Linked List: September 23, 2004

Thursday, 23 September 2004

Interview With Camino Project Head Mike Pinkerton ★

By Eric Bangeman at Ars Technica.

End Draws Near for Watson; Vaporware Java Port From Sun Lost in Vapor ★

Dan Wood:

I am sad to say that it looks like Sun doesn’t seem to be focussing on getting the port of Watson released any time soon.

Of course, this wasn’t the plan. The intention when Sun acquired the Watson technology was to have a port released by this time. But as all of us are familiar with how public companies behave when pressure is put upon them by Wall Street for profitability; it seems that the release of the Watson port is not on Sun’s critical path right now.

I’m saddened by this for many reasons. First of all, I hate to see the end of Watson’s support period come in a very short while.

Differences Between Mac XML Feed Readers ★

Buzz Anderson:

What really intrigues me about the aggregator marketplace right now is how different each of the major Mac players is. NetNewsWire has become a highly flexible Swiss Army Knife of an application to please the most demanding users (I heard someone compare it to BBEdit, and I think that’s apt), Safari RSS uses a fairly minimalist “RSS as browser bookmarks” design, PulpFiction adopts an email-like interface, NewsFire takes its UI cues from iChat, and Shrook models itself on iTunes. Clearly we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what the best ways to do syndication are, and the next few years, as more and more neophytes discover syndication and weblogs, should be very interesting indeed.

Sony to Support MP3, but Only in Flash-Memory Players ★

CNET reports that Sony is going to start supporting MP3 audio files later this year; but with a big exception: they’re only adding MP3 support to their flash-memory-based players. I suspect it’s only a matter of time before they face reality and support it in their hard-disk-based players as well. They’re so far behind the iPod it’s embarrassing.

(Via MacBlog.)