04.27.08
Posted in rant at 7:49 pm by Nate Smith
I realize the media gets a lot of things out of context, but whoa! This was a quote from Steve Balmer on CNN. “Ballmer said the customers buying PCs with XP are IT departments who are having trouble shifting old machines to newer technology.”
He’s right, we are having trouble justifying upgrades to an obese operating system that does not really have any justifiable ROI.
Steve must be living on the moon. He should go visit some people in the trenches really doing IT and living with a budget.
Permalink
04.18.08
Posted in ColdFusion, ramblings at 6:32 am by Nate Smith
Arguably, anyone who uses the Internet touches Adobe technology at some point. Most likely in the form of Flash and Shockwave or Acrobat. Some of the most annoying problems creep in when your browser and operating system don’t cooperate with these technologies. Adobe could fix this. If Adobe had an Adobe-browser they could seamlessly combine the browser with all their extra technologies to work together. Historically Adobe has had good support for multiple operating systems including Linux so we know there is expertise within the company to support a broad range of platforms, perhaps even including mobile phones.
You can say there are already too many browsers and several very good ones now, but I think the Adobe browser is missing.
What would be the attributes of an Adobe-browser? I think it would have several useful things. First, it would be small and tight, carefully written for fast execution. It would need to be rigorously standards-compliant, perhaps based on an existing rendering engine, but not necessarily. Finally it should be a component. The browser itself should be able to plug into IE or FireFox, or run by itself. It should also be highly manageable and secure. It should also break some paradigms about what a browser should look like. That’s a tall order.
An Adobe browser should be highly manageable and secure because in a lot of places people would want to use it as the sole interface on a Kiosk. Imagine all the Flash and Acrobat technologies right there, for a pleasant user-interface and form-filling capabilities. In companies it would be nice to be able to lock down different aspects, like proxy settings, history settings.
Maybe Adobe doesn’t want to touch the browser market for several reasons - there is no profit in it, nobody “buys” a browser anymore, several good browsers already exist, or they don’t want to dominate the Internet and have to contend with antitrust issues. Certainly there might not be much profit in it, except perhaps in an IDE, developer materials and deployment and developer education for those wishing to extend or better support the browser, the “ecosystem” around it. Several good browsers do exist. OK, extend one. Use the rendering engine from an existing browser (maybe not IE) or partner with Apple, Mozilla, Opera or KDE. Do not worry about dominance and antitrust. It would be hard to get market share away from the big two, worry about that once you are successful.
I’m not asking Adobe to merge all their technologies into the browser. They should be modular, as they are with other browsers. That way you could trim the browser down for a cell phone, or have different levels of Acrobat support according to what the browser needs to do. The Adobe developers of all those other good technologies can continue to concentrate on making them work and improving them, they would have just have an additional browser to worry about integration with.
Finally, an Adobe browser could be a great development tool for all the people who work in development with Adobe technologies today. The first and best place to make sure your AIR, Flash, ColdFusion, or even Acrobat applications are working. Hopefully within an IDE like Eclipse.
C’mon Adobe, how about it?
Permalink
04.15.08
Posted in ramblings at 4:42 pm by Nate Smith
When I was a kid eraser crumbs were much smaller.
Permalink
04.10.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:42 am by Nate Smith
We have a little application that collects the contents of a database and then sends them to a few mail recipients for review. It was working fine in CF 8 prior to moving to Exchange 2007. We have other applications that relay mail through Exchange 2007 fine but for some reason this one was not. It turned out that the cfmail from field only had the name and not the domain of the sender. Once we added the sender domain mail would relay and work again.
This is probably a good thing - Exchange having tighter adherence to a standard, though I’m not sure which one. But it could definitely be a “gotcha” if your mail server was working fine prior to a switch to Exchange 2007, or possibly even an earlier version of Exchange such as 2003 or 2000. We happened to be moving away from Exchange 5.5.
Permalink