Month: October 2006

Coghead, a much-anticipated tool for creating your own online applications, has finally gone live. TechCrunch explains its import in this growing market of online application-building services:

“What is special about CogHead is that users building applications with the product require less technical skills because the process is all drag-and-drop and visual. CogHead is unique because of just how easy it is to create forms, views and apps – the design view allows users to create fields by dragging and dropping them onto a form. The user can lay the fields out and place them on the page, making the application they build more user friendly and easier on the eyes. Building the logic behind the forms is also a graphical process, the user takes objects and actions and drags them into a flow chart that is similar to a data-flow or logic diagram (see their screenshots). CogHead has a large set of user actions and events available meaning that a very broad range of custom apps can be built. Data can also be processed without a user making a direct action as there are events such as when data is imported etc.”

Read the entire TC piece here, and don’t pass up the Comments, where programmers, Web designers, and others discuss the relative merits of this emerging technology.

Ars Technica has a fairly in-depth review of Firefox 2.0 RC2 (as in “Release Candidate 2”). They like it well enough, but see it more as an incremental improvement over 1.5x. That led them to ask:

“Is the 2.0 designation deserved?”

To which they replied:

“I suppose that depends on your perspective. At the risk of veering into a largely irrelevant philosophical rumination on the ontological significance of version numbers, I feel inclined to point out that the implications of version numbers vary greatly between various open source projects. In some cases, there is a well-established nomenclature and version numbers can be used to infer all sorts of useful things about the nature and status of a build. In other cases, it may simply be an arbitrary value selected for the sole purpose of making it possible to distinguish between builds. For Firefox, it doesn’t seem like there is a fully consistent version numbering model yet. Rather than expressing disappointment about the lack of new features in the upcoming 2.0 release, users should remember that Firefox release numbers aren’t always going to be a helpful medium for establishing expectations.”

Read the full review here.

BTW, they also think, after banging on it quite a bit, that RC2 is stable enough for regular use. Release Notes and downloading here.

This video of Street Tech pal Cory Doctorow’s keynote address at Toorcon 8 is definitely worth checking out. Entitled “Owned: Hollywood’s War on Security,” it is a very well delivered talk on the evolution of the user’s relationship with the computer/network, the content on it, and ownership thereof, from the mainframe/special purpose network to the homebrewed & personal computer/general purpose network to the ubiquitous computing, and increasingly over-regulated, user-licensed technologies, of today — the drift back to specialty purpose networks. Here’s a snippet:

“The worst practices of the technology industry are now being exported to other industries. Software is kind of the birthplace of a terrible Frankensteinian monster called the EULA, the End-User Licensing Agreement. It was the first time that anybody thought you could do this terrible violence to the legitimate and noble agreement — that thing that happens when you and I sit down at a table and start with what we want and walk away with what we need — when you can take that and violate it and turn it into something so trivial that you can form an agreement merely by looking at a sticker or having a screen of text flashed in front of you, and that that agreement somehow constitutes something binding, a waiver of the rights that were set out by statute and practice and custom, in the service of enhancing someone else’s business model, at your expense.”

[Via hackAday]