• Seven months later, Truevision3D 6.5 is still nowhere to be seen by the non-paying public.
• Silverlight looks like it will be enough to kick Adobe in the pants and give Flash a run for its money. I could never get into ActionScript and decent online tutorials on Flash that went beyond “hey I’m gonna make a cool intro webpage” were few and far between; I look forward to doing this sort of thing in C#.
• Ah, Paris Hilton.
• Spambayes is still working marvelously; again, I recommend it for anybody who is drowning in spam.
• Google’s new Street View feature is damn impressive. I can’t say I buy into the paranoia that the privacy advocates are attempting to whip up: if you take a picture of my house from the street in front of it, you’re not exactly peering into my windows. If some cretin has the mind to break into my home, I’m willing to bet that he’ll case the place in person and that the Internet may be a tad too sophisticated for him anyway. Besides, by the time the magic Google vans get to my city, any pressing privacy issues and legislation will have likely taken place. Thanks for taking the bullet for small-town America, San Francisco!
• Dwarf Fortress is, by far, the best ASCII-based game I’ve ever played. Not that I’ve played that many — certainly not in the last 10 years or so — but it beats the crap out of most Roguelikes. I suspect what keeps me playing is not the random-generation element (and certainly not the graphics, the other Roguelike characteristic DF shares) but the fact that you can build rather complex fortresses and gently nudge the inhabitants in a particular direction. In fact, I think Tarn Adams should pitch the concept to Maxis; SimMoria sounds like a winner.

I’m not a JotSpot user — in fact, I’m not certain I heard of them before today. But after checking their site out I’m not surprised they were snatched up by the big G. Look at this page, which contains a bunch of wiki applications that JotSpot offers. Compare with some of the web apps Google has come out with in the last couple of years. See anything familiar?

One thing Google didn’t have up until a month ago was a product that enabled users to create their own communities online. Now that they’ve acquired YouTube and a wiki application that supports forums they have all the tools to create the next MySpace if they wish: post your photos in Picasa Web Albums, videos on YouTube, chat in real-time with your friends in Google Talk (or a next-gen version of GTalkr in a web page), use Gmail for your e-mail needs, create a knowledgebase about your favorite topic using the JotSpot wiki and Google Base, provide a real-world context by linking things to Google Maps and access everything through your mobile device via dodgeball and some of the other technology Google acquired in 2005.

Geez, now all they need is to purchase some machine translation technology so these communities aren’t limited by language….whoops, looks like they’ve already got that covered.

So what the hell is Microsoft doing? By the looks of things, they’re stuck on the desktop.

Update: Scoble describes the wiki market as “white hot” and says the MS Office team should be asking themselves what Google is up to. I disagree, Robert…they should be asking their managers what Microsoft is going to be up to. Google’s plan is clear: to dominate the field of web-based applications so it’s no longer about where you are or what OS you’re using.

See?  I’m trying hard not to make a snarky comment.  Not everybody at Redmond throws chairs and rubs their hands together gleefully while hatching sinister plots to take over teh Intarweb. 

Still, I have to wonder…will the friendly relationship still exist a year from now, when Firefox 2.x and IE 7.x are the dominant browsers and each team is pushing hard to outdo the other?

Well, that and worked most of the summer like most adults.

I was happy to see, however, that sanity prevailed at Microsoft regarding IE7′s name. I had bitched about their previous plan of calling one version IE7 and one IE7+, and I guess I wasn’t alone. While it was — and still is – a petty issue, we sure as hell don’t need any more confusion when it comes to the Web.

Case in point: about a month ago, in the space of a week two colleagues asked me the question “are Java and JavaScript related?” The answer is no — but the damage caused by Netscape Corporation in the mid-90s continues today because of a half-brained attempt to capitalize on the Java hype at the time.

Today’s post at the IE blog, however, sent me over the edge.

There will be two versions of IE 7 — something in itself that isn’t too surprising, since there were multiple flavors of IE 5.x (Mac, Win9x, WinXP/2000). Unfortunately, some market-mindful monkey has decided that they will be called different things: IE7 for Win2000/XP/2003 and IE7+ for Vista.

What’s the difference between the two, other than the operating systems? Obviously if it’s IE7+ then it has to be better, right? Wrong. Apparently features as “Protected Mode, Parental Controls and improved Network Diagnostics” qualify as the “plus”. You know, critical things that most folks like you and I will likely never use.

The big problem with this inane naming convention — and the crux of my problem with it — is that it merely sows confusion. Ever run into anybody who was baffled by the differences between Windows XP Home and Windows XP Professional or Visual Studio Standard and Visual Studio Professional? How about the dozen or so different flavors of Office?

Even more frustrating is the monkey wrench this throws into the usual convention web developers use to describe browser support. For instance, if my website works under Firefox versions 1.5 and later, I merely say that Firefox 1.5+ is supported. Same with IE5.5.

Now what? “This website supports Internet Explorer 7++”?

The IE7 dev team claims:

These [aforementioned] features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version. (“The version of IE7 in Vista” doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily…)

Right. So instead of you guys dealing with a perceived naming issue internally, you’re going to force the rest of us on the planet to adopt a name that will help tout the superiority of your next OS product. Thanks.