Kev's Development Toolbox

I was slightly cautious with what to expect with the new Exchange integration in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, but was surprised to see how easy it was to set up. Added a new Email account, and just from my corporate email address it found my Exchange server and all the correct settings and started syncing all my email, calendar entries and address book. Incredibly simple and no issues. Amazing that Apple makes it this simple, knowing how much hassle I’ve had with Microsoft Outlook and Windows Mobile devices in the past.

One other feature I’m very pleased to see since I don’t have an iPhone (which enables this feature in 10.5, but it’s now enabled by default in 10.6) – iCal now also syncs with my Google contacts.

All in all, so far very pleased with Snow Leopard – $25 for the Exchange integration was worth this much alone, and I haven’t even started to look at the other changes.

If you’ve been around for a while you’ve most likely come across Dion Almaer’s name, from either his involvement with TheServerSide.com and The Middleware Company (the founders of TheServerSide.com), and more recently one of the co-founders of Ajaxian.com

A few days back Dion announced that he’s joining Palm to work on their WebOS platform for the Pre, along with ajaxian.com co-founder Ben Galbraith. This is an interesting move, and I wish these guys all the best, and I hope to see some great things coming from Palm with WebOS in the near future!

Incidentally, I’ve read a few things about Dion’s work at Mozilla with the Bespin collaborative development platform and I’ve been meaning to take a look, so while this is fresh in my mind I think I’ll head over there to take a look.

A couple of years back (2006) I made an observation that it was becoming increasingly popular for new developers to rely on materials online instead of at least having a copy of the JDK JavaDocs downloaded for reference – at the time I called this ‘Coding Blind’. This article today caught my eye and gave developers who overly rely on Google to find snippets of code the name ‘Google Programmers’. I guess it’s not just me who has noticed this trend.

Wow, if I hadn’t replaced my Windows Mobile phone with an Android myTouch 3G I would be having a great time right now looking through the immense catalog of … 34 … applications in the newly launched Windows Mobile store.

34? Come on Ballmer, get it together. Is this supposed to be impressive in some way? Did you code these apps yourself in your spare time? Surely you could have got some of your Windows 7 developers to code up a few Windows Mobile apps when they weren’t working on Windows 7, cause after all, we all know Windows 7 is just Vista with new marketing, so exactly what have the Windows development team been working on recently? Not coding Windows Mobile apps, obviously.