November 2007

Lots of Things To Do

While attending CETiK 2007 last weekend I met two guys from Cultured Code (you might know them for their gorgeous CSS editor/viewer Xyle scope).

They showed a preview of their upcoming To Do management software Things. Despite still in alpha stage (they promised to release a beta version soon) it's already fun to work with this small, yet powerful application.

Things is an easy to use manager of your personal and professional tasks. You can view them as a simple list for today's or upcoming tasks, organized by projects or areas of interest, tagged by whatever categories you like (even hierarchical ones). In fact, while you can use Things perfectly at home for your daily tasks, if you use all of its features it's more like an issue tracking software for small teams with collaboration via e-mail or Bonjour. And this is really cool. If you don't need the overkill of a big issue tracking software (which is the case for many smaller projects), Things might easily be offering exactly what you need.

As far as I can say after their short demo and my two days of testing, Things will become my preferred task management software. The software just works the way you'd expect it to (even if there are lots of tasks in lots of projects). Compared to simple HTML web pages and modern Web 2.0 web applications, I'd say Things is To Do Management 2.0. I wish the folks at Cultured Code good luck for finishing Things in time, and I'm eager to buy a license as soon as possible.

13949712720901ForOSX

As posted before, there's no Java SE 6 runtime environment included in Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). There is a quite nice Java 5.0 implementation, however, and you can even tune its GUIs better than before for special Mac OS X integration - which is really cool! But this doesn't help you much if you have to develop applications using the latest Java APIs.

To request an important enhancement like this, there is an official way: File a bug report (I did so, my report got number #5575846). This won't help a lot, either, because bug reports requesting Java 6 will be marked as duplicate... and then Apple falls silent again :-(

So, to draw some attention to this problem, someone suggested that all bloggers should use a common marker as a "public request" to Apple, and here it is:

13949712720901ForOSX

Now, the management at Apple can simply google for this string and see how many bloggers (let alone the non-blogging people) are waiting for Java 6 on Mac OS X 10.5 (or at least a statement about the future of Java on OS X).

In the meantime, someone else has ported the FreeBSD JDK 1.6 to Mac OS X (10.4 and 10.5). The port still has some problems and currently relies on X11, but this is a cool project for sure. Nonetheless, I'd still like Apple to officially release their port of Java SE 6 with proper GUI integration, as this would be the best statement about the Mac as a serious platform for Java development.