In early 2008, while working on a time-sensitive development project, the power supply and motherboard in my four year old homemade workstation failed and I was forced to make a decision: build another machine myself or give in and buy a machine with a good support contract. I decided to go with the latter, so I went down to the local Apple store and bought a Mac Pro (remember, this was a time-sensitive project, so I really needed the machine up and running within a day). At the time, I intended to install Windows on it and run with it, but after playing around a bit with OS X, I decided that I really liked the operating system and wanted to switch over to it permanently.

The only problem with this was that I still needed to be able to develop .NET applications using Visual Studio, so I needed to either use Boot Camp to run a copy of Windows or set up Windows to run in a virtual machine. After a bit of research, I decided to use VMWare Fusion to run a Windows virtual machine within OS X. Problem solved. I was, and continued to be, very happy with the solution.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I realized that the performance of my virtual machine (and OS X Snow Leopard in general) was starting to degrade dramatically. It was getting to the point where OS X would take minutes to boot up and my virtual machine was almost unusable. What to do?

I had already upgraded the Mac Pro to six gigabytes of memory, so I didn’t think throwing more memory in the machine would solve the performance issues. I did a bit of research, and found a number of articles touting impressive performance gains brought about by the installation of solid state drives. The only catch? They aren’t cheap. But being that I was looking for a good end of the year tax deduction or two, I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger.

I received my Intel X25-M drive in the mail today, and followed these instructions to replace my existing SATA boot drive with the new solid state drive (note that my boot drive also contains my virtual machine images). And the difference is amazing! Mac OS X boots up three times as fast as it did, all of my applications (including VMWare Fusion, Photoshop, and other “heavy” applications) startup within three seconds, and my virtual machine runs *almost as fast as a native Windows machine. In short, I am very happy with the purchase, and don’t think I’ll go back to using normal drives anytime soon.

If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for Google to release Chrome for Mac (or Linux), you can take a breath. It has been a long time coming, but Google finally announced today that they are releasing “developer” builds for Mac and Linux.

Because of its startup speed (dramatically better than any of the other browsers out there), I’ve been using Chrome more and more as my primary browser as of late. Once some critical “Add-ons” become available, I’m pretty sure it will become my only browser – assuming that a few improvements are made to the developer tools.

If you are looking for a solid release of Chrome, you’ll probably want to hold off for awhile, though, as this is an alpha release that is missing a bunch of critical features. If, however, you just want to play around a bit, you might as well go for it. It is definitely solid enough for most of what I do on the web. In fact, I’m writing this post in it.

I just read on Ajaxian that the Cappuccino team announced Atlas, a new “visual layout editor and development environment”, today at the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami. I heard Atlas mentioned (not by name) by a member of the Cappuccino team, Ross Boucher while attending a Cappuccino bootcamp session at Web Directions North a couple of weeks ago. That said, after the brief description I still wasn’t quite sure what to expect.

Now that I’ve seen it in action, I must say that it looks pretty impressive. When Ross mentioned they were building Atlas, I expected that they were working on a GUI builder like the Ext GUI builder that has been around for awhile now. Atlas, however, is more than just a layout editor.

Using Atlas, you can build layouts and interfaces (there are a bunch of fancy widgets available that you can drag-and-drop onto the layout) and easily connect components. They even have some ready-built “connections” to allow developers to easily bring external content (RSS, Twitter, etc.) into the app.

Atlas won’t be ready for use until sometime this Summer, but you can check out a short screencast showcasing some of the functionality at the Atlas site.

I have been playing around a bit with Cappuccino over the last couple of weeks, and may be able to get a couple of example mapping apps built on Cappuccino up here soon.

The visual nature of Atlas reminds me of the “Ext Designer” tool that Jack Slocum previewed a couple of months ago. It is good to see these types of tools coming out, as they can only make things easier for developers. I do hope, though, that things don’t become too easy, as I could see a new programmer coming in and never wanting to get their hands dirty. That said, having visual design tools available does take down one more barrier, making frameworks like Cappuccino more accessible to those who may otherwise not be interested.

Photo by Eyeliam.

Look out web developers, a new version of Internet Explorer is about to be released into the wild. Fun fun. There’s no use complaining. You know you’re going to have to support it, so, the only thing left to do is work hard to make sure that your site works in the new browser. How best to start?

I just sat through a session on Internet Explorer 8 at Web Directions North. The session, “Ensuring Maximum Compatibility with Internet Explorer 8″, was put on by Pete LePage, a Microsoft employee. It was all about planning for the upcoming release. In the session, I discovered a few interesting tidbits that I want to pass on here. But before I get to those, I want to talk a bit about how Microsoft approached the issue of compatibility while building Internet Explorer 8.

We’ve all seen (and possibly worked on) web sites/applications that were “hacked” together. You know, the application that was pushed out too quickly due to limited resources or deadlines and then left out there to rot. Amazingly enough, some of these sites/applications take on a life of their own. Even though they aren’t supported, users adapt to their bad qualities and somehow use them to get something done. In some cases, they even become a critical part of a workflow. I’ve worked on plenty of projects for the US federal government, so I’ve definitely seen these monsters – and have even, ahem, worked on a few of them.

Well, the bad thing is, plenty of other developers have worked on these types of projects too, and Microsoft plans on continuing to support them for at least the foreseeable future. In fact, it would appear that Microsoft has put quite a bit of effort into continuing this support for non-standards compliant sites/applications in Internet Explorer 8. What exactly does this mean for you, the web developer, and to one of your Internet Explorer 8 users? Possibly a big mess if you aren’t careful about how you implement support for the new browser.

Before I move on from here, let me first say that Microsoft thinks that Internet Explorer 8 will bring them up to par with Firefox and Safari. The problem is, they aren’t forcing (or even really encouraging) developers to bring their apps up to date. In fact, by making something they’re calling “Compatibility Mode” available to developers and users alike, they are actually encouraging just the opposite. Why should you update that archaic application if you don’t have to?

Luckily, Microsoft is giving developers the ability to ensure that their applications run in standards-compliant mode. And, if you manually specify (through a meta tag or an http header sent down from your server) that your app should run in standards-compliant mode, Internet Explorer will get rid of the “easy way out” “Switch to Compatibility View” button. This means that your user won’t even have the option to switch to compatibility view. This is definitely the way to go for applications that are actively developed, as this makes it less confusing for both you and your poor IE 8 user. And for those applications that are… not… so actively developed, you do have the option to specify that your site run in “Internet Explorer 7″ mode.

To switch the browser to “Compatibility Mode”: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE7″ />

To do the right thing by making sure that your site runs in standards-compliant mode: <meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”IE=EmulateIE8″ />

One other interesting piece of information: Microsoft is planning on maintaining a limited (~10,000) list of the “most visible” sites on the web that need to run in “Compatibility Mode”. If a site that falls into the category of being one of the top sites on the web is reported to Microsoft as not working in Internet Explorer 8′s standards mode, they plan on putting the site on this list and then automatically adding it to the list of “Compatibility” sites on each machine that has Internet Explorer 8 installed. The site will then automatically be rendered in compatibility mode. Unless, that is, the developers of the site override this by using one of the <meta> tags.

All of these workarounds seem like a horribly convoluted way to do things. Why not just push developers to build things the right way and stop spending all of this time (and resources) on building something that forces people down the wrong path? Hopefully Microsoft will get its act together sometime soon and fully commit itself to supporting standards. Until then, we have IE 8, which is at least a step in the right direction.

Using <a href=””></a> links to call JavaScript functions can be a bit trickier than you might think. The issues that I’ve run into are generally Internet Explorer-specific (aren’t they all?). While troubleshooting these issues, I’ve discovered a syntax that seems to solve all of the problems:

<a href=”javascript:void(0)” onclick=”yourFunction();return false”>Click Here</a>

Hopefully this helps someone.

I love Amazon.com. I buy my music from Amazon’s mp3 store. I buy books and newspapers for my Kindle from Amazon via Whispernet. I even buy my favorite nutrition shake (kind of hokey, yes, but delicious and good for me), mix1, in bulk from Amazon.

So I was excited to see that Amazon had released an iPhone app. Amazon.com is, in my opinion, the best-designed shopping web site out there. The information on the site is so valuable and accessible that I find myself using it to find new books and music all the time – even when I’m not planning on purchasing the item from Amazon. Because of this, it goes without saying that I expected a lot when I started the Amazon.com iPhone app download. Still, being that I don’t do much shopping from my iPhone, why would I be so excited about this? Well, I knew that Amazon’s iPhone app would be well done, and I was interested to see if they had added any revolutionary new features to it.

And I wasn’t disappointed. The app itself is very simple. It doesn’t aim to do much, but what it does, it does well.

Using the app, you can search Amazon.com and “over 9,000 other merchants”. Once you find something you’re interested in, you can read user reviews, buy the item with Amazon’s “1-Click” (assuming you have it setup, of course), add the item to a persistent shopping cart, or add the item to your wish list. The interface is simple but very effective.

Now on to the “wow” feature: “Amazon Remembers”. You can use your iPhone to take a picture of something you are interested in searching for on Amazon.com. Once the picture is taken, the app compresses it, sends it up to Amazon.com, and lets you know that Amazon.com is “searching for a similar product and will notify you if” they find one. If they do find the product, they’ll send you an email with a link to the item and save your “Amazon Remembers” item in the iPhone app and in your Amazon.com profile.

I tested the feature out by taking a picture of my Logitech mouse. Within five minutes, I had received an email with a link back to the exact same mouse on Amazon.com. When will I use this? I’m not sure, but I am sure that it will come in handy sometime.

Big news coming out from Microsoft this past Monday: They released an early version of their Live Mesh platform to a limited group of testers. Live Mesh is basically a system that connects a user’s disparate systems (Windows machines, Mac machines, and mobile devices) together, making it extremely easy to share resources between them.

The core philosophy is to make it easy to manage information in a world where people have multiple computing experiences (i.e. PCs and applications, web sites, phones, video games, music and video devices) that they use in the context of different communities (i.e. myself, family, work, organizations).

It looks like Live Mesh is building on the FolderShare idea and implementation. I’m excited to see what comes out of it.

Here’s a link to a series of videos that puts it all together: https://www.mesh.com/Welcome/LearnMore.aspx.

If you haven’t heard of Adobe AIR yet, you will soon. It is a runtime that allows developers to deploy web applications to the desktop, cross platform (well, I say that, but Air is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X, but Adobe says that the “Linux release of Adobe Air is under development” and will be released to “public alpha on our [Adobe's] Labs website in early 2008 in order to collect feedback from Linux developers”).

After a fairly long incubation period in Adobe Labs, AIR 1.0 was released today. That said, AIR is already somewhat proven, as developers have been working with it for quite some time now and several large companies are already taking advantage of the technology.

What are the benefits of Adobe AIR? Well, other than the obvious (write once for the web and desktop, utilize your web development skills, etc.), AIR provides a number of benefits that you only get with a traditional desktop application, including:

• the ability for an application to run in the background.
• the ability to run while disconnected from the internet.
• full desktop integration, including access to the clipboard and system tray.
• access to a local database.
• increased application response time.

If you don’t buy into the hype, I understand, but I encourage you to at least check it out. Here are some good links to check out:

• Dav Glass has packaged a sample AIR application built on the latest YUI release.
• Jack Slocum, author of my favorite JavaScript library, Ext, recently converted the Simple Tasks sample application to run on AIR 1.0.

And in closing, if you want to work with Adobe AIR (or you do a lot of front-end development with JavaScript), you should check out the outstanding Aptana IDE. It is the best IDE for doing AJAX development that I’ve found, and has support for Adobe AIR development. I discovered it several months ago while looking for a Ruby on Rails IDE, and haven’t looked back since.

I expect that I’ll be playing with AIR sometime soon, although most of the development that I’m currently doing (web map development) doesn’t really fit into AIR. If I do play around, I’ll post here.

As you can probably tell by now, I try to keep up with developments in technology. I find that doing so helps me perform better, and I’m constantly finding new tools to help me be more productive. One of the best places that I’ve found to keep up with not only developments in technology but also developments in thinking is TED. TED (Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is a conference that “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers” and challenges them to “give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)”. These talks are made available on the web.

I recently randomly ran into a presentation on TED given by the co-creator of BumpTop. While I’m not sure that BumpTop is going to help me be more productive (although there certainly is a possibility that it could), I do know that it’s very cool.

BumpTop is an overhaul of the standard desktop environment that we’ve all come to know and love. It allows you to store files in a more intuitive and “natural” way, piling them up, throwing them around, putting them on shelves, and crumpling them up and tossing them into the trash can. The interface runs on an environment that is physics-enabled, so it behaves much like you would expect it to in the real world. It supports all of the operations that we use everyday when managing our files on our current desktop, but in what appears to be a much more intuitive way.

That’s really all the info that’s available for now. I’m going to keep an eye on BumpTop as it is developed (and am trying to get on the beta), and will post about what I find out here.

In the meantime, here’s a video presentation of the BumpTop prototype:

If you’re reading this in an RSS reader and can’t see the video, here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0ODskdEPnQ.

And here’s the video of the presentation that Anand Agarawala gave at TED:

Again, if you’re reading this in an RSS reader and can’t see the video, here’s the link: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/131.

I’ve always understood the importance of backing up my workstations, but haven’t always followed through with action. Luckily it has never come back to burn me too badly, although I did have one bad experience a couple of years ago when I lost a good portion of my digital music library. Well, over the last year and a half I’ve tried to change this by consistently backing up important files to external hard drives and taking image snapshots of all my computers using Acronis’ True Image product (see My Favorite Applications and Tools post for more info on True Image). However, with more and more of my life (documents, emails, music, pictures, projects, videos, etc.) living on a computer somewhere, I’ve decided that I now need a more robust and fail-proof backup solution. Enter Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

For those who aren’t familiar with S3, it is an “in-the-cloud” storage service that Amazon provides as part of its growing list of web services. These web services are built using the same technologies that Amazon.com uses, meaning that a lot of lessons have been learned and integrated into them. Developers can access these services through a variety of web service interfaces, and, using S3, can gain access to unlimited storage on Amazon’s robust infrastructure. And yes, this includes the same availability and performance that users have come to expect from Amazon.com. As for backups, S3 is appealing not only because of its availability and performance, but also because files stored in S3 are encrypted and redundantly stored in multiple data centers, meaning that the likelihood of loss of files is extremely low, especially when compared to the chance that your external hard drive will fail. That said, I still don’t recommend making an S3 repository your authoritative copy of your data, as it’s always a good idea to have at least one copy of your data somewhere where you can access it, no matter what.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Amazon Web Services for quite a while now, and have recently opened up a dialog with the Amazon Web Services team about the possibility of migrating some of my organization’s map cache and media into S3. I’ve also been playing around with integrating S3 into a couple of demo ASP.NET and Ruby on Rails applications as proofs-of-concept. As I’ve learned more and more about S3, the idea of using it for personal backups of important information has grown on me.

As I hinted at earlier, Amazon gives developers tools to connect to (authenticate) and transfer files to and from S3. I, however, wanted an easier, more automated solution to help with my backups. I looked at a couple of solutions, including the Firefox Organizer for Amazon S3 (which I definitely suggest using, if just for browsing the files that you’re storing on S3) and Jungle Disk, a GUI for using Amazon S3 that mounts your S3 as a local drive letter (on Mac and Window machines, I’m not sure how you connect if you’re using Linux, but I do know that Jungle Disk is supported on all three operating systems) and optionally automates backups. I decided on Jungle Disk, as it’s easy to setup and use and acts a lot like a local hard drive. Note that there is a one-time *lifetime $20 fee for purchasing the utility. In my opinion it is well worth it. As I’ve said before, I’m willing to pay for a service that makes my life easier.

Jungle Disk has a ton of configuration options, but is still trivial to get setup and running. You simply download and install the utility, sign up for an S3 account, tell Jungle Disk your S3 account information, and tell it which files (or directories) you want it to backup and when. If you set it up for automatic backups, it will perform a scheduled check to see which files have changed and only backup those that have been modified, keeping the S3 bandwidth/storage costs as low as possible. Taken from the Amazon S3 pricing page:

Storage

• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer

• $0.10 per GB – all data transfer in
• $0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out

Requests

• $0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
• $0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Pretty simple and cheap, eh?

I just installed Jungle Disk and ran my first backup today. I got an average of ~600 kb/s on upload (and, yes, you can limit the upload speed and tell it to run only at certain times), and interacting with the files through Windows Explorer is just as fast as interacting with them on a local disk. In fact, as long as Jungle Disk knows where a copy of a file lives on my local machine, it will access that file automatically rather than going out to S3 to access it. If S3, however, has a newer copy of the file, it will browse to it.

Overall, so far so good. Maybe I can finally have some peace of mind about my digital files?