Leslie Franke

Ran across this article, “IBM Goes Silent On Linux Desktop Effort” over at InfoWorld. It appears IBM’s much publicised attempt to shift all of their internal desktops to Linux by 2005 is not going as smoothly as they hoped. An excerpt from the article that appears to highlight their biggest problem (my emphasis):

“Though IBM volunteers have set up an internal IRC (Internet relay chat) channel where Linux problems are discussed online, users may experience problems running ibm’s internal web applications. most of those applications are written for the internet explorer browser, which has not been ported to Linux. Internet Explorer is the only browser supported by IBM’s internal support desk, according to another IBMer.

I believe there is a lesson in this for web developers everywhere. One of the reasons it is oftern talked about for moving to web applications is that they are accessible from any platform using any web browser, thus avoiding being tied down to a specific platform. As the web becomes the dominant application deployment platform, it is critically important to write web apps in such ways so that multiple browsers can run it from the same code base. As a result, if the decision is ever made to switch platforms or browsers the most it will require is a bit of minor tweaking, making future migration to a new platform as cheap and easy as possible.

I have added three more Tungsten DIA graffiti skins to the SkinDIA! portrait graffitti skin package. To see what all three of these skins look like go to my Palm DIA photo album at Filckr.

Download link: Tungsten DIA Portrait Skins

In honor of the Crystal ZLauncher theme having 10,000 downloads in little more that one year I have made one more improvement to the Crystal ZLauncher Theme. I have never been happy with the tab title icons so I have redid them and also changed the signal icons to be Crystal icons also.

Note: The tab title icons positions and images have changed so if you use this version you will most likely have to reset the tab title icons.

Download Link

Ran across a neat, little Windows utility today to replace the standard Windows task switcher dialog (Alt+Tab). TaskSwitchXP displays a title and small screenshots of each application, in addition to the associated icon. The dialog can also be customized on a per-user basis with font settings, transparency, etc. TaskSwitchXP can be downloaded from Sourceforge. Very simple, but very nice.

Portable Firefox is a full version of Firefox optimized for use on a USB key drive. It truly is an amazing product. If you have not given Portable Firefox a try, you really should. You can download the application from John Haller’s Mozilla Stuff page. He also has a portable version of Nvu, Sunbird, and Thunderbird located there.

I have created a couple of Tungsten DIA graffiti skins, in portrait mode, for use on a T3 or T5 with SkinDIA!. Included is a dolphin, mountain, and city skin. To see what all three of these skins look like go to my Palm DIA photo album at Filckr.

Download link: Tungsten DIA Portrait Skins

Maybe I am the last person in the world to know this but when installing the latest version of OpenOffice I noticed that OpenOffice can export files to the Palm DOC format (this has been around since version 1.1). To enable this option, when installing the program under Custom Setup, choose the optional components option and then select mobile device filters. You can choose to install filters for Palm Doc or Pocket Word/Excel files. For anyone without a program such as Docs To Go this is a quick and easy way to get documents on your Palm device.