When I got my GMail invitation a good half year ago from a friend of mine, I was really tempted to use it as my main account for private e-mails. It looked good, had nice features and above all one Gigabyte of free e-mail space was just fantastic. In the end I decided against using GMail. Occasionally I'm looking into my GMail account to see whether some e-mail got lost there, but that's it.

I had three reasons to decide against GMail. One is that @gmail.com address. I bought beeger.net primarily to have this beeger.net e-mail-address. So I really don't need some other. But still the 1 GB. Another reason not to use GMail was the distrust in GMail's privacy. It scans your e-mails and shows you matching ads. While there is nothing you can say against some ads when using a free service, I just don't like having my e-mails scanned and a profile created for me based on those e-mails. They vow that the e-mails are scanned only for keywords and not used any further, but you never know. Well ok, as an e-mail travels through the internet there are probably dozens of opportunities to scan it, but nevertheless I'm not the one to say "Oh, that's ok, you can read my mail. It doesn't matter to me. You may have fun with the spam I get, if you want, too.". The last reason is that GMail doesn't support any kind of encryption -- no S/MIME no PGP. That's quite logical. It's impossible to find any keywords in an encrypted e-mail.

Although I have decided against GMail, I think it is a great idea and nice service. GMail has some unique features like bundling e-mails into conversations. I can understand anyone who uses and likes GMail.

Unfortunately since GMail was released to beta testers there are people developing and people using hacks for GMail. It begins with hacks like a GMail2POP3-bridge that allows you to use GMail through your normal e-mail client and it probably won't end with GMail drive that allows you to use GMail as an external drive. While very inventive, those hacks will kill GMail in the end. GMail's source of income are the ads that are displayed along your e-mails. But if most users use those hacks that prevent the ads from being seen by the GMail account owner, then GMail cannot earn anything for showing those ads.

So it's another situation in which people think that "free" always means "free" as in "free beer". It's really boring to see people not understanding one of the principles of our modern world: "None -- excluding possibly your relatives and dearest friends -- gives you anything for free without some other motive than to make you happy". GMail's motive is to make money through ads. If that doesn't work out GMail will be past before long.

Professing to be a nerd, I'm always on the search for new useful and cool tools. Some days ago I found two such tools.

Somehow I'm always looking into application launchers and seem never to find the right one. The start panel of Windows is the most horrible thing. It takes ages to find one's way through the hierarchies of menus. Organizing them helps a bit, but it is no real solution. Recently I have used OverlayDesktop which is a DesktopX theme I developed. The problem with OverlayDesktop is that you have to put the icons for the applications you want to use on it. As long as you don't do this, you find yourself returning to the start menu.

AppRocket is different. It takes no screen space and you don't have to do any extra management to make it work. It comes out when you press Alt+Space -- or any other hotkey which you can choose freely. It's only a thin bar at the top of the screen. As soon as it shows up, you can start typing. As you type something a drop down menu shows up below the bar containing matches in your start menu, Firefox bookmarks, your collection of MP3 files etc.. So when I type "Fire" "Firefox" is the top element in this list. That's because I have chosen Firefox several times after typing "Fire". AppRocket puts the mostly used entries at the top of the list. Yeah I know, MacOS freaks will say that AppRocket is an imitation of LaunchBar . That's right, it is, but LaunchBar is for MacOS and AppRocket is the only implementation I know of for Windows. So in the world of Windows this is something new and cool. I'm using AppRocket for two weeks now and am very satisfied with it. AppRocket probably won't be for you if you type with one or two fingers and have to look at the keyboard while searching for the next letter, but as long as you are at least somehow proficient in touch typing, it's a great tool.

The task switcher you see when pressing Alt+Tab is really old. It hasn't changed since Windows 3.1. The problem with this task switcher is when you have many windows of the same type such as ten browsers, 3 editors and so on. The icons look the same and the window title sometimes also doesn't help to find the right one. That's when TaskSwitchXP enters the stage. TaskSwitchXP is a task switcher with previews. While you run through the icons on the right side of it, it shows a miniature preview of the window for the currently selected window on its left side. There are other such tools. One of them is even one of the PowerToys released by Microsoft. Another of those tools is AltSwitch . The tool by Microsoft is said to be slow. I have tested AltSwitch and it is also totally slow. A tool of this kind is useless if it takes it more than a half minute to show the preview. TaskSwitch is reasonably fast. It still has some problems with some Windowblinds skins that use transparency in their start panel, but I'm confident that the developer will get it fixed. It's open source BTW.

Somehow I feel like downloading some MovableType plugins and playing around with them. These are the plugins I begin with

• Textile 2
• SmartyPants
• CodeBeautifier

Textile 2 allows you to type your blog entries in a somehow simpler syntax than XHTML. You don't need to bend your fingers to write all those tags. You just write down a block identifier such as "p" or "bc" follow it by a "." and start writing your text. It feels a bit like TeX. There are other identifiers and they are followed by periods instead of being preceded by backslashes, but other than that it's the same feel. As in TeX in Textile blocks are separated by blank lines.

SmartyPants beautifies the appearance of text. It changes normal quotes into curly one and knows how to handle en- and em-dashes.

Codebeautifier changes boring looking code blocks into syntax-highlighted -- possibly still boring ;) -- code blocks. Let's try something in Java:

public class SomeThing extends NoThing
{
  public void doAnyThing()
  {
    System.out.println("Maybe I should say something?");
 }
}

One cool thing about CodeBeautifier is that it integrates nicely with Texttile.

I remember playing around with Fractint on my DOS box some long years ago. It sometimes took hours to generate those Mandelbrot and Julia images, but it was somehow fascinating. Fractint seems to be dead now. I have no idea why it died and when exactly it died. Anyways, other programs have taken the place of Fractint. One of them is Ultra Fractal. It does all Fractint did and several things more. Another program is Apophysis

Apophysis is different from Fractint and Ultra Fractal because it generates a wholly different world of fractals. It generates fractal flames. I haven't looked into the used algorithms and I really don't know why they are called flames. To me they really don't look like flames. Mandelbrot and Julia images aren't surprising anymore. They all look similar because they are only parts of the same never changing things. You can choose nice colors, use other tools to generate landscapes of them, but they stay what they are and people who have seen many of those images in the past recognize those fractals in new images. Fractal flames seem to have far more variations. Ok, I have seen many Apophysis images up to now. So when I see one I know that it is one, but they aren't getting boring yet and again and again I see new ones that really look great. Maybe it's because the used algorithms are far more complicated and many things can be changed. At the generation of Mandelbrot images you can only specify which part of it you want to zoom into. When creating fractal flames you can specify of what components they will be build and each of those components has again a great number of properties to play with.

BTW: Don't let the quality of the preview put you off of playing with Apophysis. You have to render the images. The preview is only a preview. Rendering takes more time, but the generated images are really great.

One of the greatest artists when it comes to Apophysis is Tom Wilcox. I call him an artist because though it's technically only choosing the right numbers, IMHO it is a kind of art to choose the right numbers here.

Last week the new JDK was released. Funny thing is that Sun couldn't decide which version number to give to that new release.

The web-site tells us that it is J2SDK 5.0, but the name of the installation file is jdk-1_5_0.... and the default installation directory is also jdk1.5.0. So what is it now?

Now we have three version numbers for the same release. The platform number hasn't changed for while. It's still Java 2. Then we have 5.0, which seems to be a marketing department version number, and 1.5.0, which is probably the version number the development department has chosen.

This is maybe a conspiracy theory, but it seems that two groups at Sun fought over the version number and none of them won the fight. There are those who say, that this release contains so much new features, that it has to be 5.0. Others may say, that JDK 1.4.0 also had many new features. So why should it not be 1.5.0?

I think it's all only confusing. It doesn't help Java when none knows how to call this new release.

Nevertheless the features in this release are big and will have a great impact on how software will be developed with Java in the future. The inclusion of generics alone is a big step. In addition we have annotations, typesafe enums, autoboxing and more.

In the past I have tried out a number of feed readers. Some of them were self contained applications with a three pane view reminding of e-mail clients. In those feed readers the first pane shows the list of feeds, the second shows the current articles and the third shows the excerpt of the article that is included in the feed. In most cases you can click on a button that will show the referenced article in an embedded browser window. The second sort of feed readers I have used are extensions for Mozilla Firefox or Mozilla Thunderbird. One of the better extensions for Firefox was Newsmonster. It looked good and its aggregator was good too. One drawback was that it used a Java applet internally for all its functionality. Loading of this applet was very slow and since it was loaded at the start up of Firefox - back in that time still named Firebird -, the browser took eons to load. Sadly the development of Newsmonster was canceled shortly after the author realized that nearly none would buy the professional version, which contained some scoring system for feeds that none used. Feed Reader Panel and it's greatly improved derivate Sage are fully written in JavaScript and load much faster. They are simpler but they do their job good enough. I also used ForumZilla which is now incorporated into Thunderbird. It extends Thunderbird with feed accounts. Those look like normal e-mail or news accounts, but contain feeds and their articles. One good point about ForumZilla is that it doesn't trash old articles. You can ignore a feed for some days and explore it once you have the time and pleasure to do it.

So that's for what I used up until a month ago when I discovered KlipFolio. KlipFolio is a nifty little application that primarily isn't meant as a feed reader. To be precise, I discovered KlipFolio somewhen in the past and didn't take a great notice of it then because it is not a feed reader. KlipFolio sits in your tray and waits to be clicked on. Once you click on it, it appears on your screen. It consists of any number of Klip windows, each showing the contents of its own Klip. The windows itself can be of any size and you can change their skin. It's not that easy to say what Klips are. In their simplest form they look like feeds - headlines with excerpts of articles. If you click on a headline a browser is opened showing the article. But Klips can be more. I have a Klip that shows me the weather forecasts for the next week in Hamburg. There are also other sorts of Klips such as stock tickers.

The kind of Klips that look like normal feeds can have a more sophisticated configuration. The Klip of "Wired News" for example allows you to choose from a number of categories. So you only get the articles you are interested in.

Klips are generally free of charge. There are zillions of them at KlipFarm. You can download them and install them into your KlipFolio. From time to time the Klips will contact their servers and fetch new articles or other kinds of data.

One big feature of KlipFolio is the generic feed viewer Klip. You can configure it to read any feed. With this KlipFolio becomes the news center on the desktop.

Here's a number of Klips I recommend:

• Feed Viewer : Wrap any RSS feed into a Klip
• MozillaZine : What's going on in Mozilla-land?
• Neowin : News by nerds for nerds
• CustomWeather : How's the weather? (Even for German cities)
• The Register : Another of those nerd news sites. A must read!
• Wired News : Sometimes weird, sometimes wired and sometimes even unplugged ;)
• Heise Online : Tech news in German
• Tagesschau : News from outside nerd-land in German

When opened my KlipFolio occupies nearly the whole desktop space. It shows me all the current news. I can browse quickly through the headlines and decide whether there is something interesting for me to read. It's a real time saver.

After releasing the Look And Feel and the Colorizer tool, I'm now working on the upcoming Windowblinds release of Squareness. It's been a long time since the last Windowblinds release - nearly 7 months now. In the meantime Windowblinds 4.4 was released and new features were made available to skinners.

I have already fixed a bug, which really annoyed me during the past months. In Squareness 1.2 for Windowblinds the "More Programs" section is - at least on my computer - sometimes highlighted with the green activation color that is used everywhere else in Squareness and quite often it is also highlighted with a dark blue color, which looks like shit. Well, black color on dark blue background simply looks like shit though there is nothing brownish in that. If I remember correctly this wasn't always the case. I think when I released this version, the bug wasn't there yet. To make it short, I found the bug. I was searching through SkinStudio, to find any new yet unused features and found this start panel highlighting color. And suddenly it works. Funny thing is that Windowblinds behaved totally indeterministic without this color. I thought this to be a bug in Windowblinds. It must have thrown dice each time it loaded.

One other thing I fixed is the horizontal task bar. While looking ok, it was far from perfect. I have played around with it yesterday and today, until I finally understood how it works. Seems like I had a total misconception about it. As I was at it I made it a bit thinner. It's now only 26 pixels high. I tried to make it thinner than that, but it wouldn't go all that well with the rest of Squareness. I have still to look into horizontal quick launch buttons , which I do not use, and play the whole game again for the vertical task bar.

I've also added XP progress bars. Strangely Windowblinds paints a 3D lighting effect around the normal progress bar out of its own. So you simply cannot have a flat progress bar. No matter what you do, it becomes 3D. The new XP progress bar doesn't paint anything other that what is specified in the skin. So finally there's a flat progress bar in the Squareness skin and it looks much better now. The way was very stony partly because it is very poorly documented in SkinStudio. Another problem was with the way I was handling this. I thought I could play around with the horizontal variant and rotate it once it was finished to make the vertical one. The problem is that you have to do both at the same time to make them work. Both have to have the same properties. So when you specify a chunk size of 2 in the horizontal variant, the vertical variant must also have a chunk size of 2. If you don't follow this scheme, it will all be ignored and the default values will be used.

Also quite annoying is the start panel. I don't use it all that often, but each time I do, I see how bad it is. The colors are ok, but it's too big and bulky. I'll play around with compact start panels soon.

After all this is done or maybe somewhere in between, I'll extend Colorizer to create subskins. It won't be able to do it on it's own. You'll need SkinStudio for the process. I could develop Colorizer in such a way that it would make the whole subskins itself. That's not really the problem. The format of the Windowblinds files, which are INI-files with specific sections and properties, is easy to understand. The problem is that the format is copyrighted by Stardock. I have negotiated with Stardock about a "no royalties license" that would allow me to parse and write those files. Unfortunately the negotiation didn't have the desired outcome. Stardock proposed a contract to me that would allow me to do what I wanted, but this contract has a little hook to it. Anyone working on the Colorizer code would have to sign the contract. While at sight this contract seems to be ok and without any negative effects, it would have hindered me from distributing Colorizer as Open Source. How could I make sure, that everyone looking through the Colorizer code and possibly deriving other applications from it, signs the contract. No way. At first this looked like the end of the Windowblinds part of Colorizer, but now I think that the inclusion of SkinStudio in the process will do the trick.

When I started developing Squareness more than a year ago, SkinStudio looked like one of the most complicated applications to me and I resorted to editing the INI-files by hand with jEdit. In the last couple of days I have changed to SkinStudio again and am quite satisfied with it now. Funny thing, but I think that because I got to know UIS1+, which is the Windowblinds format I use, from the background without embellishments and convenient tools, I can find my way faster through the dungeons of SkinStudio. Back then when I started it was too much at once. Now it all makes more or less sense. That said I don't mean that there is nothing to be improved in SkinStudio. It surely could be better in terms of usability and comprehensibility. One thing Stardock could do, is improve the documentation. The worst thing is to see "Undefined" or nothing at all in the help window when you click on a property. So it's often making and proving assertions. And more likely than not the proof will fail. So making a Windowblinds skin is an adventure that tends to get boring if the tenth assertion about something also cannot be proven.