Wed, 10 Jan 2007
Lola Lives
It's been a while since I wrote about the weblogging code I'm writing called Lola. Lola has been running on my weblog at work since the middle of December, but you can't see it, because my boss made me block access to people outside the Space Telescope Institue. Actually, if you saw it you wouldn't notice any difference from Blosxom, as the Perl code under the hood is invisible to the user. It now has through the web editing of posts in addition to ftp upload of the sort that Blosxom supports. It still needs a fair amount of work before I switch over this site. I need to clean up the code a bit, add support for plugins, and add user comments. When I do get comments working I definitely will switch, as that's my main motivation for writing it. Once I switch over to Lola, all the permalinks will break, as it uses a different naming scheme for posts
As everyone knows, yesterday Apple introduced a $500 nerd magnet called the iphone. One feature of the iphone that bears mentioning is that it runs the same widgets that the Mac runs. Widgets are small web browser applications that run in Safari. Widgets are a nice feature on the Mac, but on the iphone they're much more important, as they make it possible to reformat information from the Internet in an attractive, readable format on the iphone's small screen. Apple is bundling a development environment with the next release of OS X called Dashcode that will make it very easy to develop and test new widgets on the Mac. These widgets can then be downloaded to the iphone. I think Dashcode will be the "killer app" for the iphone and user developed widgets will sell a lot of iphones.
