A new release of Java, a new wave of people saying they won’t buy Macs unless Apple get their Java update now, dammit now! John O’Conner joins the chorus. Of course, there’s no mention of why he needs Java 6 instead of Java 5, just that he has to be up to date with the very latest. Last time round at least people were eager to use generics and other new language features, but there’s really not that much that changed in Java 6 outside of a few specific cases.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – the best syntax you can use for your wiki is HTML, or probably better XHTML. It’s a defined standard with a wide range of excellent WYSIWYG editors, it’s well known, very portable and saves you from having to write a converter to display your wiki pages.

David Van Couvering is the latest to complain about incompatible wiki syntax and he’s certainly not alone in his frustrations. People don’t want to have to learn yet another crazy wiki syntax, they want an intuitive interface that just lets them write their content. HTML provides far more flexibility than any wiki syntax, particularly around tables, which makes presenting data a lot easier.

From the Creating Passionate Users blog:

Do you know what the “comma-stupid” phrase is for your product or service? In other words, do you know what is most meaningful for your users? Because whatever that word or phrase is (i.e. the part that comes before the “, stupid!”), it should be driving everything from product development to documentation to support and marketing.

More and more I’m seeing people value the editor in a system over anything else. When Rob joined Ephox he switched to WordPress because among other things:

I was quite interested in a few of the new features listed for WordPress 2.1, since they look like they could be quite useful to build into the plugin I have to use EditLive! as the editor for posts. In particular

• Image and thumbnail API allows for richer media plugins

sounds very interesting, since I’ve not gotten around to doing anything much with images and EditLive! has a lot of support for media that is currently going to waste. Sadly, browsing through the WordPress documentation lists nothing about how to actually go about using these wonderful new APIs. In fact, it doesn’t mention them at all – it seems the documentation is still for the 2.0 release.

In What does No Java on the iPhone Mean? (and the follow up More on Java and the Mac) James Duncan Davidson looks at why Apple haven’t added Java support to the iPhone. In particular he claims there’s no killer application made with Java. In the strictest sense, that’s probably true, but there is a killer category of applications which are almost exclusively made with Java – games for mobile phones.

It’s this popularity of Java in the mobile phone world that makes the lack of Java on the iPhone seem so odd to me. I can understand Apple wanting to have complete control over the iPhone interface, and I’ll concede that most of the existing games for mobile phones probably wouldn’t translate very well to the keypadless iPhone, but it will be interesting to see if Apple can satisfy the great desire for cool little mobile games that today’s teenagers, a key market segment for the iPhone, without leveraging the existing knowledge mobile games developers have in Java. If the iPhone takes off it won’t be a problem, similar to how there are a huge range of iPod specific accessories, there will be – if and when Apple make it possible – a huge range of iPhone specific games and add-ons.

I’ve always considered Technorarti Tags to be annoying clutter on pages because people are far more likely to search Google for a keyword than they are to look up a particular Technorati tag and the million slight variants of it. I’ve just noticed however, that you don’t actually need to clutter up you page with unsightly tags to get into the tag list. Take for instance the Ephox technorati tag. I don’t tag my posts, and yet my Oh Happy Day! post is the top entry.

I’ve been on holidays for the past four weeks (life is tough sometimes) and away from internet connectivity so I’ve been blissfully unaware of what’s been happening in the tech world. Catching up with the RSS feeds this morning though, I’ve discovered many wonderful things:

• Robert Dawson has started with Ephox. I’d forgotten he was starting while I was away.
• Someone in the engineering team managed to work out how to add Robert to Planet Ephox. I left instructions on the various systems I’d set up before I left but this is the first time someone else has had to try to follow them.
• Our integration with the open source Alfresco CMS has been released on LiveWorks! There are two great things about this, first that it’s out and second that it’s another system that someone else has successfully picked up.
• New releases of some of our products have gone out and the change logs have been posted to the Ephox Releases blog!
  • Downside, for some reason the major update to our IWWCM Integration didn’t get a mention on the releases blog, could someone fix that ASAP please?
• The main Ephox website now has a link to LiveWorks! Yay! Now we just need to add a link to the releases blog.

The best part though, is that I still have another two weeks holidays. I’ll be back in the Ephox office on the 5th of February.

I’ve been playing around with OpenID on the few occasions I’ve had internet access over the Christmas break and have it set up, but not ideally. Currently, everything points to http://www.symphonious.net/id/ as the OpenID URL, but server and delegate. Ideally I’d like my identity URL to be just http://www.symphonious.net/ and the server ad http://www.symphonious.net/id/ but I’m not familiar enough with the whole process to make it work.

Mostly I’ve followed Sam Ruby’s instructions, but the process was done in a few different sessions following a few other explanations of OpenID, but I think it matches what Sam describes.

I found an unexpected source of frustration while getting LiveWorks! online. The site is primarily an instance of WordPress1 but the mailing lists are handled by Mailman and the archives by Lurker. All three of them are simple to customize their outward appearance, but all three of them use a different template language. So now instead of having one site design, I have to have three very similar looking, but completely different design implementations2. Every time we want to update the common parts of the site, we have to do it in multiple places in completely different ways.

It’s taken quite an effort to get everything up and ready to go, but just in time for Christmas we’re ready to announce the availability of Ephox LiveWorks! The grand plan is to give our clients and the public in general better insight into what’s going on in the Ephox labs and give them the ability to shape the company’s direction.

The site is starting off small, with just a few neat little plug-ins for EditLive!1 available and a mailing list, but I’m really excited about it. Ephox’s products are used by nearly all the big name CMS vendors, so the direction our products takes has a huge impact on the CMS industry as a whole. Getting more people involved with that process is going to make a big difference. We’re hoping to ramp up the site over time, following what user’s want, but we’re thinking along the lines of early access releases, providing integrations into open source systems and eventually weekly builds of our products to let our clients take advantage of new functionality as soon as possible.

Ephox took a couple of leaps forward today in terms of being more open and accessible to our clients. Firstly the planet instance that I’ve had running as a proof of concept for a while has been moved over to an actual Ephox server and is now at http://planet.ephox.com/ If you’re subscribed to the old feed your client should automatically switch to the new domain now but please do check it as test.symphonious.net will probably go away at some point.

I’ve learnt way more about mod_jk in the last week than I ever wanted to know. Apparently the configuration is completely different between Debian 3.1 with Tomcat 4 and the current Debian testing with Tomcat 5 (point something). Why the mod_jk package doesn’t just do the configuration for you is beyond me, or at least have a debconf wizard to do it.

Anyway, with Tomcat 4, the magical directive that makes deciding what to delegate and when simple goes like: