Macs do Windows!

Apple has announced its public beta of Boot Camp; a free software that allows users to install Windows XP natively on their Apple machines. It is for the first time that Apple has publicly opened its arms to Microsoft's operating system, and I've never been as sure of a prediction as I am of this: Macs will one day ship with Windows. I'm not saying that they would say goodbye to OSX. They may, or they may not. But what I am sure of is that Apple would one day give their users the option of buying a mac running Windows out of the box.

And that is absolutely cool. I recently bought a laptop; and out of pure office work necessity, I had to buy a PC Notebook, even when I had my eyes set on a Powerbook for a long, long while. OSX rocks, but Windows rules the corporate desk; and in going for an open software platform, Apple is doing itself no harm. There are so many people like me, all around the world, who would want this to happen. Sure, the exclusivity of the Mac gets a blow, but this isn't exactly the time and generation for software exclusivity.

On another note, this is the last 'exclusive' Technology post that I'm posting on this blog. I've setup another 'exclusively geek' blog for all my technology rants and musings; you can visit it here. This blog, it's for prose, it's for movie reviews, it's for posts on music, those boring ultra-detailed posts on what goes on around me, and a Tech post here and there.

The 2005 Wrap-Up

So another year has passed and 2006 has come along. There are quite a lot of things that I'm planning for this New Year. I hope to get that done soon, so that I can start planning the things to do in 2007.

In retrospect, 2005 was a reasonably good year. For starters, it's the year this blog got this new design. And it's the first year the blog clocked 50,000 annual hits. It's the year that saw the Web2.0 paradigm emerge, the year when we witnessed aggressive acquisitions by the leaders of the Internet industry, the Googles and the Yahoos and the rest.

Macromedia went out to Adobe this year, something that doesn't matter a lot, yet signifies an end of something. Probably the end of a minor-era. How much it affects the huge community of developers and designers using Macromedia products is what we'll know in 2006 and beyond, but its sad to see Macromedia, one of the foremost web media innovators, die as its flagship product reached true maturity as a UI alternative. I had always believed that Flash's true calling was the rich interface. Well, this year, we saw a mishmash of new startups, some that used Flash truly innovatively ( Pandora.com, Gtalkr.com , Goowy.com). Yet the easier-to-develop, easier-on-the-browser and more-hyped AJAX ate into a substantial UI future-share of Flash on a permanent basis.

The web proliferated with applications for almost anything you'd want to do with it. And almost all of them were free with no or very limited advertising. And ALL of them were beta. That is pretty sensible too, for pardon my economics, but I do not see where they are going to get their millions in profits. Maybe the revenue model was in alpha all year round. Or maybe far too many ventures are betting on getting acquired by the Richie Richs of Internet. However, looking at it from the user's perspective, I do pray to god they have something up their sleeve.

And there is a strong probability that they may. For Web2.0 is the wave of 2000 ( Web1.0 ?) minus the hype and plus the innovation. Applications on the web are truly changing the way people use the Web, and the changes are quite fundamental in their nature. Now when people find a great page, they tag it on their delicious or make a digg. When they have to share with their family or friends, they do a flickr. When they want to listen to music they like, they open Pandora. And when the sharing bug truly strikes, they blog, vlog or podcast. They collaborate their calendars, their documents and their projects online. And when they need to find, they search the web and they search the blogosphere (Technorati, Feedster). They read all their regular sites at one place and IM on the web (meebo, gtalkr).

Okay, so everybody on the web is not using these tools. But then, not long ago, the only people using google were Stanford students. Its as if the world wide web is shedding its skin, and these applications are going to be the new tegument.

Personally, the year was good enough. It was the first full year of my life without any sort of academic courses. I spent the entire year in Bangalore (Or Bengaluru), and fell in love with the city. Okay, I can't write that with a straight face. I hated the city for the most part (As is evident here and here). But probably I've been unfair to the city. [NOSTALGIA ALERT ->] Probably the 1 AM coffee at Barista's when it rained 10cm/min outside and manager wailed for us to leave; or the occasional survey of the clear night sky; or the incredible achievement of a 75% discount from the friendly neighborhood book-wallah; or the Traffic Jam hours spent reading most of what I read throughout the year; or maybe Aunty's food at Tasty-Bites; or perhaps the multi-cultural soul of the city; the failed Maggi-Kurkure combination; or the successful Pizza-Coke alternative; the Christmas spirit and the Plum Cake; or the In-House New Year bash… probably, just probably, these compensated for all that went wrong with Bengaluru apart from its name. [END OF ALERT, YOU CAN BLINK NOW]

Finally, the list of Ice-Thanks-You's for 2005:

• Sean J. Partridge : For his humor and hosting space.
• Amanjeev Singh : For carrying a link to my blog on 75% of his posts. Thanks AJ, I hope you have a great time changing all those links when I change my blog url this year.
• Jennifer : For calling this blog "The ultimate and best blog I've seen on net so far."
• Regular Visitors : For all the pageloads.
• One-Time Visitors : For the pageload.

PS: If you're wondering why I'm posting this 6 days into 2006; its amazing, because, believe it or not, so am I.

Pandora Rocks! (Er.. Ghazals!)

Quite a long time back I had talked about a comparison of Rock v/s Ghazals. Obviously, they are NOT the same. Well the point was that Ghazals provide ready-made lyrics for anyone having trouble forming his or her Rock composition. Apart from that, we're talking separate universes, and I know that. Except for thematic connections. I mean, I think Rock's general theme matches those of Ghazals. Okay, so the Ghazaler is not hitting out (or throwing goat blood around) but essentially, he's the same guy, the man against the system. He’s like, the poorer cousin, the one who doesn’t have the guitar and is a rather emotional fellow, so goes out to the neighborhood bar and churns out his frustrations while enjoying a few drinks on the house. he feels the same, and consequently, writes the same.

Now, Pandora.com is a nice site wherein you feed their engine with an artist or song that you like, and they figure out music in their collection that matches the musical qualities of your artist/song. You can give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down to songs that can help increasing the engine's precision. If you're the finical fellow, you can get to know exactly why a specific track was played ("We’re playing this track because it features pop rock qualities, repetitive melodic phrasing, extensive vamping, a clear focus on recording studio production and groove based composition."). As you can probably guess from that, it's quite accurate, and much, much, much better than conventional radio. I think it's the single most important conceptual innovation in the field of streaming music.

What I'd probably like is for them to consolidate with the already heavily-researched area of Music's connection with emotions and build unified algorithms to give me an interface that asks me just one question - "How do you want to feel today?"

Or, maybe they can change the question to something that does not remind people of Microsoft, because I figure they wouldn't want to.

It's quite intriguing, however, the effect of music on humans. Probably the day we figure out the exact neurons that are hit by exactly what type of music; maybe then we’d be experimentally able to prove my hypothesis correct. Also, maybe that day we’ll be able to prove exactly why songs such as this exist.

Wink does it well

Wink recently released itself from private beta. It's a cross between web search and social bookmarking. I've been fiddling with it for some time, using some benchmark search phrases I've evolved over a long period of browsing and searching ("monica bellucci"), my personal verdict is - people do make a difference.

Not always, but quite a number of times, yes. Community-based searches, I feel, are particularly useful while making bizarre or recondite searches, typically searches where the search phrase could have a lot of different semantic interpretations. The difference in such cases is between the interpretation(s) people consider important v/s the interpretations a search engine considers important. For a search engine, "importance" is generally the number of inbound links. Hence, a web page with minimal such links yet great content (such as this blog) is bound to be a loser in conventional terms, unless a lot of webmasters wakeup to it and link it on their sites. That, even if it does happen, is a slow process. Now, in the new scenario, a normal web user can help in increasing a page's importance overnight from the engine's point of view, simply by tagging it. And voila! Content is the winner!

Gmail goes mobile!

I've been waiting a long while for this. Gmail now has an interface for mobile devices: http://m.gmail.com

The Niceties Montage

This is a nice online collaboration tool: jotlive.com

This is a nice personalized content tool: netvibes.com

This is a nice free stock photograhhy search engine: yotophoto.com

This is a nice free upload tool: putfile.com

This is a nice sher:
Sakhtiyan bad rahi hain alam ki,
hausle muskuraaye jaate hain

And I am a nice man.

Marketing genius or attitude statement?

This is for those who never saw Apple's '97 "Think Different" campaign. What follows is the voiceover script of Apple's most successful ad campaign ever -

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round heads in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status-quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

Cool Mozilla Firefox Extensions

There is a certain ignorance amongst internet creatures regarding Mozilla Extensions. I felt that because the topic came up in converation with KD today, and he didn't know much about them. And if he doesn't, well, then it's safe to say a LOT of people don't.

So here's a list of neat tweaks to make your foxes foxier:

1. Sage - The best Integrated RSS reader for Firefox. The CSS Style for RSS looks drab after some use. Here's an idea for those of you initiated in development and looking for making something popular quick - An RSS Reader with some cool content templates.
   
2. BlogThis - Adds the Blogger "Blog this!" functionality to firefox.
3. googlebar - :)
4. easyGestures - Do everything with a middle click.
5. FoxyTunes - The one I use the most. Allows you to control your music player from within firefox status bar, you can hide the player or open/close right from the neat little control buttons. Mmmuuuah
   

Go here for more.

The One-Media future epic

http://www.broom.org/epic/

Photoshop and Fireworks Tutorials

I compiled these some time back, so some of the links may be broken. But there're some real gems within these.

Adobe Photoshop Tutorials
Computer Arts Magazine
N-sane - Photoshop Tutorials
. Screaming Art Designs .
.Dubtastic Design Labs 4
Computer Arts Magazine
Dubtastic Design Labs
Index of -photoshop
Index of -tutorials
Photoshop Roadmap Photoshop tutorials, plugins and downloads
Striding Studio Photoshop Tutorials
thinkdan.com {Resources, Graphics, Tutorials, Wallpapers, Photoshop, Freehand 8}
Photoshop 7.0 Tutorials
Photoshop Tutorials -- Absolute Cross
Photoshop tutorials about text effects
Photoshop Tutorials
Robouk-Designs -- Online photoshop tutorials, php tutorials, flash tutorials......
solarDreamStudios Tutorials Fireworks (4,MX)
SOULISS.com - Frooty Arty Yummy!
Spoono - Photoshop Tutorials - 3D Globs
theWebMachine - Your guide through Adobe WebCollection!
Welcome to WebTekNique.com

India and Game Development?

I found this article to be very insightful -

http://www.businessworldindia.com/aug0204/invogue01.asp

Group94

WordCount is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it.

The Complete unadulturated blog tools list

Here is the complete list of bookmarks I added while surfing around for blog tools. Some of these are absolute gems. My favs are italicized.

angiemckaig.com - the ultimate blog template list
Blog Designs An Escape from Bland
BlogAmp
BlogChalking
Bloglines _ Free, Web-Based News Aggregator
blogLinker.com - The automatic link swapper and traffic generator
BlogRolling - The best link manager for your weblog and more!
blogsnow_ what blogs link to
E y e F o r B e a u t y - Linkware-Journal Templates
FoaF Explorer
Groovy Lizard Ltd _ Original Web Design _ Graphics _ Linkware
Hello _ Introducing BloggerBot
humor buttons
ModBlog - Blogging Redefined
Site Mojo - give your site some Mojo!
Taylor McKnight - --gtmcknight buttons galore
TheBlogFather.net - A resource for Weblogs
Unfamous Quotations. Quotations from people you probably haven't heard of before.
Weblog Translator, powered by Google Translate - Microcontent News, a Corante.com Microblog
Weblogs Compendium - Blog Tools
 
 

Blog Tools Contd - Templates

Here is a comprehensive list of sites to find free templates for your blog.

EyeForBeauty is one of the better places listed here to look for linkware templates.

Oh and by the way, I'm back.

Blogger Tools

Ever since the blogger restart, I have been increasingly interested in this entire phenomena of blogging and its increasing possibilities. So this Sunday, when I was faced with a choice to either crawl around job websites, or to browse around the web for innovative things people are doing with this entire concept of blogging; I thought twice, then defered the decision until next weekend.

In this interim period, though, I worked through huge amounts of pages, tried out all types of tools and widgets around. Here are a few gems -

http://blogsnob.simpleads.net - Neat Concept, U show my link, I'll show yours.

http://www.blogsnow.com/ - This thing 'reads' blogs, depending on what's going on between 100 and 240 times a minute (or that's what they say). Out of this stream of information it extracts links and displays them in different views every 10 minutes.

http://www.geocities.com/insanitydrops/blogamp/en/ - This serves no actual purpose but to give the instant feeling of gratification on seeing the title of the song your playing come up on your blog...

More on this soon as the expedition continues.

I got gmail!

I just got a mansion in the beverely hills of web mail.

sameer.ahuja@gmail.com

Thank you, Sean, you are a real buddy.

Oh, and by the way, all you peeps can start bargaining for an invitation ;)

Programming ebooks

This page is a nice index of free programming e-books on the web.

Macromedia - Products : Macromedia MX 2004

Here's the biggest news of the season -

Macromedia - Products : Macromedia MX 2004

New Website

I just finished with this new design for s.den. Feedback would be wholesomely appreciated. I'll have a feedback form ready very soon for your convinience.

if you are one of the few enlightened personalities who like to see softwares crashing all around, heres something to keep you smiling -

create a new html file and put the following HTML code in it -

<html>
<form>
<input type crash>
</form>
</html>

open it in IE and voila! :)
( from f256 )

chromosoniq.com - stumbled onto this today while browsing thru my fav list. It is one of the best work i saw anyone do with the dyna3D engine. The author customized coding to add some accelaration.

ego7.com - there is no way u have seen a site hotter than this.

gModeler.com - is this cool or what. hats off.

My very good friend Sean Partridge has set up his own design and hosting firm, DigitalDoormats.com . I would be doing some flash development for the site. The firm provides professional web design, development and hosting solutions at the cheapest prices on the web. Go there now and get your own digital doormat on the web!

My longest project in running, scu ( GTBIT student community ), which is a discussion board developed for students of my college, developed in ASP 3.0 with MS Access database on IIS 5.0 server, is almost complete along with the college website ( http://www.gtbit.com ) and to be released by 15th November. Visit at http://www.gtbit.com/scu

dyna 3D v2 still has time to come, infact, encouraged with the popularity of this engine ( 10,000 + downloads of nav Engine ), I have now branched it into two seperate projects -

1. First one, continues on the same lines of 3D navigation, but now apart from just modifying mc properties dynamically, you can have realtime 3D polygon based objects, with objects or polygon faces as links, all dynamically generated in ActionScript.

2. I was so impressed with the Draw API that I decided to develop a full fledged 3-D engine in flash, I call it FFP ( Flash First Person ). It is basically an advanced version of the dyna engine with Object Oriented code and some special optimization codes...


Download dyna3D v1 Source Engine
Download dyna3D v1.1 Navigation Engine

I would like to thank Sean Partridge ( digitaldoormats.com ) for providing me this space on his server. Thanks Mate!