Month: June 2008

280slides

My boss Thomas came home from San Francisco today where he attended the annual WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and he brought some interesting infos and stuff along (Snow Leopard Alpha install party, anyone?)

I haven’t had the chance to have a longer chat with him yet, but one thing he was totally awesome about was when he attended in this indie developer track the other day. I forgot what he told me it was entitled, but basically it was about a young startup company which “just” created a Powerpoint / iWork Keynote equivalent which completly runs inside your browser… you find it here:


http://www.280slides.com

Back yet?

Have you noticed the overall responsive UI? Have you seen the semi-transparent tool windows with their soft drop shadows? Have you tried to insert a shape via drag’n’drop and changed its size and form? And of course you noticed how the little preview pages on the left instantly updated when you changed somewhat in your main slide, haven’t you?

As a normal Joe you’d probably say “hey, decent application, very nice!” – as a developer of any kind you should by now just simply blown away…

A bit of explanation follows.

What you’ve just seen was a completly new web framework user interface built on top of a completly new web programming language named Objective-J built on top of plain, old Javascript 1.x. One of the founders of 280 North, Francisco Ryan Tolmasky, apparently loved his Objective-C for desktop development of Mac OS X applications so much, that he decided to create a version for any browser (the underlying Javascript can be found here for the interested).

Ok, now, nice, somebody invented a new script language on top of Javascript – now what? Shouldn’t this be painfully slow? What’s the point?

As you’ve seen it is not at all slow, I guess with Firefox 3 and newer versions of Safari / Webkit it should get even faster. And the point behind this is that if the foundation stands as-is, its just a matter of time to reproduce all the core functionalities of the Cocoa Frameworks – those programming libraries which are already used for all these fancy Mac OS X applications (not to forget the iPhone / iPod touch applications and the native Windows versions of iTunes and Safari). What if you could write a Objective-C application in the future – and with minimal changes to its rendering source code – just publish it as a web application running in everyone’s browser?!

Wow, now this is very cool…

Of course there are similar efforts of creating “rich internet applications”, most of them need some kind of browser plugin or runtime (Flash, Adobe Air, Silverlight, to name a few) and some are install-free (basically everything what Google has created, like Docs and Spreadsheets, the calendar app, GMail, …). While widgets on the former usually look very decent and maybe even adapt to your local style setting, pure web-based javascript apps often look like outlaws – or at least do not provide all the widgets you’re used to if you’re developing desktop applications. With whatever drives 280slides, we might see the best of both worlds – widgets which look and feel like the widgets in desktop applications and widgets which are completly install-free.

The guy(s) behind 280North promised to release Objective-J (and hopefully the Frameworks on top of it) soon under objective-j.org and I’m very very excited to see more of it.

One last anecdote Thomas told me today – Francisco Ryan Tolmasky was asked during the presentation of 280slides what he did before he founded his company, i.e. he was asked for his background. Imagine a young guy standing in front of the audience, probably aged under 25, answering “Well, I’ve worked for Apple on the iPhone version 1, but after that had been finished, I decided to leave the company. What was left for me there anyways, doing it again for iPhone 2 was not appealing after all…”

Oh my god.

Compromise a coffee machine

Just found via heise: The Jura F90 Coffee machine’s connectivity kit which “enables [the communication] with the Internet, via a PC [to] download parameters to configure [the] espresso machine to your own personal taste” seems to have some security problems:

The connectivity kit uses the connectivity of the PC it is running on to connect the coffee machine to the internet. This allows a remote coffee machine “engineer” to diagnose any problems and to remotely do a preliminary service.

Best yet, the software allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on at the level of the user.

(Source)

So next time your coffee is too strong or too weak – look out for nearby hackers!

Depressed and angry on a daily basis

There is a lot discussion currently going on if or if not the Peak oil (the maximum capacity in oil extraction) has been reached yet – of course caused by the sky-rocketing oil prices in these days. But even if our daily lifes pretty much depend on oil, which we use for heating, cooking, driving or plastics like toys and packaging (and the list goes on almost endlessly), we should be aware and even fear other “peaks” much more in my opinion: the upcoming peak of food, caused by a peak of drinking water.

A very interesting and well-written article on this topic has been published in the German net magazine Telepolis, called “Peak Food, Peak Water” (English version via Google translate), upon which I stumbled today:

One of the most powerful players in the global financial system, the investment bank Goldman Sachs, introduced the Top Five Risks during its risk assessment of future developments conference and invited several experts which all warned for a huge and catastrophic water shortage.

[One of them] Donald Kennedy [a Stanford biology professor and former chief editor of Nature] spoke of a climate change, initiated by an accelerating spiral of extreme droughts which alternate with “psychotic and excessive rainfalls”. The consequences are already visible: “There are already 800 million people who live with food insecurity. They can not grow enough food, or they can not afford it. This is a seismic shift in the economy,” Kennedy alerted. Goldman Sachs has even estimated that by 2025 a full third of the world’s population will have no access to “adequate drinking water”.

So with a global water problem we also get a global food problem, because agriculture demands up to 70% of the global water ressources.

In this year I certainly have no problem to acknowledge the water shortage: We’ve had a pretty warm and dry winter in Germany and after some rain in April, May started out very hot and again very dry. I’m not a meteorologist, but I bet the past six weeks or so have been the most waterless weeks for this season in a couple of years. When I go out with my little boy and my dog I see all this grass in the parks around my home withered and dead which usually was not the case before July or August in a “normal” year.

Now most people around here just enjoy the weather and don’t think about it much. But somehow I’m more in touch with the nature (after all I have a gardener background) – I feel for the plants and animals which suffer from a drought like this – and I tend to imaginate (I would say realistic, my wife would say pessimistic) agendas how the next couple of years will look like – for us, for our area, for Germany and for the rest of the world. And I get very much depressed and angry even if I follow the daily news and recognize how less the world’s biggest leaders do to solve the world’s biggest challenges, the global climate change. My wife usually tells me then that I should stay away from the news if they make me depressed or angry, but this is no solution for me either…

The stated Telepolis article now again contains one particular section which again makes me wonder what on earth should happen before people start to act and do the right things:

The “proposed solutions”, which have been hatched during this conference by one of the most influential U.S. investment banks, sound like the a declaration of bankruptcy of the late, capital-dominated economic advisers. Goldman Sachs said water to the “oil of the next century” and recommended that all investors should heavily invest in this resource, especially in the “high tech” sector of the industry. The product ‘water’ will offer “enormous rewards for investors who know how to play during the upcoming investment boom.”

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