adrian's wall

With AirPort Express Apple really have begun to show how a Mac sitting somewhere in the house could be a 'digital hub'. Music stored on iTunes syncs to a portable iPod or is beamed wirelessly to the audio system in the lounge. But I've got to go into another room to select a different album! So what I want from Apple this Christmas is a remote control It could be boring; iPods already show how to control music on-the-move. So just put the same interface on some Wi-Fi enabled remote or maybe even provide some Wi-Fi add-on for an existing iPod. Alternatively... Invent a new category of mobile device; a Wi-Fi enabled mobile client. Sure its got to be small and mobile, but if its use is restricted to 'in the home/office' it doesn't have to have the form-factor of a mobile phone that can be hidden in a smart suit, it could be more like a PDA - even a bulky PDA. But it doesn't have to operate standalone like a PDA. For a device that can be assumed to be a...

Now that JavaOne is over (not that I got to go) and we are all more up-to-date with where Java is going, I have a simple question: as Java developers are we in a better position to develop web applications that offer a richer user experience? To this end I have developed a simple test scenario: test scenario I have a service that can provide the metadata for several thousand items (id, title, creation date, status, etc) and a service that can deliver an HTML description giving further details of an item specified by its id. I want to develop a web application that displays the metadata in a table on the left (allowing the user to resize, reorder columns etc) and the HTML description of a 'selected' item on the right. When the user selects a row in the table, the HTML description on the right is updated. As a complication the description may also reference zero or more other items. Selecting one of these links should update the both the description and reset the selec...