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crazy building with floating towers
Joyent Slingshot: a smart product idea
Joyent Slingshot uses Ruby on Rails to create webapps that you run on your desktop that can sync up with the server side. It’s designed to provide an easily installable program for Windows and Mac. This is a good idea and it’s good timing for this product, because it’s coming out head-to-head against Adobe’s Apollo. Apollo could be huge, but it’s just getting going.
For those who have been following my blog, TurboGears was actually extracted from a desktop webapp. I didn’t have a need for the sync part of the equation, but I did indeed create an easy way for me to build Windows and Mac double-clickable apps (with little bits of platform-specific GUI to make it nice).
Good luck to Joyent with the new product! Spiffy stuff!
links for 2007-03-22
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neat little wifi rabbit looking thing that gets data from the net
The security of online password managers
Today, I learned about PassPack – Free Online Password Manager. PassPack appears to do everything right. The encryption/decryption happens in your browser, which means that the data simply cannot be decrypted by the people at PassPack or someone that gets ahold of PassPack’s data. They also offer a reasonable technique for dealing with phishers.
Fundamentally, though, there is still a risk with a service like this. If someone manages to get into PassPack’s servers, they can modify the software that gets sent to your browser so that it passes along your encryption key, which they can then use to decrypt your passwords at their leisure.
Granted, the people running PassPack are undoubtedly security concious. They’ll run their servers as securely as they can, keep up with patches, and would disconnect the boxes as soon as they see a sign of a potential breach. The risk is relatively minimal, but you still have to decide if it’s a chance you want to take.
links for 2007-03-20
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todo list – integrates with QuickSilver
Adobe Apollo is in alpha
Though there are some people who are concerned about handing over a monopoly to Adobe (which is a fair concern), Adobe Apollo is now out in alpha and is certainly technology to watch. It’s a system for creating cross-platform desktop apps using webesque technologies (HTML/JavaScript/CSS/Flash). Unfortunately, cross-platform at this time only means Windows and Mac, though Apollo could undoubtedly be brought to Linux if the demand is there.
I heard a rumor at one point that Adobe is considering bundling in sqlite, which I think would be killer. Looking at the FAQ, it would appear that sqlite is still on the table but is not in this release. It seems like having sqlite as a local data store is a no brainer… having to come up with your own formats for all offline data you want to store seems like a drag. At least, it would be for any moderately sizeable amount of data.
links for 2007-03-16
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Article about Carol Dweck (a psychologist) and her research into motivation and success. Haven’t read it yet (Guy Kawasaki recommended) but it sounds intriguing and useful at first glance.
links for 2007-03-15
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woah. javascript has getters and setters. I never knew that!
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If you’re using cookie authentication, you should be aware of what that can mean for you.
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think JSON results are safe from
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nice use of tg.include_widgets… add RSS auto discovery and Google Analytics without touching your app