Friday, January 19, 2007

Morning Coffee 14

I just realized that I had Morning Coffee 9 both last Friday and last Monday. Woops. Rather than changing the titles of four posts, I'm just skipping #13 instead. Just like a hotel.

• The folks behing the Optimus concept keyboard are shipping a mini 3-key keyboard. The basic idea of both keyboards is that the keyface is a little LED screen. Apparently, they're planning on releasing a production version of the full keyboard this year. The 3-key keyboard is $160, so I'm guessing the full keyboard will cost quite a bit. (via Scott Hanselman)
• Some people are up in arms that the chair of the new W3C HTML Working Group is Chris Wilson from Microsoft. I'm guessing these are people who don't understand much about how such working groups work. As Chris writes, most of his time as chair will be herding cats. (via reddit)
• I am interested to see what this new working group produces. The #1 deliverable for this group is "A language evolved from HTML4 for describing the semantics of documents and applications on the World Wide Web" (emphasis added). Given the already existing Web API WG, it would be nice to see an application model as a formalized part of HTML.
• Again via Scott, Jello.Dashboard is a replacement for Outlook Today with a GTD bent. However, as Scott points out, it is slow. Scott blames the Outlook Automation APIs, but I think the scripting engine is also to blame. In the CRM Integration for Outlook sample, I used a WinForms UserControl as a folder homepage and didn't notice any perf issues. If you expose a WinForms UserControl as a COM control (via Guid and ComVisible attributes), you can then host that control within an HTML file which is set as the folder home page. The sample includes a helper function to generate the HTML folder home page to host the UserControl. If there's interest, I can post a small sample. Not only is this approach faster than a script based one, it's easier to design and debug.