Congratulations! You are one of the first 250 iPhone3G-owners in Belgium!

D’un naturel plutôt ponctuel, je suis arrivé précisément à 21h, comme requis dans la charmante invitation de Mobistar. Il pleuvait une pluie fine qui vous glace les os, et avec la chaleur résiduelle du jour, une certaine moiteur régnait, ajoutant à l’ambiance tendue d’un petit groupe d’une centaine de personnes qui faisaient déjà la file le long de la Toison d’Or.

Parmis les plus de 5.000 personnes qui s’étaient enregistrées sur le site dédié à ce lancement, une centaine de personnes avaient eu la chance d’être sélectionnées comme V.I.P. Malheureusement je n’en était pas. Je me glissai donc dans la file des client non V.I.P., déjà un peu frustré – mais c’est tout le but de ce genre de lancement organisé.

Ayant compris du petit groupe la mécanique de la soirée (attendre sous la pluie), je reçu un ticket numéroté 085 d’une demoiselle qui pris la précaution de m’indiquer qu’avec ce numéro je ne passerais pas a la caisse avant 3 heures du matin, histoire de m’encourager.

J’étais bien résolu à me démerder pour trouver un raccourci mais je commencai par prendre mon mal en patience. Pourtant après une bonne heure d’attente humide, ponctué de jatte de café tiède, je commencais a en avoir franchement plein les couilles. J’ai alors usé de mes crédits de journaliste pour aller me mettre a l’abris et boire un verre de Coca tiède en attendant minuit.

Malheureusement mon badget Press ne me permis pas d’entrer avec les “VIP” et je repris ma place dans la file comme un bon citoyen. Finalement, c’est vers 1h30 du matin qu’un Emakinien (que je remercie au passage) me fit passer discrètement la barrière nadar, pour me permettre d’acquérir le “precious”. 4h30 d’attente pour pouvoir écrire ce putain de post et frimer pour quelques heures?

Non, en réalité je pars demain matin, rejoindre ce bon vieux Thierry Tinlot, pour 3 jours de délire au North Sea Jazz Festival à Rotterdam. Je vais pouvoir shooter, twitter, surfer, uploader, blogger, emailer, à la vitesse de la 3G. Good night!

My amateur PHP developer toolset

I am not a developer, but I enjoy coding sometimes for hacking pleasure. I toyed with Ruby (Rails), Python (Django), exotic scripting languages (WebDNA) but nowadays I mostly tweak PHP, HTML, JavaScript, CSS code and some Bash. As an long time Apple user, I run only MacOS X on my Macintoshes, so over time I have selected my software tools of choice.

As text editor I use Coda for its well designed interface, integrated FTP browser, grep integration, CSS editor, DOM inspector, integrated terminal and ability to share live code over Bonjour using the Subetha engine, with better developpers than me at Emakina.

Unfortunately Coda can’t grep through a bunch of files, so I still have to use BBedit for massive re-factoring.
I tested SubEthaEdit, the free TextWrangler and ForgEdit. All of them are great text editors too, but lack some polish in their interfaces.

I also use Transmit from Panic as my main FTP software. It’s strong at syncing a whole sites with my servers and just well integrated in MacOS X. It syncs FTP bookmarks over .Mac which is practical when you work nightshift from the office to home 😉 Forklift is cool too, especially it’s FTP to FTP feature and integration of Amazon S3.

I experiment a lot of Open Source PHPware, so I download the latest trunk version of my favorite projects from their subversion repository. After using svn X (free but ugly) for years I have recently switched to Version. The current beta 4 is very stable and it’s interface matches perfectly with Coda. I like the way it present the recents changes in a Timeline, that you can unfold to click every file for a quick diff. Juxtapose Folders is also useful and free. But the diff presentation of CornerStone are by far superior. CornerStone is another Mac OS X style Subversion client and I’m still wondering if I’ll buy Version at the end of the beta or go for CornerStone.

But to integrate update of Open Source software I have modified, I use Changes, a stronger diff tool which allow me to compare a whole project then integrate code changes bits by bits into my version. Previously I used DiffMerge (free but ugly), but I was tired of having false positive because of Mac OS X / Windows linebreak differences.

On my development servers, after using Mac OS X Server since the beta version to 10.3, I switched to Tenon iTools. They have great support, keep updating their Apache, PHP and MySQL packages and are a three clicks install on a brand new Mac mini. Its web based remote administration interface allow me to control my servers from anywhere, anytime, even on a Windows machine. When developing offline (during holidays in remote locations) I use MAMP on my MacBook Air.

To edit MySQL databases I currently use phpMyAdmin like everybody, but I just stumbled upon Navicat. If you know some better MacOS X native MySQL editor, let me know in the comments below.

Why I don’t blog anymore ?

The reason I give usually is that I found something more interesting to do (like developing a Social network, reading a book, dating a cutie or run a company). In reality, I have never been a real blogger. I just like to test the possibilities of blog platforms and their plugins, or embedding rich content. Also when I encounter something cool, I am ready to spend 5 seconds to share it with the world by a cut and paste. A more a micro-blogger and the real reason is that I’m too lazy to write. Now I can wait another month before the next post 😉

Major update on ContactOffice beta !

ContactOffice is a collaborative and messaging platform offered in Software as a Service. It is used daily by more more than 350.000 users of which 250.000 paying users !

It’s new beta version is an AJAX enhanced interface developed using Google Web Toolkit. ContactOffice developers have added numerous features to GWT (drag and drop, marquee selection, contextual menus, sortable columns, resizable panels, …) and are showcasing what is – according to Google engineers – the most advanced web application built using their java based revolutionary AJAX web application development framework.

The latest beta version of ContactOffice (release 1.2.002) contains numerous fix and is very close to being the best in his class of applications. It is finally fully compatible with Safari, in addition to its outstanding Internet Explorer and Firefox/Mozilla support. The new beta also features numerous new functionalities and enhancements :

– Wiki
– Info panels
– Threading for emails (only for paying subscriptions)
– Categories on docs, notes, contacts, bookmarks, …
– Right click or Ctrl click for Mac users to access contextual menus
– View document as PDF (.doc .ppt .xls .txt + openOffice extensions)
– Import Google contacts
– Account backup now includes the notes
– Details panel fro emails and contacts can now be collapsed or expanded as well email headers
– ‘Print contact’ is now available
– Some drop-down menus were not displayed for FireFox/Mac users
– Better interface color contrast
– Tons of UI enhancements and bug fixes

If you are in web development, you really have to test this web application to have an idea of what is the state-of-the-art today in a web interface!

If you are a java / ajax developer, you should try working for this company.

If you are looking for a solution to manage your group online collaboration needs, you have just found the best on the web.

"To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe." — Anatole France