This leads me to a bigger disscusion about Opera. They have been making all of the right moves, placing themselves in the three major markets: Desktop Computer, Mobile Devices and Gaming Consoles and all of them built with standards in mind. Opera has positioned themselves very well in the past couple years, I find myself browsing around the web with my Opera browser more and more. Although it is a nice browser it still has it's short commings but what browser doesn't? I spend about 1 - 2 hours with Opera Mini 4 a night and I hop on my Wii from time to time and on to the Opera browser.

Now I know what you are thinking "We get it Opera has a lot of browsers who cares? Get on with it!" Opera has in my opinion positioned themselves so well that an entire generation will now be using the Opera Browsers in many different areas in their life. A generation that is now spending more time online than watching TV. Now I am not smoking that much crack, I realize that more is going to have to happen for Opera to take over or even be considered with the big boys (IE and Firefox)

Mozilla has been slowly chipping away at IE for awhile which in a sense can only help Opera. I am by no means saying that Opera is poised to take over the Browser market tomorrow but keep your eye on them, their day will come, they are putting out great stuff on many different platforms.

I was scanning through all the session topics earlier and got distracted reading Planet JSAN, the blog for a project called JSAN that my friend Dave is leading a session about. JSAN is a sort of CPAN for javascript.

If I want to catch his session, I've got to get there by 11am. I'm also looking forward to the Nintendo DS meetup at 2pm, and the UofMN Robot Demo at 4pm.

Maybe I'll see you there!

This is amazing. With all of the resources that the big companies use for product development -- literally billions of dollars and some of the brightest people on Earth -- they haven't created a solution as cool as LAMP. Open source, 1, commercial software, 0.

With the adaptation of LAMP, the economy has "lost the sale" in one very narrow sense, because companies aren't laying out thousands of dollars to pay for commercial web deployment software. To build out a cluster of Microsoft servers is incredibly expensive. To roll out a LAMP cluster, by comparison, is cheap. The company spends less and gets more and part of the budget is deployed elsewhere, a serious competitive advantage.

Now throw in the fact that companies like Apple and IBM are bundling LAMP in their operating systems. Every Mac comes with apache and mysql installed. These companies are leveraging open source, too.

So LAMP and other cool open source projects create tremendous value in the economy. Open source is fueling thousands of companies that are creating incredible value in the marketplace.

Then the husband got me going on this rad Google mashup that scrolls around the world displaying the latest tweets. Mesmerizing. Just sit and watch the world tweet!

I tweet from an easy little (Mac) desktop app.

But, the question remains: What's the point? The NY Times is using this to "tweet" the latest headlines. But, is it just yet another distraction on top of my ever-refreshing inbox and IM? Dunno yet. Jury's still out.

I'm a well-known Apple zealot, but in my experience nothing makes buying music, TV and movies easier than iTunes. Apple figured out how to do it. They've even made it fun. They've also made it easy. I download a TV show and can watch it on my Mac, on my iPod or my TV without thinking about it.

I am predicting a big deal where someone like Google or Time/Warner buys Apple for billions of dollars. Or maybe Apple buys them. I don't know. But I've been listening to people count Apple out for 20 years and they are still wrong.

Apple, not just a computer anymore.

Your computer is your phone. I keep saying it and you keep not listening. Here is another way you can put down your phone and use your ear buds instead. Gizmo.

Tonight, via Parent Hacks, I discovered Listpic - a site that allows you to browse Craigslist posts by photo. BRILLIANT! How many times have I wished I could just look through all the pictures without having to click on every post?!

If you're a fan of Craigslist, you'll be immediately addicted to this interface.

1. Everywhere I turn, there are stories about how unhealthy Americans (and in particular American kids) are. The Medtronic TC Kids Marathon is helping parents and teachers to involve children in more physical activity. Their motto is, "Running a marathon, one mile at a time." It's a really cool idea, and I hope it has an effect on getting kids moving!

2. The site gave us @ Clockwork a chance to exercise our "conditional content" components within the Active Media Manager (AMM). Conditional content is the term we use to describe content that is displayed when certain conditions are met. For example, you can set up conditional content that says "Hi, Guest!" if a visitor is not logged in, and "Hi, [first name]!" if they are logged in. Sounds simple -- and it is -- but in the case of the Medtronic TC Kids Marathon we got to really dig in and use conditional content to power whole pages and sections.

A few examples:
- Once users have created an account, we know if they are a Teacher/School or a Family and can change the content that is displayed on every page within the Kids Training Program section. Families are eligible for one kind of incentives, while schools are eligible for others. Using conditional content, each group sees only the information that applies to them.

- As users give us additional information (like address, whether or not they want to order incentives or attend an event) we can slice and dice information even futher. We can display one kind of order form if you've never ordered incentives, and another order form if you need to add extras to your order later.

As we were working on this project with the client, the client struggled with who would get to see what information and how to organize the content. Originally, they were thinking that we would have to have separate sections of the site for Teachers and Families. Argh! Can you imagine having to maintain separate sections, and dealing with the confusion of a Family accidentally getting into the Schools section? No, thanks! It was rewarding to bring them such a simple solution.

Don't get me wrong, it certainly took a lot of thinking (and debate) internally to figure out how to put users into certain "buckets" and then how to give them information at appropriate times, but it was a fun problem to solve. And in practice, I'm excited at how elegantly it all turned out.

Enough blabbering, you should really go check it out for yourself.

To learn more about the Clockwork suite of products, visit activemediamanager.com.

I mean, of course, that little help text that appears when you mouse over things. Tooltips are awesome because they are super ignorable and yet super helpful. It makes software self-explanatory in those areas where a little more explanation is necessary. The other cool thing about them is that when you know what you are doing and are moving fast, you don't see them at all! Completely invisible. When you are going slow the computer supplies you with a little more info in the exact place your eye is looking.

I predict that we'll see a rise in the ways, places and uses people think up for tooltip-like technologies. I suspect we'll see tooltips in places we can't imagine.

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I have been using dual screens with my PowerBook, which has a Digital Video Interface (DVI) rather than VGA (whatever that stands for) the the external display. Doing a very quick A/B I did not see a huge difference between the two. Having one less adapter in my life is a Good Thing ™ so I always try to use DVI. I finally got around to Googling the difference and what I found is: DVI is best for LCD's and the like, VGA is best for tubes. At least according to that guy. But he sure sounds like he knows what he is talking about.

It is sort of cool that our display technology has developed to the point that your display is showing you an exact copy of the digital information. CRT's are soon to be a thing of the past.

It is well known that I am a bit of a Mac zealot. I'm also a Summit Pale Ale zealot and a dark-roasted coffee zealot. I like what I like a lot. But I like them for a reason and I just encountered another reason why I love Macs so much.

1. My trackpad on my Powerbook died. The screen was also a little loose.
2. I transfered my home directory to a Mac Mini.
3. My whole entire life, every preference, every bookmark and every piece of email was right there on the Mini as if it was my Powerbook. I had zero loss of continuity on any of the million things I am working on with my computer.
4. I dropped my Powerbook off at the Apple store and it was shipped back to my office in less than a week with a brand new LCD and a new trackpad for a total cost of $0. (I have AppleCare, the extended warranty.)
5. I rsynced (well, actually psynced) my home directory from the Mini back to my Powerbook and picked up where I left off with a nicely refurbished Powerbook.

This is old hat for Unix people, who can easily move around their home directories. Maybe the same thing can be done with Windows, I don't know. All I know is that I am getting rather addicted to having all my stuff in the exact way I have it available to me at all times. It's nice that it works so well.

With Mapion Local Search, users can now walk down the street anywhere in Japan and point at over 700,000 objects such as buildings, shops, restaurants, banks, historical sites and instantly retrieve information on what they are looking at or find what they are looking for just by pointing their phone. Just like one uses a mouse to click on an object on a computer screen and retrieve information, now users can Click on the Real World® using their mobile phone.

Press Release

The current prototype uses a monochrome laser and a holographic micro-screen to create an image via diffraction. A PowerPoint presentation on the device is available from this press release.

There are example images inside this presentation, though they have been cropped in the presentation to hide some laser edge effects. Perhaps these distracting lines and dots are part of the technology? The uncropped originals are reproduced below:

Via Slashdot.