For a long time the world was stuck into a non-topic: the „right browser“. If we may believe the news, there won‘t be any new Internet Explorer – for the Macintosh. Seems like Microsoft is just doing the right thing and is no longer polluting the Mac space with it‘s dirt.

But wait! Internet Explorer for the Mac wasn‘t that disgusting. Actually it worked a lot better than Netscape 4 which was a very dirty bastard. And it is still faster and much better integrated than Mozilla. And surprisingly it even had a much better standards support than its Windows counterpart (at least it was able to display transparent PNGs, which the Windows version still can‘t).

But I do not shed a tear now: Mac IE 5 is buggy as well and Microsoft is famous for not doing much on the feature front once the product has been released. Only security fixes have been released in response to or in fear of bad press. Now they are complaining that they couldn‘t integrate with OSX as much as Apple can. Huh, bad style! Didn‘t they deny that was the case with windows in the infamous IE/Netscape „war“? And what about OmniWeb? Their integration has been pretty fine so far…

The good thing now is: if MSIE will be gone on the Mac, web standards organizations and evangelists get new ammo. Safari is much better on web standards than Internet Explorer and Apple does not need Internet Explorer to survive. They have good browser now and in terms of usablity it is setting new standards. And the Mac space is crowded with good browsers these days: Camino, Mozilla, FireBird and wKiosk all share the Gecko foundation. Safari and OmniWeb base on KHTML.

Of course, the Mac still represents 3% of the overall market. But it is certainly still the platform of choice for designers, creatives and other pros. No IE on the Mac: probably the most promising news since Mozilla 1.0.

I am going to attend Hackmeeting 2003 next week. It is about to take place in Torino, Italy on the weekend of June 20th to 22nd. It is going to be my first Hackmeeting although this is already number six in a row. Hackmeeting is supposedly pretty popular: a couple of thousand hackers attend and it is a real grass-roots initiative. I am really looking forward being there.

I am going to do a talk on – you guessed it – Project Blinkenlights. Apart from the usual buzz I am going to focus much more on the underlying technology and all the other nerdy details. The talk is scheduled to be on Friday, June 20th, 2003 at 22:00h.

I will also show the documentary „Codes – Makers And Breakers“ by Jannik Splidsboel (originally presented at 18C3) which was done two years ago and shows some coverage of the Hackmeeting 2001 in Catania as well as HAL 2001.

Kung-Log is another useful tool for Mac OS X like NetNewsWire. It allows offline creation of Weblog entries and has options for basically everything you need to support Movable Type weblogs (like this one). It actually has one extra feature, NetNewsWire is missing: you can upload files (like images) as well. That way, you don‘t have to go to the web based admin interface at all.

There is just no better introduction to Discordianism than the one given in the fifth edition of the Principia Discordia: „if organized religion is the opium of the masses then disorganized religion is the marijuana of the lunatic fringe…“: read it.

MacOSXHints – a really, really useful site, describes another way for circumventing the iTunes 4.01 sharing limitation. This time it involves Rendezvous Beacon of Chaotic Software which is a handy small tool by itself.

Chaotic Software is the producer of quite a lot useful tools which I have been using now and then, especially MP3 Rage and Web Devil (until OSX gave me curl and wget, of course).

What the Matrix would be like if it was running on Windows XP: eat this. I guess this was done by some film students from Hamburg. Very cool.

I am using FileMaker for many years now and although I do appreciate many of its features and do not see any other contender in the area of desktop databases the tool does show first signs that it‘s time has come. Not only that there hasn‘t been any significant update to it‘s user interface and that the integration into OS X is almost non-existent. It‘s programmers seem to lack basic knowledge on security as well.

A BugTraq update today reports on FileMaker handing out complete password lists to any clients connecting via TCP/IP. There is a corresponding article at FileMaker‘s web site as well. But no update. Instead, they recommend „Reducing the scenarios in which the database is shared“ and other helpless tips.

I can only hope someone will soon come up with a cool XML database based desktop database GUI application for the Mac. It can‘t be that complicated and we are going to have it anyway sooner or later.

Does anybody know about any probable alternative to FileMaker?

If your Mac OS X computer is idle most of the time, you might want to install Fluid to get rid of your excess cpu cycles. It looks mar-ve-lous.

While iTunes version 4 was a huge step ahead in terms of publicity for Apple because everybody was talking about their new Music Store, another feature was even more important: the software provided the ability to share software via the Internet (which was a good idea).

But as the files were more or less served „as is“ it was actually more the coming of a new Napster and new tools were emerging making use of its protocol. Apple reacted with a pretty embarrassing move and limited the reachability of it‘s sharing service to the local network.

However, the cat is out of the bag. First, there is a hack called 401ok circumventing this mechanism in iTunes 4.0.1. And – even more interesting – there is free implementation of the sharing protocol used (DAAP). Let‘s see how this develops. At least this thing shows you can‘t take back anything you have put on the Web once.

Shrook is a new contender in the RSS client game. Like NetNewsWire, it sports a simple, Cocoa-based user interface.

It won‘t replace NetNewsWire for me as NNW provides other important features like the Weblog Editor, but Shrook does have some nice features that are still missing from the other program: you can define update times for each channel individually, it has a simple sort view for „new“ news, it marks „opened“ items with an small icon and it allows for more than one level of folders. Best of all: old items get archived when they get kicked off the feed. That way you can follow feeds that fill up fast and that you probably check out not fast enough.