CMSWire: Vendor Criticism of CMS Watch

In an industry whereby most of the “independent analysts” are heavily dependent on revenues from the very firms they claim to be “independent” of, it’s unusual to see truly critical research get published. So it becomes a surprise to both buyers and sellers when they read such criticism. In our reports we widely distribute the compliments and brickbats — if something is truly terrible we will tell you.

I’ve said this internally to Ephox already but I want to give a big congratulations to the team on getting EditLive! 6.4 out the door. We have a lot of customers who have been waiting quite a long time for the features in that release and only a year or two ago they were thought to be effectively impossible given the Swing Text APIs that EditLive! is built on. It’s a testament to the team that this can be done at all, let alone with such high quality.

Since Ephox is an IBM business partner and we pulled the right strings and made friends with the right people, I get access to IBM’s offices (apparently world wide but Bedfont Lakes is closest and best set up). They’ve got quite a nice business partner suite on the first floor looking up at all the real IBM employee’s offices but before today it’s always been a major pain.

Firstly, without a car it takes about 2 hours to get here which is never fun, but today I have a car so that was ok.

Ephox’s fearless leader, Andrew Roberts turned up in an interview with Randal Leeb-du Toit. Some good stuff in there, definitely worth a listen.

Reuters:

“Later this year, Vodafone customers in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa and Turkey will be able to purchase the iPhone for use on the Vodafone network,” Britain-based Vodafone said in a statement.

The plans for the iPhone in Australia will be very interesting – mobile internet is ridiculously expensive there at the moment and the iPhone is basically dependant on an unlimited data plan. While I was over in Australia recently with data roaming turned off my iPhone was pretty much reduced to a big, somewhat ineffective phone rather than a mobile internet sensation…

Business Week on the increasing number of companies that have at least some Macs:

In a survey of 250 diverse companies that has yet to be released, the market research firm Yankee Group found that 87% now have at least some Apple computers in their offices, up from 48% two years ago.

What’s interesting about this is that it’s one of the few surveys I’ve seen that doesn’t focus on raw market share. While hardware manufacturers might be interested to know that Apple has X% of the total market, software developers shouldn’t care.

It’s been echoing all over the blogosphere today that NYTimes.com “hand codes everything” instead of using a WYSIWYG editor. It all extrapolates from a fairly offhand reference by the design director, Khoi Vinh:

It’s our preference to use a text editor, like HomeSite, TextPad or TextMate, to “hand code” everything, rather than to use a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) HTML and CSS authoring program, like Dreamweaver. We just find it yields better and faster results.

Something I’m sure I’ll want to find again in the future: the OmniGroup provide statistics from their update app showing what OS, CPU, Graphics and various other hardware stats their user base has. Very useful for getting a rough guide of adoption rates.

Automator is a cool little app that comes with OS X that makes it much, much easier to programmatically control the various applications on your computer (all the good ones anyway). It’s all done by dragging and dropping actions into a workflow – the output of one leads to the input of the next. In Leopard, Automator got a big upgrade so it can now handle loops and variables but most of the time you don’t need them.

The server migration to a new data center last night went horribly wrong when the new IP didn’t (and still doesn’t) have a reverse DNS lookup. Sadly that means the secondary DNS where all the actual requests go to refused to pull the updates and the site was effectively down.

I think I’ve managed to sort out the DNS issues for all the domains hosted here now by making one of the secondary DNS’s the primary DNS and generally juggling things around. This is probably a smarter set up anyway so I’ll probably leave it this way in future. Still, annoying….

Arrived safely in the UK early this morning with no hassles from customs thanks to my shiny new visa. Somewhat ironically I also got my first serendipitous travel event from Drupal:

The problem of course being that this was my reminder to change my home location from Brisbane to London so I actually miss Andrew by a week. Never mind, he’s heading over here next anyway.

I woke up this morning to discover that I can no longer access my GMail account (using Google apps for your domain) via IMAP. It just returns an error saying that IMAP is not enabled for your account. The IMAP option has even disappeared from the web interface, now only allowing you to enable POP access. The same is true for a second Google Apps for your domain account that work uses.