JD on EP

Mark Hall at ComputerWorld talks about the Flash-based email client Pronto. (The article later includes an AJaX "counterpoint" line about another version of another JavaScript library, with Tibco marketing guys saying "... the key advantage of AJAX over Flash as a foundation for Web development is its ubiquity among browsers." That's not righteous marketing -- "Ajax" is merely generic branding, and no one has yet shown a good way to describe which JS/CSS/HTM functionality a given app requires from how many audience members. His story does not make sense for me.)

Eric Meyer proposes that the W3C "become a foundation instead of a consortium", by having a few multimillionaires donate enough to hire invited-experts to committees, abolishing membership fees.

Gartner Group understands that PDF is now much more than just a way to get predictable printing from a web browser... they also show how unexpected abilities, like interactive 3D rendering, directly address the needs of specific customers.

Nicole Hernandez at WebProNews thinks current video sites are dumb because they chose to deliver using better codecs, even though Linux users are a few months away from being brought into the fold.

Jens C. Brynildsen has a good long piece on the experience of first using Adobe Flex 2.

Matt Todd, at 37Signals, has a lengthy post on how shorter posts, with fewer buzzwords, are stronger. One of the many good lines here: "Tech folks often use terms that imply we're part of some secret club. It's as if we're saying, 'We can speak in a code that those other people can't understand.' It's a way to build a wall that separates us from them. It's a form of exclusion. You don't need to build walls or exclude people when you're confident in your message though. When you're confident in your message, you want everyone to understand. When you really have a point, you want to say it sharp so it can penetrate deep."

I read Linux complaints, but I wish they read me too.

Ryan Stewart had a great piece last week on global computing, where an interface which makes to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs might not make sense in a village outside of North America.

An uncredited author describes potential social site exploits -- recommendation sites like Digg and bookmarking sites may soon be used to publicize nasty things.

Liz Gannes at GigaOM talks about the narrow social base of some of our technology today: "DEMO has a thing about blasting loud rock in between presentations that’s incongruous with the geeky, nervous presenters"... small point, I know, but if we're actually developing for a global audience, then a diet exclusively of things a small number of people listened to while going through adolescence does not give us a wide enough base from which to work.

Google Video has added closed captions.

Listings of physics engines and isometric engine resources for Flash work.

Steve Jobs blooper reel is actually pretty good... I like how he deflates some of the more-techy-than-thou buzzwords seen in such high-profile presentations.

Jess Ezell called me by name when saying he'd like to build things atop the video codecs used in Adobe Flash Player, but I couldn't make a comment there... Tinic Uro laid out some of the total factors going into codec decisions, and the ability to make alternate servers cheaply wasn't as high on the list as playback, adoption, hardware support, and so on.

Brent Simmons talks of intercommunication between his NetNewsWire RSS client and the browser.

New support plans from Adobe... I like how they lay out the matrix from the perspective of the reader, so you can easily see which choices might be the best fit.

John Rhodes likes many of the new data-fed visualization tools.

Better software license management cuts away confusion and cost... here the US Army National Guard had purchased software they didn't actually use. (Adobe License Manager is an upcoming way for volume purchasers to more efficiently handle the software they use.)

Nick Gerig has an intriguing essay on how cross-cultural development works both ways... here, experienced mobile developers in Japan need to learn the cultural issues to expand into worldwide development too.