Author: atrasatti

Born and raised in Italy, US resident. Innovator with a soft spot for developers. Currently director of developer advocacy @kin_foundation, previously @Samsung_IoT, @Nokia, an advocate of the open Web

Nature and technology

I really like the contrast given by my new keyboard on my natural Teak table.

This is my Tisettanta Carpenter table (picture from official site, I don’t have the bench):
Tisettanta Carpenter Teak Table

And this is how the Mac and the keyboard look like (sorry for the little blur, they just shine!):
Apple Mac Aluminum Keyboard

You may also see the previous setup on Flickr, it’s still about the same, but the table is not a bit more clean. 😉

Apple is clearly making money

Someone should probably create a statistic (I’m surprised there isn’t one, yet) that shows how lawsuits grow in number when company earnings grow.

I don’t agree with all Apple’s policies, but it’s a pity that many people try to make money out of them (and other big companies every day) with lawsuits.

See here new lawsuits against Apple.

The Finder that will come

When I moved from Windows (2000 at the time) to OS X I had quite a few problems, initially with Finder (the counter part of Windows Explorer). I simply felt it did not have all the features I needed and that I was used to on Windows.

I tried PathFinder a really nice alternative Finder developed by CocoaTech. I think it’s a cool tool and shows many of the little things that could be added to the native Finder. After the 2 weeks of free test I decided that it actually had too many features for me. I went back to the default Finder and over the years I found my way with it and using xterm when needed (opening a file with vi or less is SO easy, fast and comfortable).

A new Finder is going to be introduced in Leopard. An overview of the evolution of Finder over the years and what is coming is available on AppleInsider. I think it’s an interesting reading.

mobileAJAX Workshop

On Sep 28 2007, in San Francisco, USA, the mobileAJAX workshop was held. I have not joined it, but it was good to read a couple of reports.

The W3C has published the official minutes of the meeting.

Also interesting to read the scratchpad used during the meeting.

I wonder where will (mobile) widgets go. I’m a bit skeptic. I think there’s much more than widgets to use AJAX. It wasn’t the main topic of the workshop but seems like it was one of the main points.

iPhone: The Web Browser is the only user interface

I was reading this article @AppleInsider and thought that if Apple is thinking about extending Javascript to allow applications to access more of the features of the device and is going to provide more visibility for Web-apps, then maybe they think that the iPhone is a Web-appliance. This means that the iPhone is a pocket-web browser. It’s not a device to build applications for.

There are so many services that have moved from their original interface to a web interface. If you can use Javascript to access information on the device and you can store data on the filesystem (like Google Gears already offers) then why do you need to build your own UI?
See this older post I made on a similar topic and I think this rumor, if true, would confirm.

DSL speed upgrade?

It looks like Telecom Italia (Alice) have upgraded my internet connection. I noticed that in the last days the latency seemed higher, I connected to my router and this is what I discovered.


myspeed.visualware.com against the NY server

myspeed.visualware.com against the Florence, IT server

dslreports.com against a NY server

From a pure human non-machine-tested point of view, the latency seems longer. Speed to international sites hasn’t improved, but seems like the download speeds from Italian sites has improved dramatically.
We’ll see.