Quality Reads

Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Stikkit! and my Vista Experience

I should probably start off where I left off. Vista. Once I got past all the flashy new UI components,I was left with a very sour taste in my mouth. Backward compatibility is a serious issue. I realize I'm using a pre-release version but more than half of the programs I became accustomed to using on XP crash on Vista. The most annoying of all is Eclipse which throws a JVM error (Java error) randomly when I'm doing any file folder manipulation. Since I use it all the time for programming, its particularly disruptive. Another killer is the pre-release for Fireworks 9 (Adobe's image editing suite geared towards web design), I haven't been able to get the thing to install yet. Tried everything under the sun, crashes right when I starts the main installation. You know when the little status bar comes up. I've come to hate that damn bar. I guess I shouldn't surprised. Microsoft's products, excluding SQL Server, tend to be skin deep apps. Real pretty when you first pull them up and you read about all the stuff they do but then you realize all the hoops you have to jump through to get there. I think thats the reason I've become so partial to programming all my work rather than using Excel et al. I can define the interface to support exactly what I'm doing. Nonetheless, lets move on to the new web 2.0 app. Stikkit. Its got a very sleek UI with some sweet features not overtly apparent. The sites general concept is a web-based stick-it note, hence stikkit. Type in something you want to remind yourself of with a date or perhaps a buddy you want to share the note with and the application figures it out on its own. I tested it out by typing "I have a presentation due on Monday". In response, it created a calendar event automatically. I wonder if they're using an AI friendly server-side language like python to get the job done. I'll poke around and see what I find out. Cheers,
Todd

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