Archive for January, 2005

Java 6.0 Mustang release dates posted

Friday, January 28th, 2005

From Ingrid Yao, leader of Mustang CAP program:

Here is Mustang release schedule:
Dev Freeze: 8/11/05
Beta Ship: 11/3/05
RC Ship: 3/30/06
GA Ship: 5/11/06

It looks like the 6.0 Beta will be out in November, and final release will be a year from this May.

Someone else doesn’t like Google Suggest and GMail either

Friday, January 28th, 2005

It looks like I’m not the only one who thinks Google’s web apps are driving technology backwards. Charlie Hayes has posted his own thoughts on Google and rich web apps, called “Rich web apps, GMail, and Suggest get bashed like none other, for good reason”.

Charlie makes some points that I hadn’t thought of, about what happens to your webmail when your Internet connection is down, and that we all have 1GB free on our home computers, and he explains a bunch of other reasons why native applications are often easier to use.

iTunes system tray buttons

Thursday, January 20th, 2005

I’ve started working on a program that allows you to control iTunes for Windows with system tray icons. Here’s a screenshot of what I’ve got so far:

iTunes system tray button icons

I’m writing the program in Java using JACOB and the iTunes COM interface. As of right now, it works, but it’s not configurable, and it’s always on until you close the program.

Next I’ll add configuration of which buttons appear, and then I need to learn how to detect when iTunes is opened and closed, and show/hide the icons appropriately. Then I plan to release it.