Just as I say OSX is like windows...

The latest update for my mac includes Safari - a web browser, which requires me to restart my Operating System to install it. Presumably this also means whatever holes it's being patched for go through to the core of the OS.
This was the same thing people used to criticize windows for. ...

A while ago I had the misfortune of working with a product called BroadVision that was sold to the IT Director. Information on the internet about it was pretty sparse so we knew nothing about how it actually worked until we recieved the discs, I vowed to contribute back to the internet to give my own personal opinion of it sometime, I forgot until I was reminded today by looking at some BPM diagrams.You should do your own research if you are likely to be interested in buying any of it, but beware a company that doesn't want your developers to see their framework until you've signed a contract.

It was a sign of things to come that they had sent us discs for the wrong OS so we had to wait even longer for the correct ones to arrive. It was a stack of open source products together (The editor was based on Eclipse, but an oldish version!) with the work they had done in a kind of BPM type of way. From what I could tell from the internet and one of their consultants Broadvision started out as some kind of TV/internet concept but it didn't do that well so they reused code for the new model of selling self service e-commerce apps. If you use it and you wonder why some of the naming is a bit odd ("channels" for example) that's why!

We had no end of problems, it was buggy and i'm not even sure it was finished (you had to write a custom java class to be able to persist a checkbox as a boolean!). It was sold to the IT Director with tales of how you can just draw these flow charts connect up the boxes, click a button and your application is done. From the start we needed the consultants for practically everything even during our supposed training course - at one point something wasn't working and we couldn't figure out why. He couldn't figure out why either. Eventually he decompiled a class (which we weren't allowed to do) and discovered a catch block swallowing the Exception.... I asked the consultant (his desktop wallpaper was his red sports car in front of his nice house) how often he expected we'd need to have a consultant come visit and he said something like "2 days every fortnight", a cost my company had never expected - this was supposed to be a system that almost didn't need developers! We also found that we would have to buy more modules than we expected to just be able to do a fairly simple shopping cart.

I will spare you the rest of the messy tale but lets just say it got much worse and dragged out for a few months. They never did fix the checkbox bug I raised a ticket for, and then we were back to normal java - ahhhh.

They may have totally changed, their website looks different now - but despite it saying "View demos and download free software" under the "Attention Developers!" banner I couldn't find anything to download except marketing media that seems to still be claiming that you much less developer resource.

Here's a dashboard widget i've been working on.

I wanted a way to control my Squeezebox from the mac dashboard and found the Slimcontrol widget. With changes to slimserver (and maybe OSX) since it was last maintained quite a few things didn't work but luckily the author GPLed it when he stopped working on it so I fixed the bits that weren't working and added display of cover art, plus the "cd player" look :-)

I am using SlimServer Version 6.5.0 and OSX 10.4.8 - if you have problems please state your versions.

Download from the google code project page.

If you can't get it to work with cauth (I couldn't) then you can get it to work by switching cauth off in your slimserver preferences.

There are still some things that could be improved and some bugs I noticed.

Known bugs:
If the dashboard hasn't been shown for a while it can lose connection to the server.

Todo:
Style the volume slider - i've trawled the documentation and failed to find a way to do it, the alternative is a DHTML replacement which would make a round knob possible :-)