[Tue Nov 29 10:28:26 CST 2011]

Today I received in my mailbox a message from Google announcing the end of Google Wave by April 30, 2012:

Dear Wavers,                                                                    
                                                                                
More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be
developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the
site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the
specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As
of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be
turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting
individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave
service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before
April 30, 2012.

If you would like to continue using Wave, there are a number of open source
projects, including Apache Wave. There is also an open source project called
Walkaround that includes an experimental feature that lets you import all your
Waves from Google. This feature will also work until the Wave service is
turned +off on April 30, 2012.

For more details, please see our help center.

Yours sincerely,

The Wave Team

To be fair, I signed up, tested it for a while and... stopped using it, probably for the same reason I barely use Google Plus: the network effect is barely there. Yes, the idea is cool. Yes, they have done a good job with the interface. However, if I cannot use it to communicate with the vast majority of people I talk to on a daily basis, what good is it? Google Plus may last longer, but I am afraid it may meet the same end. {link to this entry}

[Mon Nov 28 14:33:04 CST 2011]

Difficult as it may be to believe, I had no clue that the Firefox browser had a feature called app tabs that allow you to always keep open certain tabs allocated to your favorite web apps, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Mail, etc. The main features of these app tabs are that they show a smaller tab in the GUI, cannot be closed accidentally and automatically open when you launch the program. Sure, I know it is a very minor thing, but sort of useful. Here is a screenshot. The app tabs can be seen on the left.

{link to this entry}

[Wed Nov 16 08:31:07 CST 2011]

I read on ComputerWorld that Linux loses its luster as a darling among developers. Mind you, the headline makes it sound as if it is huge news when, in reality, it all boils down to this:

OS X is now the primary development platform of 7.9% of developers, the survey found, while only 5.6% of developers use Linux.

So, let us be clear: 86.5% of developers still use something other than Mac OS X or Linux (presumably, Windows) and ComputerWorld is wasting time dedicating a headline to the fact that one of the remaining OSes is now ahead of the third one by a whooping 2.3 percentage points (which, incidentally, most likely falls within the margin of error of the survey they are quoting). Yeah, slow news day, I suppose. Still, string a few of these one after another, realize that plenty of people never go beyond the headline and... well, you end up with a lot of people out there having a mistaken impression of what is going on.

In any case, I have to agree I see a certain danger of Apple stealing users from Linux and other open source alternatives (BSDers are especially prone to the switch). Since the Mac OS X is based on the BSD utilities with a Mach kernel, UNIX users feel "at home", in spite of the fact that they lose both flexibiloity and, as Richard Stallman would point it out, freedom. That first impression, though, is a bit misleading. I also have a couple of Apple laptops lying around the house and, in general, they do not provide me with the same experience as a true UNIX or Linux variant. In the first place, it is obviously clear that the whole design is geared towards GUI users, and going down to the terminal and the command line still does not feel as normal as on a UNIX or Linux box. Second, as mentioned above, you lose flexibility. Simply put, it is not so easy to change the desktop environment because it doesn't work for you, or change this or that particular option in the preferences, unless the preferences dialog in the GUI allows you to. Third, I have tried setting things up for web development installing the usual suspects (Apache, PHP, MySQL...) and it is a true pain in the neck. As a matter of fact, one of the Apple laptops I have at home is still showing an error message about the MySQL service every single time I log into it. I never bothered to fix it once I was sick of struggling with the setup, especially since I knew I could just set it up very quickly on Linux. Fourth, the overall "ecosystem" of free apps is not nearly as large. Yes, I know about MacPorts and similar, and they are also a pain in the neck, for the most part. And, finally, we have the freedom issue. I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of moving away from Microsoft to fall in the hands of Apple. Sorry ut, when it comes to overall business strategies, they both are about the same. As far as I can see, the only difference is that Apple has much better marketing and makes you feel as if you are a member of the "chosen technirati", one of the "cool people" who are ver "in". I cannot tell you how many dull people go around thinking that they are "creative" just because they own an Apple product even though they have never "created" anything in their life. So, I must admit that, altogether, the fact that there must be a trend going on that is causing developers to move from Linux to Mac OS X sort of worries me for its possible long-term implications. After all, in the last 20 years or so, we had managed to sneak a bit of freedom into the world of high-tech. All that can go out the window now in the name of "coolness". {link to this entry}