pinterest

Alex Jones

I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

applications

CoRD: an Alternative Remote Desktop App

I downloaded CoRD yesterday to see how it stacks up to Microsoft’s RDC client and am very happy with it, so I thought I’d spread the word. While it’s not a perfect app, the differences are enough to make me switch. I’ve found it to be much faster than RDC and it implements ClearType beautifully (make sure you choose a good resolution), so reading Word docs and e-mail is a much better experience. For those who hook into multiple desktops at a time, it’s specifically set up to make it easy to run multiple sessions.

The only real downside that I’ve noticed so far include cursor artifacts when moving around Word docs and Outlook messages, but they go away as soon as you type.

CoRD Example
CoRD Example

If you’re on a Mac and need to regularly access a Windows box, check it out. It’s free, so you have nothing to lose.

Could Google Quick Search Replace Quicksilver?

Nicholas Jitkoff, who created one of my most used Mac utilities, Quicksilver, now works for Google, which has just released Google Quick Search. I and many other devoted users lamented Nick’s decision to stop development on his popular app. Now we know why he took that step and more importantly have hope that something better than Quicksilver is on the horizon. Lifehacker has provided a nice writeup of the current capabilities, but if you’re in the mood to just grab it and give it a whirl, you can download it on Google Code.

Google Quick Search already contains a lot of the QS functionality, but uses Spotlight for its indexing, which should provide a significant increase in search speed while reducing the processor requirements. Hopefully, by offloading the search indexing to Spotlight, privacy advocates don’t need to worry about Google synchronizing the index of every file to their servers, but I haven’t seen word one way or the other as of yet.

Google Quick Search is young, but promising, and I truly hope it will pick up the Quicksilver banner and advance it.

SproutCore: Apple’s Flanking Move?

SproutCore LogoI wasn’t all that familiar with Sproutcore, Apple’s JavaScript framework prior to reading this article, but after thinking the arguments over, I think Apple has been flanking the other players in the application marketplace (both online and desktop) for a while. The article Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore provides some very good reasons for Apple’s moves onto Windows with Safari and other apps; I highly recommend you read it if you’re the least bit interested in development on the Web, the iPhone and/or Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Being based on open web standards and being open source itself means SproutCore will enable developers to develop cross platform applications without being tied to either a plugin architecture or its vendor.

Sitting on top of web standards will also make it easy for Apple and the community to push SproutCore ahead without worrying about incompatible changes to the underlying layers of Windows, a significant problem for the old Yellow Box or some new Cocoa analog. SproutCore also lives in a well known security context, preventing worries about unknown holes being opened up by a new runtime layer.

Daniel Eran Dilger – Roughly Drafted

These developments are exciting for oru industry, but also for the world as a whole – a solid platform that can be as portable and accessible as the Web, yet have the power of the desktop has long been sought. We may finally have it in our grasp.