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Up until the 1820s, Fuck was apparently very much in vogue. Not until 1960s was this great word brought back into the lexicon of the common man.

Sometime around 1885, the very first Anonymouse Cowarde briefly tried writing about Slashdot, but apparently died off before his comments could be modded up.

It's more on topic this time though.

On Android, all you need to do to is tap the "USB Debugging" button in "settings and your phone is your own to do as you please with. Tools like App Inventor will help even non-geeks develop and load their own apps onto the phone.

Microsoft's new phone OS isn't downright bad, like their previous attempts. It's just not that interesting either, effective enough, but a little bland and corporate-y. Probably very well aligned to their target market, but there's no surprise that their nod towards openness is also bland and corporate-y.

> The real issue is a lack of a "Interface builer" so we can build beautiful apps with no extra effort.
> Combine a really good "interface builder", "default layout settings" or whatever it might be with
> Android's customization and we got a clear winner in the UI and UX space.

Try Google App Inventor, an official tool from Google itself

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

Do you mean something like this?

Sounds like what Google recently demoed for Android then:
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

Still, that is a targeted tool. What i refer to is how sooner or later such specific programs as a word processor gains the ability to be programmed for just about any task.

Take a look at Google's App Inventor for Android (for now). It was heavily influenced by projects like Scratch. It's not an app as such, the kid/toddler will still need a PC to "program" with, and it doesn't have an emulator (you must have an Android phone connected to your computer, or connected to the internet, if you want to be able to test your programs, although you can still write one without one), but any changes the kid does to the visual lego-like structure on the screen of his PC will immediately reflect itself into the program logic and display on the phone, which makes it an absolutely fantastic programming environment to work in!

As a developer, I would love to able to use that tool to do fast prototypes, and then have access to the code, so I can further customize it. Unfortunately, it was written in Scheme (LISP), they don't want to give us access to the actual written code (only the visual one, that's what's considered the source), and its developers don't seem to be at all interested in changing the scope of their project -- they are really only interested in targeting kids/teenagers with it.

Or even something... authoritative.

http://www.googlelabs.com/

And also this: http://www.google.com/newproducts/

Or even something... authoritative.

http://www.googlelabs.com/

That is the biggest problem with Firefox, it doesn't work with policies. Otherwise there might be many more companies running Firefox instead of IE.
And if it is just for sake of "running properly", check here for new Javascript compatibility: http://sputnik.googlelabs.com/
First place Opera, followed by FF and Chrome, then IE with 6 time more errors than Opera -.-

Yup.. Hypercard was really kind of cool. But that was a completely different Apple, before Steve Jobs got so paranoid. Now, don't get me wrong -- paranoia has been a great business model for many different businesses, and it's hard to claim that the Apple of the 70s and 80s was doing better than the Apple of today. In fact, it might as well be a different company.

Apple in the 70s was the Apple of Wozniak... the one many of us in the hardware business were inspired by. When I want on to design computers at Commodore for 11.5 years, I took along the lessons of the Apple ][. I'm sure I'm not alone -- that was the Apple everyone liked. You didn't need the Macfaithful or iPhonies to show up and defend Apple at every turn of the corporate policy. There were a fundamental good.

The Apple of the early Macintosh was different. That was the Apple of cool software. Their hardware SUCKED, unlike the Apple ][ days, but their software had all kinds of cool, at least at the top layer. And by then, most users weren't well versed in hardware design, so they didn't understand how crufty the early Macs were. It wasn't my kind of revolution as a hardware guy (I was designing Amiga systems in that era, doing hardware correctly, so I didn't really care all that much how crappy Apple's hardware was), but they did usher in the GUI revolution. Theirs was slow, but they had quite a few very advanced ideas.

Today, it's the Apple of the closed Appliance. That's not a surprise to long-time Apple followers -- Jobs always claimed the personal computer ought to be an appliance. It's just that, before the various technologies of today, it wasn't practical. Now it is, and Jobs is running with it. That's find for some people, but the Computing Appliance idea is the polar opposite of what many of us at the start of personal computing believed our work to be. The Amiga, for example, was our best shot at enabling creativity in its users. This was a machine on which to create new things, perhaps as much as any new platform had been. Mac moved the publishing house to the desktop -- we wanted to move the production studio there too.

The Appliance is about viewing things, not creating things. And they go the extra mile to ensure you can't use it as a creative tool. No real multitasking, no keyboard models, finger-input-only, etc. They've optimized the consumption device, but killed it for useful creation. And so, no big surprise there's nothing like Hypercard.

But you can't keep that idea down. Check out Google's answer: App Inventor. Whether or not App Inventor really emerges as a Hypercard for the new era or not (or something even better), it's going to make it dramatically easier for "regular folks": students, teachers, artists, webmasters, etc. to crank out their own apps, reliable apps too, without the need to spend 5 years learning to write great Java or C-code.

Game Maker is a pretty nice tool that let's you get into making games without heavy programming: http://www.yoyogames.com/make Also, you might consider mobile game development. I'm a professional Android developer, but I haven't looked at App Inventor yet. I'm not sure how amenable it is for building games, though I'd guess it would work pretty well for simple ones: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/

This is the actual statement by Apple.

Also, I've read some rumors about the next iLife '11 having a new program for creating iOS apps in a similar way to the Android's AppInventor. This new statement seems a like a pointer in that direction, otherwise they would have a hard time arguing about antitrust issues on the App Store...

Maybe add some Google Scribe to the edit box? :)

No, that would be Google Scribe.

if you want to see something really cool, check out the Image Swirl search. Its no so much a bit of eye candy as is an associative grouping of search results - for images. Unfortunately, it uses Flash, but give it a go - click a group result and you'll see. Hopefully they'll implement this as js if it comes out of the labs.

Honestly I don't see how a normal person could possibly care about Afghanistan given the way it's reported.

Long ago, Adam Smith wrote a nice little summation of why most people don't care about Afghanistan:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#Far-away_disasters

Would you be willing to give up your computer in order to save the lives of three strangers in Africa?

Even with this WikiLeaks story, the overwhelming focus of most of these stories are about whether WikiLeaks is doing something dangerous.

Because, as I said, there's not much new in them, mostly just additional pieces of information about what we already knew. The Washington Post, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and NYT features on it right when it was released had lots of non-meta reporting.

Here's articles on civilian casualties: http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com?date=2000-07-27&zoom=3&subs=anews.afghanistan+civilian+casualties%2Cperiodical.Time%2Cevent

A good reporter would find a story that really matters and then look for a way to tell the story so that people will care.

Have you read the actual leaked reports? Most of it is so dry that very few people would sit around and read them. The fact that you know what they discuss is most likely because reporters took the time to read them and explain them in interesting terms.

Scratch or AppInventor for Android could be good starting steps. From there, will be easier to go then to more "textual" programming languages.

It sounded like fun, so I tried stepping through google's instructions. I was a bit surprised when their Getting Started page said "Whether you are using a Mac or a PC, a Nexus One or a MyTouch, this section will tell you everything you need to know to get App Inventor set up on your computer and phone." This seems to exclude my linux box, which seemed odd. Oh, well, I grabbed my Macbook Pro and tried following the instructions there.

After a bit of stumbling around, appinventor said it's installed. So I connected my G1 to the Mac, and it said it was connected via USB and in debug mode. So I clicked on the link to http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/ which shows me an App Inventor window that should appear. It doesn't. I do get a page that says App Inventor, asking me to log in with my google account. I do that, and get another App Inventor page asking for some information (including the email address that I just logged in with ;-). I fill in that information, hit the Submit button, get yet another App Inventor page saying "Thank you. Your information has been sent to the App Inventor team." There are no links on this page.

That's apparently the end of the install tree. I've tried a few different paths through the maze of links, and they all lead to the same dead end. I expected some feedback through a gmail message, but after several hours, no messages from google have appeared there.

So how have others tested App Inventor? Have you got it working? I'm obviously missing something, but I can't see what. Maybe it's a test to see whether I can spot something that I'm failing to spot ...

(Hmmm ... It occurs to me that gmail may have sent me a message that was tossed in the spam folder. Hold on ... Nope; just one message since I started on App Inventor, and it was from me offering "VIAGRA cheap".)

"I do miss the ease of direct downloading podcasts"

What do you mean by this? Have you downloaded Google Listen? http://listen.googlelabs.com/

According to the documentation, App Inventor is based on Open Blocks, which is in turn modeled after Scratch, and uses Kawa (a Scheme implementation) to produce Java.

As for the Blackberry Storm ... it's best not to speak of these things.

An interested person might start here: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/

This is interesting reading: http://socghop.appspot.com/

Chrome and/or Chromium browser: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome

Whatever your interest is in open source, try googling it. Not everything in the labs is open source, but some is - check that out: http://www.googlelabs.com/

Want code to play with? You'll get more from Google than you'll EVER get from Microsoft. Maybe I exxagerated with the word "most" - but they have given away a lot of stuff, and they help with a lot more. One of the things you'll see when you click the links above is Gnome. They contribute, but, of course, Gnome doesn't belong to Google - that capital "g" is just coincidental.

So, go look around.

not only the number of elements on a page but the type of data that constitute those elements as well as the virtual location of them. With ads being more bloated as time goes on and various Java/Flash components being added to webpages over time webpages in general tend to load slower.

All that is completely irrelevant once you block the bloat elements (flash, ads, etc). And, it seems even in this new service they are still a problem:
Take this story. Looking at it (after disabling Ad-block) shows two ads, and an incomplete article.

Once you press the link, you get into this page which shows the complete article infested with blinking and moving ad-banners.

I have been using Adblock Plus since maybe 5 years (used Adblock before), and nowadays I cannot stand browsing the internet in its "native" form.

A service like this could be good if it re-paginated the web pages in a way easier to read for the eye (something like Microsoft Word reader mode, or Acrobar Reader fullscreen-two-pages, with a big enough monitor).

That is all.

The summary didn't seem to have it, so here's a link to the actual service:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Looks like all the other "progress" bars frozen on mid-load.
Have tried multiple unique and linked searches and the "Building a Square for..."
bar fills 90% and stops every time... didn't think Big G was susceptible to the Slashdot Effect.

Meh, back to the timeline for me.