Tag: open_source

Web 2.0, wiki

TiddlyWiki

I have started to use TiddlyWiki a lot recently. TiddlyWiki is a wiki platform which runs on your personal computer.

TiddlyWiki

TiddlyWiki runs entirely out of html and so simply by visiting the TiddlyWiki site, you have downloaded the application! Chose File -> Save As… to name it and save it to an appropriate folder on your machine.

TiddlyWiki is blog-like in that new articles (Tiddlers) appear like posts in a blog. But it is unblog-like in that they are not displayed sequentially, but rather called by links or searches on the page.

It is very handy for notes-to-self – especially when you are offline. It can be hooked up to an online version and synched but I haven’t tried this yet.

The application was written by Jeremy Ruston who was taken on by BT as head of Open Source when they saw TiddlyWiki

Interviews, Podcast, PodLeaders, Web 2.0

Any questions for Dan Bricklin?

Dan Bricklin is the inventor of the spreadsheet. Dan, along with Bob Frankston released the world’s first spreadsheet, called VisiCalc in 1979.

Dan has worked on many projects since and recently has started work on wikiCalc – an open source, online spreadsheet application.

I’m interviewing Dan this coming Tuesday afternoon (10th Oct 2006) for a PodLeaders podcast. We will be talking about VisiCalc, his new application WikiCalc and anything else that may arise in the questions!

As always, if you have questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to leave them in the comments and I’ll put them to him.

Browsers

Microsoft! Open Source Internet Explorer

I mentioned previously John C. Dvorak’s PC Magazine article where he calls on Microsoft to abandon development of Internet Explorer because:

All of Microsoft’s Internet-era public-relations and legal problems (in some way or another) stem from Internet Explorer.

He advised them to:

pull the browser out of the OS and discontinue all IE development immediately…. Then, Microsoft can worry about security issues that are OS-only in nature, rather than problems compounded by Internet Explorer.

I was thinking about that article again recently and John is absolutely correct to say that most of Microsoft’s negative image is due to internet Explorer (and how they abused their monopoly to gain it market share).

However, while I think it is extremely unlikely that Microsoft will abandon Internet Explorer, an even better idea might be for them to Open Source Internet Explorer. Think about it. It isn’t like they’d lose any revenue – they already give Internet Explorer away.

If Internet Explorer were Open Source, security holes would be found and patched far quicker. A developer community would quickly emerge and Add-ins/extensions would suddenly abound.

Of course, this would all be very beneficial to Microsoft’s image as well.

In order to do this, they’d also have to de-couple it from the Operating System, but they should have done that years ago anyway.