(Credit:
Microsoft)

Sam Ramji

Microsoft will begin collaborating with the Eclipse Foundation to improve native Windows application development on Java.

The interoperability work from the open-source lab continues to rise in prominence at Microsoft. Last month, the company’s top executives rolled out a number of interoperability initiatives only a few days before international delegates considered a vote to standardize Microsoft’s Open XML document format.

“It just makes sense to enable Java on Windows. We started a collaborative effort with JBoss two years ago that continues to this day. At the end of the day, it’s all about the developer,” Ramji said.

“Among a range of other opportunities (which we’re still working on), we discovered that Steve Northover (the SWT team lead) had gotten requests to make it easy for Java developers to write applications that look and feel like native Windows Vista. He and a small group of developers built out a prototype that enables SWT to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). We’re committing to improve this technology with direct support from our engineering teams and the Open Source Software Lab, with the goal of a first-class authoring experience for Java developers,” he wrote.

Eclipse, which has become the most popular development environment for Java, is the biggest competitor that Microsoft faces to its Visual Studio developer tool line. With the exception of Sun Microsystems, most other large software companies have committed to using Eclipse in some way.

The goal of the joint work, which will include contributions from Microsoft engineers, is to make it easier to use Java to write applications that take full advantage of the look and feel of
Windows Vista.
Ramji wrote about the planned collaboration on Microsoft’s Port25 blog.

The move builds on several initiatives coming from Microsoft’s open-source software labs to ensure that open-source products work well on Windows and other Microsoft products.

Sanity has come home to the United States, if only briefly.

The US patent system is a morass of ill-begotten gains and poor oversight. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), however, has offered up a slight ray of hope, swatting down N-Data’s attempts to milk excessive amounts of cash from its IP:

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“We [the FTC] recognize that some may criticize the Commission for broadly (but appropriately) applying our unfairness authority to stop the conduct alleged in this Complaint. But the cost of ignoring this particularly pernicious problem is too high. Using our statutory authority to its fullest extent is not only consistent with the Commission’s obligations, but also essential to preserving a free and dynamic marketplace.”

It’s Friday and that means I’m going to take a look at beautiful tech! This week, I take a look at the Asus Eee PC 1000H.

Draw on your maps with doodles and more using Quikmaps.

[via Lifehacker]

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

To answer that call Quikmaps, a third party tool that plugs into the same Google Maps data, is a far simpler solution letting you simply doodle on the map. In some cases this can be far more useful than Google’s straight line tool like when you’re creating turns and arcs (not all streets are straight). The best part is that the results will scale when you zoom in and out. Still included is a straight line tool, but between the two Google actually has a stronger effort since it shows the distance between each segment.

When Google launched its MyMaps feature last year I was pretty excited about the potential for creating things with it. Growing up in a house that required giving very complex directions because Mapquest would deliver people to the other end of our neighborhood I looked forward to making simple, personalized maps that could be shared easily. While the big G has done a great job adding a directory of special layers, the tools for creating your own maps have not seen that same advancement.

Map creations can be embedded, which I’ve done after the break. You can also share them via e-mail or with a simple URL.

Nic Bellenberg, IT director for publisher Hachette Filipacchi UK, declared open source an “incredibly logical choice” and then went further:

There’s no point spending gazillions on a complex proprietary content management system to run a website that may have to be completely changed in only a year of two after go-live.

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Silicon.com assembled its IT executive council last week and heard from a majority of its CIOs that open source is playing an ever-growing role within their enterprises. This isn’t surprising. What is surprising is how increasingly open/public IT executives are being about the benefits of open source for their organizations.

(Credit:
MSI)

I’m starting to get Medison Celebrity flashbacks.

Was there another fire I don’t know about? MSI is now 0 for 2 on Wind release dates. The company originally stated its Intel Atom-based mininotebook would start shipping on June 16 and then cited the LG Chem fire as it pushed back the release date until today. Well, June 27 has arrived and still no Wind.

AUSTIN, Texas–I just rolled off a JetBlue flight where half the passengers were typing on MacBooks and talking about last night’s episode of Lost and the other half were wearing worn-out band T-shirts and combat boots. Incoming text messages from Twitter are making my cell phone buzz off the hook. I have this sudden craving for baby-back ribs and a giant margarita.

Or maybe Yahoo’s FireEagle should’ve debuted a little sooner…

OMG! There's a cowhide ottoman in my hotel room!

I’ll be here through Tuesday night for South by Southwest Interactive, the digital-culture arm of the festival, and I’m pumped. Unlike my seasoned colleague Daniel Terdiman, I’ve never been to SXSWi. Heck, this is my first time in Texas. But amid my naive wonderment at the local culture (”The barbecue here actually tastes good!”) I’m hoping to pull in some fun interviews, cool news, and wacky photos. Hey, it’s an amorphous five-day geekfest loaded with open bars. Who knows what’ll happen?

One thing’s for sure: at Tuesday night’s “Bigg Digg Shindigg,” a massive party that the social news site is throwing on the final night of SXSWi, I bet a whole lot of people will be asking, “So who’s the buyer?”

Additionally, I just got an interesting piece of bacn: a friend request to Dodgeball, the where-you-at text-messaging start-up that was bought by Google and largely forgotten as Twitter gained momentum. The friend who invited me said that he doesn’t think Twitter’s servers will survive the onslaught of SXSWi messaging and that he’s using Dodgeball as a backup plan.

I guess it must be South by Southwest.

See more stories in CNET News.com’s coverage of SXSWi (click here).

• Under the Tools menu, click Options.

Still, that’s some pretty big consequences for a feature that saves a few seconds’ time. Sure, those seconds add up over time. But I imagine the lawyer in question would give any amount of time to have that e-mail back.

The result was that confidential negotiations with the government involving as much as $1 billion quickly became nonconfidential. The Times, doing what it does, got a big scoop.

I try to always give my address bar a second look before hitting send, but once or twice have found my note to a colleague going to an outside contact with a similar name. Maybe Microsoft should get rid of the feature.

Another suggestion comes from ClearContext VP Brad Meador, who recommends people tweak Outlook settings to delay sending e-mail for a matter of minutes. That way there’s a chance to catch a broad array of mistakes before they go out forever.

A representative for Pepper Hamilton, the law firm whose barrister sent the note, was not immediately available for comment. But, in good news for the firm, an Eli Lilly representative told Portfolio that the firm is not immediately getting the boot.

Eli Lilly and its outside lawyers found out this the hard way this week when one of the esquires sent a note intended for a colleague to a New York Times writer with the same last name. (Note: I’m not certain which e-mail program the lawyer was using, and it’s supposition, though a seemingly safe bet, that some sort of autocomplete was to blame.)

Update: A Microsoft representative said the feature can be turned off. Here’s how:

It’s right most of the time.

But with e-mail used to send everything from jokes, to family photos to corporate secrets, “most of the time” seems like far too low a bar.

Then again, in a world where businesses and governments are increasingly secretive, maybe the typo has become the greatest opportunity for openness and democracy. On second thought, leave it in there.

• Select or clear the “Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields” check box.

I’ve always been leery of Microsoft Outlook’s autocomplete feature. That’s the one that guesses who you want to send the e-mail to by looking at the first few letters you type.

Sun is shifting the license that governs OpenOffice from the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2 to LGPLv3 in an effort to give the open-source office suite greater patent protection. I’m not sure it’s going to work:

Until Microsoft and the ever-waiting horde of patent trolls start contributing to OpenOffice, it’s unclear how users of OpenOffice will gain any new patent protection from the license change. No one was worried about Novell, Sun, etc. waging a patent war against users of OpenOffice. The threat is elsewhere.

By moving from version 2 of the LGPL to version 3, Sun is bringing new language prohibiting the use of software patents to OpenOffice.org. “The most important protection for developers comes from creating mutual patent grants. … LGPLv3 does this,” [Sun's Simon] Crosby noted. In effect, a code issuer using either the plain GPL or LGPL is telling developers who adopt the code that he will not invoke any patents he may hold over that code.

As such, this is well-intentioned but probably not all that useful.

I want the Trapster app. Not only is this the most useful of the apps, I believe, it’s also the one that leverages the Dash’s two-way capability the best: You can add to the Trapster database when you drive through a speed trap yourself. There may even be a button that says, “Yo, I am getting pulled over right now.” (I haven’t tried the service yet; I don’t know.)

Dash Express

(Credit:
Corinne Schulze/CNET Networks)

Current Dash Express users can go to the MyDash site for apps.

Dash, which makes the very cool Dash Express GPS gizmo for
cars (review), has opened up an API so developers can build new apps for the unit. On announcement, according to a company press release, several apps will be available: a homes-for-sale app from Coldwell Banker, a calendar app that can read appointments from Outlook, Google and automatically route you to them, a weather app from WeatherBug, a speed trap app from Trapster, and Mediaguide, which can display the songs that just played on local radio stations.

Second: Safety. I don’t know how Dash is going to ensure that developers don’t build distracting or confusing apps that get their users into trouble when they’re driving. Building for the “60-m.p.h. user interface” is not something many developers have experience with. Hopefully this will be addressed is Dash’s presentation at the Where 2.0 conference Wednesday morning.

The Dash API program faces two small problems, though: First, there’s the chicken-and-egg issue for a non-market-leading platform. Dash is hardly the best-selling GPS product, even if it is the coolest. Developer interest will wane unless consumers start to get behind this product.

Even cooler would be: Let me connect my Valentine One to the Dash device to update the database automatically.