Screaming Penguin

So a number of places are reporting that HP is looking to license WebOS. Don't do it! Seriously, I think HP is way underestimated right now and their PC dominance could be a thing, but they don't need to get into licensing their OS. What they need to be doing is starting to drive specs. Get HP Touchstone on iOS and Android. Negotiate the come to jesus meeting on installable HTML5 apps with Mozilla, Google, RIM and Microsoft.

Apparently, the entire Flight Simulator development team has been laid off at Microsoft. Sad day. Of course this frees them up to make other, far more brilliant, products and services . . . like the Zune, or MSN Mobile DRM . . . I mean Mobile Music.

1.5, with all of the Java 5 features everyone has been clamoring for, is now available in milestone 1 form: GWT 1.5 Milestone 1 now available for download.

Review of KDE 4 at Ars KDE 4 sure do look pretty. The review talks about many of the new features, all built with QT4: a new file system browser, a new desktop shell, a new multimedia system, new scripting framework, and much more - and all with clever names.

One of my daughters asked me the other day what a Supernova was. The discussion stemmed from me blabbering about A Short History of Nearly Everything, in which there is a fascinating account of the amateur astronomer Reverend Robert Evans.

Flock 1.0 is now available. I have to say, I played with it a couple times earlier and wasn't that into it. Having seen the 1.0 release, I am quite impressed. The integration with the social sites it supports is impressive, and the blog editor is one of the nicer once I have seen, tough I wish it popped under the current tab, or as a tab of its own. Flock runs most Firefox extensions, so all the stuff I liked about FF is still there. It would be nice to see even more integration: Last.fm and Meebo would both be great adds.

Skankland at news.com.com.com.com/~com/com has this callout of Adobe in Open Source doublespeak:

In a blog posting Sunday, Adobe's top creative products executive, John Loiacono, made unflattering remarks about open-source alternatives whose free cost is offset by the time that creative pros have to spend fiddling. [snip]

This post is jumping the gun a little bit, so consider it distant early warning, if you will. Cooper has been hard at work lately on a GWT Framework that is pretty damn amazing. The idea was a framework to allow an MVC pattern to be easily applied to GWT widgets, and also enable introspection and two way binding very simply. From there you can build really cool - and smart - GWT components with ease. What kind of components? Well the sample is almost ready, but stuff like data bound tables, animations and effects, validation, and an overall application "FlowController."