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As many of you have probably noticed, the Blackberry development team has been slowly moving from proprietary IDEs to the plug-in model for Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.

I'm not going to pretend like I know anything about the Visual Studio plug-ins but I did get a chance to play with MDS studio 2.0 beta plug-in for Eclipse.

The first order of business was to convert existing applications to 2.0 which ended up being quite the chore.

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Ok, ok. It's been 11 months since I put up a blog post and frankly, its about time it gets off my todo list. Here is a good reason to write something... An interesting thing happened to me this week as I filed through my regular smattering of news feeds on what my customers are up to. I feel as CEO it's my job to keep abreast of our customers -- and one way I do that is by watching the public companies closely via news services. While many of our customers are not public -- for the ones that are there is a wealth of information available that allows us to serve them better. So this week I saw the little newsfeed alert that indicated that Ritchie Brothers had some news they were talking about. I was very excited by what I saw.

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Chiconomics:

This is essentially Appendix A to the post on "Marketing and Open vs. Closed"

Fashion and the black art of belonging are Closed©.

There are groups you must golf with even if a crowd-sourced free game of ultimate frisbee would be just as fun and better for you. If you could open one of your many Cultures' cases you'd find a shocking number of soldered-in parts and non-upgradeable ROM chips.

Read more about Chiconomics after the break.

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Open™ works. Open™ is wonderful. I get Open™.

I love how easy it was to hack-update the Calgary Springbank airport in my X-Plane flight simulator (to reflect the 2,000 foot lengthening of runway 16/34).

I have hundreds of community-built add-ons for my workaday software.

I'm about to post a tutorial on how to tweak your janky type 3057 turn signal bulbs for longer life, using 3M metal foil tape.

Having said all that, Open™ isn't a prerequisite (or a barrier) for success. You're surrounded by lots of successful Closed© platforms. (We can look at the psychology of Why® in another post.)

More on successful Closed© platforms. after the break.

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From Hitwise Intelligence (January 2008):

“A year ago, MapQuest had more than five times (429%) more US visits than Google Maps. Last week, that gap was down to 126%. Google Maps is the #2 Maps website and attracted 22% of visits to Maps websites… Traffic to MapQuest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months.”

The difference between Mapquest and Google Maps has everything to do with the input Google collected as they imagined release 12.0 of Google Maps, while coding release the alpha release of Google Maps. Mapquest smartly built a product for some of some of us. Google wisely architected a product for all of some of us.

More after the break.

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We're continuing to provide more ways to build easy-to-use, great looking web sites which leverage all of the strengths of Lotus Domino's architecture. In version 4, which is now available, we have added  "Web 2.0" features, design wizards to change the look of your site without any coding, and faster, more direct content editing and administration.

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Ten second version: The things that make your kids' game console do so much, will soon help your work computer do it's thing faster too–on the cheap–by letting everything in the OS—not just whizzy graphics—put your video card to work.

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I know what you're thinking. What would a graphic designer slash media guy be doing following news about Javascript libraries? It's a long story (I like a good accordion as much as the next guy). But never mind. What matters right now is that Google just announced their new AJAX Libraries API, and that means faster access to jQuery, prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools and dojo. Easier setup too.

<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js"></script>

I'm a minimalist neat freak. Once a month I reorganize the cables under my desk, and I recycle my DVD cases so I can keep everything consolidated in one small binder, so if Google can spare me even a smattering of server clutter and make my work load faster, I'm there.

Learn more:

1. Read about the announcement over at Ajaxian.
2. Visit Google's AJAX API Documentation.
3. Manage under-desk cable clutter with help from Ikea.

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I'm happy to report that I managed to survive the Impact SOA conference in Las Vegas. It was an incredible event. I've been to many of these events and this year's Impact was something special. The tone was set by the opening key note. The CIO of Harley Davidson kicked off the event by riding a Harley through the MGM Garden Arena onto the stage to introduce Drew Carey, the MC.  

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Back in September, Jonas blogged about whether or not JSR 286 was our savior.  It was a good question.  And now we have the answer – kind of.   The guys at the OpenPortal Project were kind enough to build a https://portlet-container.dev.java.net/" title="Portlet 2.0 Container">Portlet 2.0 Container for us to play around with.  I’m not going to through all the new features in depth, but you can read about it http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=286" title="JSR 286">here and http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0803_hepper/0803_hepper.html" title="here">here.  I got a chance to plug into the container and build some of my own 2.0 (err.. jsr-286) portlets.

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