FeedDemon

Nick Bradbury has put together a pretty cool RSS aggregator called FeedDemon. Written entirely in Delphi. It’s tough to code to .Net when the CLR is over 20 MB. You can bundle a Delphi or Python runtime, but I rather pull off of common libraries. Can a developer ship and require a 20 MB+ required library download? It’s tough in the small app world. I would love to roll out something that uses Microsoft’s P2P libraries, but I doubt anyone has that installed right now. If you build it, they will come…

Gnomdex

Day 2 of Gnomedex and so far so good. Nelson Minar had a good speech on an overview of Google, but was nothing I did not know already. Learning more about AdSense was something new for me. Cost per click and past click relevancy are both used to determine page position. Nelson hopped on IRC for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t find him at the Meet the Speakers part of the day. Eric Sink was interesting, and reaffirmed that I want to take a look at C#. Rob Malda was great, and unscripted. Met the wife. They stayed for the Microsoft party but left after some really bad karaoke. Kyle Bennett is a nice guy and definitely knows his stuff. Worth showing up early for. Didn’t really enjoy the Microsoft speech. They showed off Halo for PC as well as Gotham Racing 2. Nothing all that new in either of them. Would have liked to see more detail about why my entire music collection should be in WMA instead of MP3 or AAC.

Mobile thoughts

TigerDirect is selling my Compaq TC1000 for $999. I have been questioning how much the Tablet’s handwriting recognition abilities matter to me and whether I should sell my Tablet on eBay and buy a Sony VAIO or an IBM ThinkPad instead.

Intel has done a really crappy job marketing their Centrino brand. Most people have no clue that Centrino is a bundle and not a chip. The clock speeds are notably lower than the mobile P4 processor, and the AMD and Apple have already struggled with educating consumers about clock cycles.

Wireless Internet is the driving force for notebook sales in my mind. I explain 802.11 wireless Internet to people by relating it to a cordless phone in your house. If you are within range, your voice travels over radio waves to a base station that passes on that information to a large grid, en route to your final destination. Lots of people want to be able to plop a business laptop anywhere in their house and get their work done. Or lay out in a hammock accessing the corporate Intranet over VPN.

I write software targeted at Microsoft Windows, so I will not be buying a PowerBook any time soon. Plus I get whatever software I need from Microsoft for free or next to nothing.