JK thoughts on technology

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog recently, but very busy elsewhere. At Idea 11 we have released a new white paper on implementing Citrix XenApp. Check it out if interested.

A video of my talk from Ignite Brisbane is online. Watch it here.

Ignite is a short presentation format where you have 5 minutes to talk on a topic, with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s fun, interesting – and not to mention a very different presentation format to the 30 – 60 minute talks I’ve done previously.

There are far too many guides on the net about running multiple versions of IE on the same machine. And most of them are a pain in the ass to set up.

Here’s something I bumped into today: Spoon’s Browser Sandbox. Spoon have a plugin that can launch all sorts of applications from your browser. It streams virtualised application packages to your PC through the browser. A couple of clicks and IE6 – or any other application they have in their portal – will launch.

This is probably the single best use of application virtualisation that I’ve seen in the wild. It’s the kind of “just works” technology I love. Great for web developers or occasional hacks (I’m in the latter category).

And just for the hell of it – here is a screenshot of Firefox (running natively), IE8 (running in a Windows VM via VMware Fusion) and IE6 (running in the VM with Spoon) all on my MacBook Pro:

I download and play with a fair amount of iPhone applications, but I only stick with a few in the long run. The few that I use all the time are NetNewsWire, RunKeeper Pro, and Pocket Weather AU. I’ve found a new application for that list – Instapaper.

The idea behind Instapaper is to mark web pages when you’re at your computer so that you can read them offline on your iPhone when you might have a few minutes to kill. You add a “Read Later” link – which Instapaper supplies – to bookmarks toolbar in your browser. Whenever you’re at a page that you’d like to save to read later you hit the “Read Later” bookmark. Instapaper then saves that page to your reading list.

When you’re away from your computer, run the Instapaper app on your iPhone and Instapaper grabs your reading list and formats it nicely to read on the iPhone. Pick an article and start reading. If you’re interrupted Instapaper will remember your place. Nice little touches like that make it a pleasure to use.

It’s a simple concept that is done very well. The whole process just gets out of the way and lets you do what you wanted to – read.