I don’t mean to add to the blog echo chamber, but I read Simon Horwith’s blog post Online Diagramming and had to share the love on my own blog. I love the concept of diagramming but unfortunately have always done my diagramming with a pencil and paper because available software was either incompatible with my work process or too expensive.

On the other hand, I have managed to make an entirely paperless documentation process, but this naturally never included any visually stimulating diagrams to document project logic or organization.

Welcome to Gliffy. It’s simply a Flash-based app that covers just the basics of diagramming, and like many apps, it is the absence of feature bloat that makes this app so nice. It allows you to print or save your diagrams in several image formats, or it will even host the file for you so that all you have to do is link to the generated image. The process is pleasantly simple.

It even has some simple revision control. And when you make a new revision by saving the document, any links to the hosted file are automatically updated with the latest version. Nice!

Don’t be dissuaded by the pricing page on Gliffy’s website! The pricing is just for hosting the app on your own server (which I think is a worthwhile consideration for any business who is serious about documentation). For us poor folk, the Gliffy service on their website is free of charge.

We’ve worked so hard at enabling our computers to multitask effectively–and increasingly faster–that we have far surpassed the human ability to multitask. Don’t get me wrong; being able to continue browsing the web or working on a document while I’m downloading a large file or processing some video is obviously invaluable. It’s hard to imagine a time when we actually had to sit and wait helplessly while our computer chugged away at some data.

Unfortunately, some of us humans might try so hard to leverage our computer’s multitasking abilities that the ultimate bottleneck becomes the limit of our own mental concentration. You’re working on a document, but you also have your email client open and perhaps a few tabs on your web browser. Before you know it, you’ve wasted a significant period of time replying to email or going off on a tangent through the web, when the most important task at hand was just to finish typing up that document.

Enter WriteRoom. It may seem archaic by today’s standards to boot up your computer into a word processor program and to only be able to use your computer for that purpose until you finish and boot into another program, but it sure didn’t test human self-control and concentration like the systems we have today. WriteRoom duplicates that simple, distraction-free experience, and while you’re at it, gives you a bit of nostalgic joy in the process. Sure, you could get a similar affect by opening TextEdit (on the Mac) or Notepad (on Windows), but where’s the joy in that experience?

Did you grow up on an Apple ][ using AppleWorks with a green-on-black monochrome monitor? WriteRoom’s default scheme duplicates just that environment. Did you have the DOS PC’s common white-on-blue? Or can you just not stand anything but black-on-white? Fine, the color scheme is customizable. So is the font, so you don’t have to stick with a monospaced font, although it sure adds to the nostalgia.
And the best part is that you don’t have to give up the multitasking bit to use WriteRoom. You can run iTunes and download that huge file in the background, but experience a visually simple and uncluttered experience while working on your text document.

WriteRoom is for the Mac only, and the original version is free. A clone called Dark Room was written to respectfully “capture the essence of WriteRoom” for Windows machines, and is also free.

From the moment Intel Macs became available, running Windows apps on Macs has been a topic of interest in the Mac community. Suddenly, Macs became the ultimate machines for those of us interested in running multiple operating systems. Sure, Linux was always available for PowerPC Macs–at least several distros–but running Windows at satisfactory speeds was always a challenge. With the advent of Intel Macs, there are choices aplenty. We can (1) dual-boot with Bootcamp; we can (2) run Windows with virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare, which run at near-native speeds, significantly faster than the emulation we did on our PowerPC Macs; and now we can (3) run Windows apps without Windows using CodeWeavers’ CrossOver.

Those solutions are geared to respectively increase convenience. Bootcamp requires an inconvenient reboot. Then virtualization software allows us to boot up Windows without rebooting our Mac, and we can even use Mac apps and Windows apps simultaneously albeit with Windows in an encapsulated environment. Finally, CrossOver aims to take the convenience to the next level by eliminating Windows and enabling Mac OS X to execute Windows apps!

One article at LinuxWorld called CrossOver Office “the best way to do the wrong thing”. I contend that CrossOver is the worst way to do the wrong thing. If I have to run a Windows app on my Mac, I certainly want it to run as smoothly as possible, just like the rest of my Mac experience, and I want it to run like the developer intended. Largely, dual-booting and virtualization don’t compromise the behavior of the app I’m running. When you run your app with CrossOver, however, you don’t know what kind of performance you’ll get. Your app may just die; it may run but be full of bugs. The reports coming from the web show that your experience will be very hit-or-miss.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not knocking the WINE project, which is the basis for the CrossOver codebase. A project to port the Windows APIs to another platform, although ambitious, is fascinating and, frankly, perfect as an opensource project. The problem I have is with the attempt to commercialize this technology that is great as a free resource but destined to never deliver a level of quality that befits a commercial product.

Why? There are so many variables and pitfalls to porting an API that the technology will never be able to work for even a large percentage of Windows apps, let alone all or the majority. And the technology can continue to be refined, only to see a Windows upgrade completely shatter the compatibility of future apps, and the development process of tweaking the port starts all over again. And from an opensource perspective, that’s fine. That’s the strength of an opensource initiative. It’s not such a great model for a commercial product.

What would you rather do? Buy CrossOver for $59 and be able to run only a few apps with it, and perhaps with a few bugs at that, or buy Parallels for $79 and be able to run practically all Windows apps with it, nearly bug-free? Of course, the price differential increases if you need to purchase a copy of Windows. Nevertheless, your experience will be infinitely more reliable if you use a virtualization solution like Parallels.

For the tech geek who likes tinkering with new software, this solution is worth a gander, especially while the free public beta is available. However, if you just need to get down to business, I recommend sticking with virtualization.

I just got wind of Aptana today. At first glance, I would describe Aptana as a new IDE focused on web development, especially with an eye to Web 2.0 development. In other words, it has strong support for JavaScript-oriented code insight for AJAX development.

Aptana’s strength, then, from what I can see in some of the screencasts, is that is supports HTML and JavaScript and CSS all in the same editor, providing outline insight and even error detection with all the code intermixed. This seemed pretty nice.

Being that it is still in its infancy, I’m hard-pressed to try it at this time. After all, Eclipse can do most of what Aptana claims to do with various plugins, and much more. The thing, though, is that Aptana is also offered as a plugin for Eclipse itself. I actually just downloaded JSEclipse and the ATF today, but if I find these mediocre, maybe Aptana would be worth a closer look.