XML (OOXML) specification to be sent to the ECMA (a European standardization association). This is the next step in Microsoft's spec being accepted across many systems, platforms and applications. This is also the format that is the new hotness in the 2007 version of Office, at a beta-tester's workstation near you. I have to say that I have been very happy with Microsoft's 2007 Office system, and especially the XML format. It seems to make documents save and open a little bit faster, not to mention the endless interoperability features I haven't had a chance to test out yet. I think Microsoft is really on the right track here, and it shows, even in the beta. Hopefully this standard will be as versatile and flexible as we all think it will, but right now it is looking good.
What's Skweezer, you ask? Well, on its own, it's a free, platform-independent web service that optimizes page content for mobile devices. The benefit of Skweezer technology being added to Bloglines is that you won't have to specifically go to the Skweezer portal when you want to force a particular site to be friendly to your mobile device. When you visit a page via Bloglines Mobile, Skweezer compresses and reformats the content on the fly. Bonus: Skweezer can also translate content into more than a dozen languages.
Microsoft shocked me a bit with this one. If you use Microsoft's web service specifications (XML, SOAP, UDDI, etc), you don't even have to reference Microsoft or mention that what you're using is from them. They have stated that they won't enforce their patent. What? Microsoft not wanting credit for one of their ideas? That's cool. As a developer, there are plenty of restrictions and rules you have to follow when writing software, so this just makes it a bit easier, not having to add one more thing to your application. These web service specs are used in many contexts other than traditional desktop software, so it is a bit more complicated to add credit to each instance of the technology. It isn't so cut and dried. Imagine if you had to credit someone every time someone consumed a web service, it is doable (if you have to) but it's also a pain.
Everybody likes quick and dirty apps, especially me. Anything quick and dirty that is also free is my holy grail. Microsoft is offering the XML Notepad 2006 for download, which is quick, dirty, and free. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is a simple XML editor for editing XML documents. Sometimes less is more, and this app proves it. XML Notepad does a nice job of helping you organize XML nodes and easily modify XML documents. Like I said, quick and dirty is the focus here, and it isn't (by any means) full featured, but it does it's job well and makes quick work of editing XML, should you ever need to. I 'm sure that most of the time, XML documents are managed by more complex processes and programs, because that is the point after all. This app is nice to have in case you run into a small-scale edit that needs to be done. You don't need to launch your behemoth programming IDE to do it.
Google dropped the word a little while ago about some Open Source Community thingy they were working on, and Greg Stein said that he was just putting the finishing touches on it. Well, it looks like it has been released.
The new service from Google is a hosting environment called Project Hosting, that allows developers to upload and store any open-source project code they have in their arsenal. It also allows those interested, to search and download open source codes in Python, C++, Java, Audio, XML, CSharp, Graphics, and many other formats.
Google Code allows users to create new projects under the new hosting environment, giving it a name, summary, description, assigning it a license, (if it is licensed), and labeling it with keywords. The online description together with the keywords, is how users will find the open source code on the Google Project Hosting website.
When a project is opened, It is displayed with the title, description, licenses, and labels. There are also links to Blogs, and Google Groups info on that particular open source code. A great job from Google to help open up and grow the open source community.
Oh, how I love free things. Especially free pretty things. And I'm the kind of person who things Flash charts and graphs are pretty, so I present amCharts and PHP/SWF Charts. 
In this issue of 
