Monthly Archive for June, 2005

Apple and Intel

This is another major bombshell after the aquisition of Macromedia through Adobe: rumors say Apple is going to announce Intel chips in Apple computers tomorrow.

Another interesting articles:

Intel, Apple coupling could woo Hollywood

Apple to Intel: Some advantage, lots of risk

Update:

So it’s true. I wasn’t surprised about the fact that Apple had been secretely maintaining a port of OS X to Intel. In fact: NeXTSTEP ran on Intel back in 1994. And NeXTSTEP was the origin for Rhapsody (the origin of OS X). I cleary remember to have seen a screenshot from an unused splash screen of a Rhapsody Developer CD saying »Rhapsody for Intel«.

Unexpected for me though was the move by Apple to add podcast subscription support to iTunes. This will change the game a little bit. Podcasts will be introduced to mainstream. I still think it will not have much impact in the blogsphere, but it will pave the way for daily audio content for sure.

Plone book arrived….

I just received a copy of the Plone book by Andy McKay (german translation). Lot’s of new things are in there. Good for studying after some extensive trial & error sessions.

I had a discussion with Peter Baumgartner two days ago about Plone – and it seems like they’re going to substitute Userland Manila with Plone in their department. This is something I was considering to do several times before as well. But unfortunatly there are two major drawbacks:

a) Plone does not yet come with a full blown bug-free weblog software (I tried Quills, but it is still in development and somewhat undocumented & buggy) and

b) changing designs for Plone is a daunting task. The skinning system is very flexible and advanced but also very complex to learn. You can’t just go a head without deep understanding of the application logic of Plone and advanced knowledge about CSS and Zope. It is too difficult for a youg student to redesign a weblog novice HTML skills. But that is what we need. Redesigning a site according to personal preference is an extremely important must-have-feature for students.

I am using Plone right know to supplement a course I teach. There are approx. 200 students registered. I am using CMFboard, Quills and ZWiki as extensions for Plone. While Zwiki is fine – CMFboard does make some problems: discussion group posts don’t show up in chronological order and the templates for CMFBoard are confusing.

And to make the problem even more difficult: Zope3 is coming up – and I don’t know about any work of Porting Plone to Zope3 (or I think they integrate the best ideas from Plone in Zope3 anyway, huh?).

So without superb weblog-support (and templating easy enough for kids) and without a very good discussion board add on – Plone will remain some kind of community CMS.

There does not seem to be a quick solution for the templating issue at hand. So we think of using WordPress MU for just the weblogging. Maybe Typo3 for the Extranet and Plone+Custom Products for the Intranet.