Brian Fitzgerald

Kutaragi on PlayStation3: it’s too cheap

At $600, Sony Computer Entertainment cheif Ken Kutaragi has said that the PlayStation 3 is too cheap. Perhaps, in the effort to put together a console that would be technically superior to anything else available, they have priced themselves out of the game. It is only $100 more than an XBox 360, but by time the PS3 comes out in November, Microsoft may drop the price of the 360 as console makers do after a box has been out for a year. Is the PS3 $200 better than the XBox 360?

technorati tags: playstation, xbox, ps3, xbox360

The Dreamweaver Developer Center is a resourcet that I tell people about a lot, but always forget to continue checking myself. This morning I found there some great articles and tutorials on form styling with CSS, formating XML with XSL, and using a framework called SPRY to add interactive AJAX elements to web pages. I wish that there was an obvious news feed so that I could subscribe to this page…

technorati tags: dreamweaver, adobe, xsl, xml, ajax, spry

Eric Meyer is a giant in the CSS world and this is a great interview with him about how he got into CSS and the business of web development.

technorati tags: css, eric, meyer

Firefox 1.5 CCK (Client Customization Kit)

technorati tags: firefox

O’Reilly Radar > Come Out and Play: As a former camp staffer, this sounds like a blast!

technorati tags: games, camp

As long as I’ve been posting Flex info Here’s information about installing the Flex SDKs on a mac.

This is a couple of days old but the major soda makers have agreed to replace the fully-loaded pop that they sell in schools nation-wide with water, juice and sport drinks.

technorati tags: soda

Adobe has released an update for Dreamweaver 8. The 8.0.2 updater is available for macintosh and windows and improves code generated by Dreamweaver for server behaviors and for active content such as Flash.

technorati tags: adobe, dreamweaver

Beta 3 of Adobe’s Flex version 2 is available on the Adobe Labs site. Flex is a development environment that allows rich internet applications to be built via XML or Adobe’s FlexBuilder application to be delivered via Flash. Steep learning curve, but incredible results.

technorati tags: flex

You have got to see Norelco’s new web site advertising their new BodyGroom shaver. It’s hilarious (and made with Adobe Flash!).

I can't wait for the column specification in CSS3 to become a standard in browsers. In the meantime, Firefox 1.5+ (and of course Flock), support parts of the column spec through their own stylesheet selectors.

• Here's an example of it in use
• Here's information about using it in Firefox

Pete Freitag is in the middle of a series of posts he calls “How to build a form that isn’t annoying”. There isn’t a lot of useful information here, but good things to think about. Steve Krug said “Don’t Make Me Think." Pete here, seems to be saying, “Don’t make me work.” There are a lot of things that we do with forms (pull down menus for example) that could be much easier for a person to fill out if it were presented in a different way.

MacDevCenter.com evaluates a few FTP clients for Macintosh.

If you have words, phrases or code that you find yourself typing over and over, you should take a look at Textpander. I downloaded it this morning and I think that it’s going to be very useful. You can feed it long amounts of text (great for chunks of HTML code) and assign abbreviations to them. For example, I assigned the basic code of a HTML page to “<html” and the opening and closing of a P tag to “<p”. Now I can write a simple HTML page from scratch in seconds using any application on my mac (not just the cocoa ones).

For the “I’m sure I’ll need to know this sometime” file: Here’s a post about log file management in JRun.

Will Richardson discusses the difference between teaching kids to be ‘lifelong learners’ and ‘lifelong teachers’. Included is a video podcast from an elementary classroom teaching others how to do podcasting.

kuwamoto.org has a sneak peak at Flex beta 3.

Rumor sites are reporting that Leopard (MacOS 10.5) may have peer-to-peer sharing abilities in the OS that would allow the system to share with other computers system and application updates. This would be a opt-in feature that would be rewarded by Apple with free songs or other incentives. Benefits would include faster downloads, less bandwidth for Apple and the ability to more easily update computers in an institutional setting without soaking the incoming bandwidth. Sounds great to me.

ABC’s new streaming service is amazing. Through their use of Flash they have created a site that is both compatible with many platforms and browsers as well as beautiful. Not a lot of shows there right now, but probably the ones that most want to see: Desperate Housewives, Lost, Alias and Commander in Chief. I hope that this is successful enough to encourage the other networks to follow.

I haven't seen any of these on TV yet but Apple has started a new Mac vs PC ad campaign.

Here's an interview at photoshopsupport.com with Scott Bourne about the current landscape of photo management/cataloging applications including lightroom, aperture and iPhoto.

I have long wondered what the future of JRun is as it has been a long time since version four came out and you almost never hear about JRun from Macromedia/Adobe. I was surprised and happy this morning to read that the next version of JRun is ready for beta testers.

While Adobe and Macromedia merged around six months ago now, they have continued to maintain separate web sites that served their unique audiences. Until now. At some point in the past day or so, the macromedia.com domain was finally redirected to the new adobe.com website (which looks a whole lot like the old macromedia site). The macromedia name will probably hang around as long as the current versions of macromedia applications are current. As they are upgraded, the name will eventually disappear altogether. sniff

Explorer (I’m not sure what else to call him) Dan Buettner gave an impressive presentation at the NETA spring conference on Friday morning. You can catch his presentations (keynote and followup) on the NETA podcast page. You can view the web site of his current project, Blue Zones, here. Finally, here is a link to his latest article in National Geographic on the same topic.

technorati tags: neta06, blue zones, dan buettner

The keynote and feature presentations at this year’s NETA conference are being podcast. You can find them here.

technorati tags: neta06, podcast