When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · December
· · · · 05 (3 entries)
Darkening · This time of year, weeks yet till the shortest day and still it’s dusk so early, and the weather not helping; only today there was light enough for pictures, albeit dark ...
JambOO.o! · Via Simon Phipps, a significant step forward for Kiswahili chaingizwa katika Programu Huria na zinazopatikana bure, which is to say “Swahili Free and Open Source Software”: the first ever release of a free office suite software in Swahili, called Jambo OpenOffice. This whole Open/Free software thing, it’s not just one hemisphere or economic sphere or ethnic sphere, it’s, well, everybody everywhere.
xfy · The full name is xfy Technology; it’s one of the most interesting pieces of new XML software I’ve seen in a long time. On the surface it’s an editing system, but the world has lots of those. There are three things that are interesting here. First of all, it’s from Justsystem, a Japanese software vendor which has gone toe-to-toe with Microsoft for a decade, carving out their fair share (and then some) of the office-suite market; so they should be taken seriously. Second, it’s got the slickest SVG-editing demo I’ve ever seen, you stretch shapes and watch the XML source code change, or vice versa. Finally, they told us it was all-Java and I was watching the demo and I was really impressed at the snappy, attractive UI, but then I got puzzled and said “I thought you were using Swing but, uh, what’s that?” “Well,” the soft-spoken young Japanese engineer allowed, “we are, but then we created some custom controls.” It just may be that the world headquarters of Java UI innovation is currently on the other side of the Pacific.
