Did you ever use google maps to get direction from point A to B, only to have to give up and do some manual adjustments, because you wanted to make a pit stop at location C? Did you ever want to get google maps (or any other mapping program for that matter) to take you through a different route, because you knew for a fact that some road along your route was under construction? Well I have and usually I end up having to pick a arbitary point somewhere to force the mapping engine to take a certain street/highway that I want.

Well those crafty engineers at google have solved the problem for all of us. You can now input your source and destination and if you don’t like the route, just move your mouse along the outline and move the outline (through the magic of AJAX) and force it to go through another path. All this is done in realtime and the mapping engine does all the calculations while you’re moving the route points.

Well, maybe. If there is one feature I like about spreadsheets, it is that you can use formulas, have them lookup other static field/colums and have the spreadsheet engine fill down an entire column automatically by reference. We’ve all done this and marvelled at the simplicity of the concept. Another feature that I like is that you can modify portions of a spreadsheet and have it recalculate related field. Well, Google docs and spreadsheet has taken that concept to the next level. Imagine having active spreadsheets that update their fields using google data. In the above picture I lined up a bunch of Baseball players names and created two columns using the following “formulas”:

• Date of Birth field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “Date Of Birth”)
• RBI field: =GoogleLookup(A2 ; “RBI”)

then I used the copy function to copy the field, selected the rest of that column and did a paste. After google digested the data, all fields were automatically filled in using google lookups. Now the neat thing about this is that if the data changes, the appropriate spreadsheet field will automatically update. You can see the power of something like this in creating simple worksheets that keep track of stock prices, auction prices, etc. The basic syntax is in the format of =GoogleLookup(“entity”; “attribute”), where “entity” represents the name of the entity that you want to access, like Kuala Lumpur, Audrey Hepburn, or oxygen, and “attribute” is the type of information that you want to retrieve.

Yeah, I like history, and I think you can learn a thing or two from it. In this case we’re talking about google (and I guess all search engines before and after). Just have a look at this ad for the “Answer Machine” from 1964. Published in Childcraft Vol. 6: How things change by Field Enterprises Educational Corporation. Are you having a “Wow, who would have predicted that” moment…?

(Credit: Web Owls)

Just came across this site Fauxto.com (read it like it’s french…..Phau-to….ie: photo). Anyways, great web 2.0 application. It has all your standard photo application funtions/features (including layers for all you PS guys). Maybe it’s just me, but a couple more applications like this and well, we won’t need the OS anymore (be it OSX, WinXP, Linux, etc…). Google (and others) already do word processing, spread sheets, presentation (ie: powepoint)….add photo editing to it and you’ve got a pretty good arsenal of applications that are truly platform agnostic. TIC TOC…TIC TOC…TIC TOC…I wonder if the OS guys are listening….

Well it took a little while to get these out the door, but I think you’ll agree, the wait was well worth it. These are 60 of the best (out of a collection of 1228) pictures I took on thursday night (June 14, 2007) during Apple’s WWDC07 bash. I think 5% keepers is a pretty good number…right. Well enough talk, click and jump to my gallery site.

I love tty. I love command line. I love vi. Well if you agree with any one of these statements, you have to check out startty.com. It is absolutely simple and stunning at the same time. All you need is a telnet connection (you can even do it across serial terminals). Here is how it works:

- sign up for a account with a real email address.
- wait for confirmation email, click the link inside the email to confirm and create your startty account.
- login to startty.com website and goto the configuration screen to setup your panels.
- setup your 8 panels with different content
- bring up a terminal window and telnet to startty.com on port 50000 (telnet startty.com 50000)

Now go and grab the oldest computer you can find, hookup a wise terminal to it and amaze all your blogging/facebooking/rss’ing friends :-) TEXT TERMINALS RULES!!!

…..enjoy…..

Well, I found this little Gem a bit late for WWDC. I missed an early thursday session, since I was relying on the hotels wake up call system which — for some reason — did not work that day. Well not anymore, ALARMD comes to rescue. ALARMD is a internet alarm clock that you can run in your favourite web browser. It can wake you gently wake you up using built in alarm sounds or optionally tune into last.fm and wake up to streaming music. Additionally you can change the clocks font size so you don’t have to get out of bed to check your notebook on the other side of the room. Can’t wait for Siggraph ’07, this will definitely be useful then.

In the continuing saga of starship “G” vs. the evil empire, here is a story that I almost missed. Gmail has introduced a slide show function that just happens to work with power point files as well. So now you can email that ppt file to your gmail account, go to your presentation, login to gmail and do a web slide show….all through the magic of AJAX. Now, you can’t edit power point files yet, but this feature will be added soon. This is thanks to google acquiring Tonic System. You can find the announcement here.

Google already supports web previews for Word documents and Excel sheets as part of their Google Docs & Spreadsheets program. You can see the pattern here – with every new instant preview, users have less reason to actually buy Microsoft Office. So go signup for a gmail account and choose your side in the coming galactic desktop battle.

In addition to discussing several new features for the consumer edition of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Apple has disclosed some new functionality for Mac OS X 10.5 Server, also scheduled to ship in October. Among them: a wiki server; Podcast Producer; Spotlight (find content stored on other servers); and a new iCal Server, based on the CalDAV open standard. Leopard Server can also automatically configure Leopard clients for use on the server, including file sharing, Mail, iCal, iChat, Address Book and VPN settings.

There is also a built-in Network Health Check, a new Server Preferences application and a server status Dashboard widget.The new iCal Server can interface iCal 3 in Leopard, Mozilla’s Sunbird and OSAF’s Chandler. Spotlight Server delivers search results of content stored on mounted network volumes. Content indexing is done automatically and transparently on the serverCore services also see an update in Mac OS X 10.5 Server. Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Cyrus, Podcast Producer and QuickTime Streaming Server will be 64-bit.

Other new features include Server Admin 4 with new file sharing and permission controls; iChat Server 2 to securely communicate over instant messaging; External Accounts to enable Leopard users to store their home directory on an external FireWire or USB portable drive; a new System Imaging Utility that uses a workflow-based editor to create customized images that can include Boot Camp partitions; Xgrid 2 for ad hoc distributed computing in environments without dedicated controllers, and QuickTime Streaming Server 6 with support for 3GPP Release 6 bit rate adaptation.

Mac OS X 10.5 Server will carry a price of $500 for a 10-client edition and $1000 for an unlimited-client edition.

MacNN | WWDC: Mac OS X Leopard Server features

Blogged with Flock

iPhone, aka. Apple Inc.’s Achilles Heel. Well, just about everyone was waiting for a SDK for the bloody thing. They wanted to rush to the AT&T store on June 29, buy a iPhone and start developing real software for it. You know, the kind of software that is actually useful. Well Apple’s idea of software development is this:

“You don’t touch our phone, you just use AJAX and HTML and design webpages that can be loaded (using wireless) on the phone”. Now I have no idea how this qualifies as a Application development platform, but according to Apple it does.

Itunes download package for windows just grew in size. You will now be force fed Safari as part of this download. I have absolutely no idea why the hell apple would want to do this….or for that matter, why would I want to run Safari under windows. I thought the Mac guy was supposed to be lean and mean, not like the bloated PC guy who can’t even move his butt around because of all the “included” software.

Okay so Stevie did his keynote…..10 “new” things about Apple’s OSX Leopard. Well more like 3 news things and 7 recycled things….you decide:

1. New Desktop (New Menu bar, New Dock, Stacks, consistent window look, prominent active window).
2. New Finder (New sidebar, search other macs and servers, shared computers, back to my mac, cover flow).
3. Quicklook
4. 64-bit (64-bit cocoa, one version runs 32 and 64 bit apps side-by-side).
5. Core Animation.
6. Boot Camp.
7. Spaces.
8. IChat (AAC-LD for audio, tabbed chats, photo booth effects, ichat theater, backdrops).
9. Timemahine.
10. Hmm maybe I missed this…..

All this fun can be had for $129. But you have to wait ’til october.

Started lineing up at 7:00 am this morning. Front of the line people actually were here at 5:00 am….Now that takes some dedication. NOT ME!!!! Anyways some shots of the massive lines outside/inside and upstairs at the Moscone West. It’s 8:40 am right now and we’re all waiting….good pastaries, lots of coffee and juice…..YUM!!!

So I’m back at my hotel –after getting my badge, bag, t-shirt and dinner– and am getting ready to go to bed early. Need to be in line for WWDC keynote tomorrow at 6:00 am. Now that is fully 3 hours before the keynote, I better get a seat in the main Ballroom. We’ll see what Stevie announces tomorrow….Let me guess, a damn SDK for the damn iPhone. That better not be true. I am predicting today that iPhone will fall flat.

Head over to rixstep.com and have a peek at their list, detailing a ton of keyboard shortcuts for OS X (and also ones for Windows XP). The list has your standard shortcuts and some “super secret” ones that the author has collected overtime. Did you know you can hold down the “shift” key after login to prevent startup items from opening?

I did not get a chance to post this last night as I was totally smashed. At 7:43 pm last night this was the scene in our machine room. A happy XSAN of 13TB being burned in for the next 12-hours. It’s 9:30 am now and I just stopped my abusive dd command (dd if=/dev/zero of=/Volumes/RAID/crap.null bs=32m count=4096000). The filesize is 10TB with a 220MB/s write throughput (non-optimized) and I think the system has passed the test. Now for the real test Final Cut Pro Editing……

In and of itself this might not be big news, but I think it is the trickle that will eventually turn into a flood, so put on your life jackets…..I warned you.

As a follow up on my earlier story on how google will use gears to move in on Microsoft’s domination of the desktop, here is the story of the first non-google app to use gears. Remember the Milk is a popular online todo list that until yesterday needed a network connection to it’s backend to work properly, but that’s not true anymore.

They have paired up with google to provide a seamless online/offline experience for their users. The offline experience will allow you to view your todo lists, add tasks, edit tasks, search your tasks, create Smart Lists, and do the zillion other things you normally do with RTM. Once connected to the net, you switch from offline to online mode, and RTM will sync all the offline data with the online data. My hats off to RTM, fantastic job.

ROM_Crystal_opening_wide_crowd_02, originally uploaded by wvs.

Okay, so I missed this event. This is a shot of festivities at the opening of Royal Ontario Museums new extension, lovingly known as the “Iceberg“. Image credit goes to Sam Javanrouh, my new favourite torontonian shutterbug. Check out his main site Daily Dose of Imagery, absolutely fantastic stuff.

This is one of the coolest clocks I’ve seen in a long time. Check it out (needs flash) or go here to download a screensaver of another version of the clock. Almost as cool as those nixie tube clocks.

Well, here is my prediction after digesting most of the content that came out of G-Day. Google Gears will soon make MS Office (and for that matter most “installed” applications) obsolete. Google’s Gears homepage explains that Gears is …

<<... an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:

– Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness>>

Google in a press release states that Gears “marks an important step in the evolution of web applications because it addresses a major user concern: availability of data and applications when there’s no Internet connection available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable.” They go on to say that making the browser environment more powerful is increasingly important (Google snatched up a couple of Firefox developers – this makes even more sense in the light of this announcement).

Well I guess at this point we can just wait and see. Let’s just hope google doesn’t turn into the next MS when they get to the top.