The history of Apple OS (between Copland and Mac OS X)

An article about the origins of the Mac OS X Cocoa framework and the history of the architecture of the modern attempts of Apple to design a modern and high quality operating system, and the dismissal of the Java-like technology that Apple acquired from NeXT when it bought back Jobs to the heart of Apple.

The Yellow Box might have been a great technology, and a great attempt from apple to gain higher mind-share in the heads of software developers, but maintaining a multi-platform development foundation (as Java) turned out to be harder than we all like to think, and even Microsoft didn't completely embrace the concept of the multi-operating system framework (even when they have all the pieces necessary to do just that) and left a smaller company trying to complete such a huge project using complete rewriting and reverse engineering !!

Vectorworks 2010 Released

The latest release of VectorWorks has been released earlier this week, it contains many productivity enhancements, most notably:

• The fantastic new 3D snapping environment, adding the the world class 2D snapping that was introduced in 2009 (which was a good addition into an originally very good snapping system in earlier versions), it gives VectorWorks more 3D drafting capacity.
• The enhanced utilization of the Parasolid engine to enable many new features like the unified 2D/3D, wall sculpting,improved wall holes and the new powerful stair tool.
• The inclusion of the D-Cubed 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager for parametric modeling and improved management of the walls network in the building model.
• Improvements in the Hardcape tool, the DTM object, the Grade calculator, and the new symbols content and plants imagery.
• The inclusion of VBvisual plants in RenderWorks.
• Various minor changes in the drafting, editing, dimensions management and importing/exporting experience.
• Various additions to the Machine Design and Spotlight editions of VectorWorks.

This is great news for VectorWorks, it builds on last year decision to use the Parasolid engine to allow for a more robust 3D environment that is much more intuitive and allows for a better 3D drafting package (which is much need in the market right now), in addition to NNA tradition of adding real world improvements and enhancements to its software every release.

طب و النبي دي مش قلة أدب !!!

وزير الاتصالات يتهم شركات المحمول بـ«حرق الأسعار».. ويهدد بمنعها من إضافة مشتركين جدد.

مهزلة جديدة تضاف لوزارة الإتصالات إللي ريحتها فاحت قوي و بقت مزعجة أكتر بكتير من فوايدها.

طب بشير عقيل و المصرية للإتصالات و قلنا شركة بردوا و يهمها مصلحتها فوق أي حاجة تانية ... إنما تبقي كده ... طب وزير ليه بقا مدام شغلتك إنك تحمي مصالح المشغلين .... أمال مصالح الجمهور فين ... الشعب إللي إنت المفروض بتخدمه قبل أي حد ... و لا هوا إللي بيدفع بس هوا إللي بياخد خدمة.

بس مش هاتبقي جديدة علي وزارة بتحاول توقف نمو الإتصالات بإنها تحط تحديد لسرعة الإنترنت في مصر ... أنا أفهم إن شركة لوحدها تعمل كده (يعني فودافون من الأول كان عندها حد في خدماتها .. بس حد معقول .. يعني 100GB لسرعة الـ 1Mbps) يعني من الأخر بتحمي الخدمة بتاعتها ... مش بتقفل علي قدرتك إنك تستعمل الخدمة إللي إنت بتدفع فيها قد كده كل شهر .. و ياريت عاجب.

الأرقام إللي موجودة جميلة جداً و بتقول إن إنت لو باشا و بتدفع لشركة الإنترنت 2400 في أول كل شهر (إللي هوا يجيبلوا قسط عربية متوسطة) فإنت من حقك تستعمل الخدمة نسبة 5% بس من إجمالي الشهر ... و الباقي منها بتستعمل سرعة ما قبل عصر الـ ADSL أصلاً

Greatest Business Cards

I just came across 2 galleries of some of the most creative business cards that I've ever seen in my life, here they are:

32 great creative business cards

100 most creative business cards

After some time I recognized some of these cards in the Taste of Ink website, a great design studio, you have to check it out too.

A great article about JSF 2

I found a great article on the JSF 2 Spec (the View technology of choice for the Java EE 6 stack) and what's new/updated from JSF 1.2.

It serves as an overview to the new features in the JSF 2 and not as a comprehensive review of a single feature, it covers:

• The inclusion of the Facelets technology in the JSF standard and the View Declaration Language
• The composite components (or construct-your-own-component-without-major-hassle)
• New standardized Ajax support and the Ajax request lifecycle management
• The (inspired by Apache MyFaces Trinidad) partial state saving
• New system events
• Improved navigation system
• GET requests improved support and the view parameters
• The (Seam-inspired) additional scopes (View/Flash/Custom Scopes)
• The new (and much awaited) Managed Beans annotations
• New project stage declaration (for separation between production and development stages)
• The new client behaviors
• New bean validation system and the new validators
• Improved error handling
• Resource Loading

The article is available here What’s New in JSF 2 by andyschwartz