Utrecht, The Netherlands
Geneva, Switzerland
Madrid, Spain
Bayonne, France
Bordeaux, France
Montreal, Canada
Mexico City, Mexico
This new episode is about the relationship that exists between XML and Web Services. In it I cover topics such as SOAP and WSDL. Next week I will continue talking about SOA. Please enjoy and give me your feedback.
So far I have been able to publish a new episode of IT Insight every week. The last one was about SOA and it seems that the subject is generating a lot of interest. I am currently preparing a white paper on successful SOA implementation for an upcoming episode and I sincerely hope that it will be received with the same kind of interest.
On a related note I can tell you that if you are planning on starting your own podcast you better prepare for a lot of work. This is not something that can go unplanned. You really need to put aside at least three or four hours each week just for production. Additionally you will need to plan the content of your show and that can also be time consuming. The fact is that it can quickly become a full-time job and it requires a lot of motivation to keep doing it week after week. I really think that we should be very thankful to all the people who entertain and educate us every week. People like Leo Laporte who produce great content week after week deserve a lot of recognition.
It took a while, but the IT Insight podcast (Spanish version) is finally available on iTunes. It turns out that in order to submit a podcast to the iTunes music store, you need to be an active iTunes customer. This is very problematic if you live in a country such as Mexico and do not have a credit card issued by a bank in the US or a country that has an iTunes Music Store. Well, the good news is that you can open an account if you have an iTunes gift card. One of my friends bought one at the Apple Store in Las Vegas earlier this year and he helped me get the podcast published. I will definitively buy one next week in Miami to open my own account.
There were some problems with my blog, as links did not operate as expected and the RSS feed was not a valid one. Everything should work fine now. Please report any further problems directly to me at huibert_aalbers@mac.com
I am currently working on Address Book URL Insider 1.1. I have cleaned up the code to make it less intrusive and therefore avoid possible conflicts with other plug-ins. Besides that I am also working on supporting RSS feeds. I expect version 1.1 to support RSS 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0, with support for Atom coming in a subsequent release.
At IBM I sometimes create hands-on labs to help customer learn new technologies. However, since these documents are written in Spanish there is no public IBM site where I could publish them. That is why I have created a new section on this site called WebSphere Labs where these documents can freely be downloaded.
iWeb is probably one of the worst commercial Mac applications for creating web sites. I hope that most of its shortcommings will be addressed in version 2.0. However, even with its current limitations it still produces beautiful slideshows. That is why I have decided to use it in conjunction with my .Mac account to publish some of my pictures…
If you want to see them, click here.
I have completed the functionality that I originally envisioned when starting to work on this small project.
URL Insider is an Address Book plug-in that allows to display URLs within Address Book, inside a drawer, instead of having to open Safari. It doesn’t do much at this time, however, if there is interest I may continue working on this project and develop a full blown RSS Reader within the Address Book. As more and more persons publish their blogs over the Internet, it may make more sense to read them from within the Address Book than within Safari. At least that is what I think, but let me know what you think.
Today, after spending a couple of days working with iBlog I am finally ready to launch my blog. Wow this is exciting! I still expect my podcasts to be more interesting than my blog but I will do my best to keep this interesting.
I recently learned about an Address Book plug-in for Mac OS X that allowed users to check directions using Google Maps. You can download it from www.briantoth.com. What I found interesting was the fact that the Address Book could be extended. I decided to take a look at what could be achieved and I quickly created a plug-in that displays URLs in a drawer. It is amazing how deep you can get inside an existing cocoa application and modify it’s behaviour without breaking it.
It turns out that there are many ways to extend an existing application, proof-of-it is an excellent plug-in for Safari called SafariStand. This product is very interesting because it extends a product that was not even designed to be exteded through the InputManager extension mechanism.
There are many tools that help developers extend existing applications. I have started by using class-dump, a command-line application that will give you detailed information of all the existing classes and methods within it. If you are interested by this topic take a look at this page which contains a lot of useful information.
Well, I plan to continue to work on my plug-in to learn more about how all of this works and what the security implications are. If I feel that my plug-in can be useful, I will release it. I will let you know!