Monthly Archives: March 2008

Ten Years

By Ian McKellar | March 31, 2008

Ten years ago Netscape released the source code to their browser. They called it Mozilla, I downloaded and built it at my work at the time. I didn’t manage to build it immediately, but I worked it out in the end.
Somehow I’ve spent most of the past seven years working with the platform. I touched [...]

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I told you so

By Ian McKellar | March 24, 2008

Six months ago I predicted:
This kind of bundling is often done by the bad guys. If you install Apple’s Quicktime codecs on Windows every update will trigger an iTunes install, even if you haven’t installed iTunes. I’m sure they’ll do the same thing for Safari on Windows. I’m not sure what iTunes’ market share on [...]

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Taming MacPorts

By Ian McKellar | March 21, 2008

For the record, I don’t like MacPorts. I don’t like building software from sources when someone could have done it for me just fine. It’s a waste of fossil fuels and a waste of my time. Since my Mac doesn’t come with most of the software I’d expect I have to build things from sources. [...]

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Google AJAX APIs outside the browser

By Ian McKellar | March 20, 2008

Google just announced their new Language API this morning. Unfortunately their API is another one of their AJAX APIs – that are designed to be used from JavaScript in web pages. These APIs are pretty cool for building client-side web applications – I used their AJAX Feeds API in my home page – but I [...]

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API Design

By Ian McKellar | March 17, 2008

Recently at Songbird I’ve been working on some guidelines to help us build better APIs. One of the most exciting things we’re hoping to offer users and developers are APIs that give them access to their music and the ability to extend their and others’ music players. Getting these APIs right can be hard and [...]

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