Apple Subsidiary FileMaker Returns to 1980s Name Claris Following Stamplay Acquisition (MacRumors) ClarisWorks was a fantastic piece of software that led to my first professional software engagement: whilst at university, I developed a CRM in its database module for a freelance photographer. My trusty Mac Classic, coupled with ClarisWorks, made fo...

Phillip Torrone Andy Hertzfeld has a YouTube channel and its great. Read more… Long-time readers of this site will know I love the folklore.org website and its geeky tales of Apple yore. Its good to know that Andy Hertzfield has a channel: immediately subscribed!

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Ive enjoyed Imogen Heaps music for a very long time, as this blog can attest. However, Ive not paid as much attention recently, and then boom this video came up on YouTube. Wowsers! First, Imogen sings a new track with Frou Frou bandmate Guy Sigsworth, and then we get the Mi.Mu gloves and a mesmerising rendition of arguably her most famous song, Hi...

Boon Gould, 1955 - 2019. R.I.P.

As someone who looks after a few websites, some set-up within Google's webmaster / search tools maze, every now and again I receive an email alerting me to some issue or other with site. The latest one was for this site itself, highlighting two mobile-related issues: Clickable elements too close together Content wider than screen Interestin...

This couldn't be more appropriate given that there were no posts at all on this site in 2018. Now that Facebook has shown its true colours, likewise content platformssuch as Medium* and Tumblr, some people are predicting that personal websites and blogs may enjoy a little bit of a come-back. No bad thing at all! Here's David Heinemeirer Hansson on ...

I think I last posted about IDEs almost three years ago, so figuring it was time for an update, over at the Via blog we've opted to run the odd post about what tools we use in our day-to-day work. I'm up first with a brief look at my web / text / JavaScript editor of choice, Atom.

It seems extraordinary to me that I started this website over fifteen years ago now. That's an awful long time ago when we consider the world of the web and the technology around it. Amusingly (and what a testament to the platform), this site was built on IBM Domino back then, and still is now. There have been a fair few iterations of the site, the...

I've written a short post over on the LDC Via blog which addresses a question we've been asked a number of times in the two years since we pushed the "Go Live!" button on LDC Via (at Engage 2015 in Ghent no less): to wit, why don't we migrate application logic, and / or code? I don't write JavaScript like I write LotusScript. Do you? Languages hav...

At the risk of clogging up the internet, sundry bandwidth, your attention, or your craw, I'd like to turn your attention to a website and movement that truly is Time Well Spent. The Time Well Spent movement is all about reclaiming our lives from the miraculous wee devices we have in our pockets, on our wrists, and before us on the desk or sofa. We...

In amongst the more general news (i.e. society going to hell in a handbasket, World War III, all that), you could be forgiven for having missed the news in the smaller world of IT: we lost two giants of our field in recent weeks. On April 13th we lost the internet pioneer Bob Taylor, and just a few days before Harry Huskey, passed away at the amaz...

In London next Tuesday? Run, do not walk, to IBM Connect goes to the pub, a cheeky wee event we at LDC Via are hosting at The Castle very near Farringdon station. We will have the IBM Connect opening general session on a screen, and the drinks are on us! Read more and sign up on our blog.

I wrote this six years ago. Flip 2010 for 2016! So, the veg. are done, the table is laid, the turkey a-ready: I can now sit down and wish my readers a very merry Christmas and happy holidays! You three make my day, and I run this site just for you guys. Here’s hoping for a splendiferous 2011 for us all (and let’s face it, it can’t be any worse tha...

By most measures, Apple is well overdue a refresh of its Mac and MacBook lines: 2016 has seen nothing on that score, and the latest press event announced for next week doesn't really tell us any more. One of the more persistent rumours for the new machines, whenever they may turn up, states that the row of function keys on the new MacBooks will be ...

I have a recurring, not to mention infuriating, issue with Fusion which has existed since I started using the software in those heady beta days (2007?). To wit: drag n drop from the host to the guest OS just stops working for no apparent reason. Occasionally, this extends to copy and paste too. One way to address this is to restart the VM (bah!) or...

It's terrifying, especially hot on the heels of the brexit farce here in the UK. Consider this comment, made in a book four years ago and derided at the time: The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier in American politics — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un...

You know a blog is pretty much dead when its author misses said blog's fourteenth birthday by almost three weeks. Chortle! Oh well, happy birthday little website: you've done well!

Quite rightly, the world has gone nuts over the loss of Prince Nelson Rogers last week. Hell, I'm listening to some of his music right now, and I've had some insanely sad moments this weekend pondering his death, whilst also thinking about the other entertainers we've lost so far in 2016 (Alan Rickman, Victoria Wood, David Bowie, Ronnie Corbett, Pa...

Over the past few years, I’ve had cause to tinker with Visual Studio and its stable-mates more and more. Quite a few corporates have laid their eggs in the Microsoft basket, and the tooling is better than ever. .NET, Entity Framework, Web API, MVC .NET… some Good Things have been happening, all spurred on by intitiatives like “coding-by-conv...

Charles Miller has just written a neat take on why blogging isn't the thing any more. Writing on a standard platform would probably help too: I must move this site off of my home-grown Domino template some day! It takes a lot of time and inspiration to write a long-form article, so most blogs filled the gaps between with links, funny pictures they...

Long time readers of the site will know that I adore Steven Wilson's music, whether with Porcupine Tree, Storm Corrosion or as has been the case for the past few years, his solo material. I've attended gigs on all of his tours to date, sometimes twice—this time around being no exception: Woowar and I attended both the London and Wolverhampton...

Just been sitting here pondering the mess that is my desk and wondering where to start—both with the desk… It might be time for a tidy-up pic.twitter.com/upCI7AOoob— Ben Poole (@benpoole) January 31, 2015 … and with how to summarise the past week. Was it a swansong? No idea. All I know is, I'm so glad I came to Florida ...

For more years than I care to remember, Eclipse has been my Java IDE of choice. I've been known to branch out to things like MyEclipse as required, but in recent years, just base Eclipse. As Indigo, Juno, Kepler and company came and went, tweaks were made, user interfaces polished: fair enough. But of late, Eclipse has become more and more sluggis...

There’s a lot of writing out there which I really enjoy at the moment (reading more than ever nowadays). One site that I only started following relatively recently is Wil Wheaton’s. No idea what took me so long. I rather enjoyed this little snippet in his latest post: Stephen King says that writing is a form of time travel, and I’ll take that a st...

My, it has been a busy few months (as you can tell from how dark this site has been). In addition to normal client assignments, we at LDC Towers have been beavering away with a new product, which we call LDC Via. You should definitely check it out. At this stage the app is in active development, and we're looking to sign up willing beta testers. T...

I do not have the body of work in my past that she has—but to see a mature woman create something so idiosyncratic, risk it all in the public view and then triumph on her own terms is a joy. Read more… Hear, hear. Off to see Kate Bush in less than two weeks, and cannot wait!