ever so gently rambling, rambling at my chamber door
There’s been some rumors making their way through the geek community that Google has been working on its own IM service (ala ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc). Turns out it’s live! Mike was ever so kind as to hook me up with an invite, and it seems fairly slick so far. Appears that anyone with a Gmail account can use it.
They’ve only got a Windows client that integrates with your Gmail account and even supports voice chats, but their server’s running Jabber (opensource IM server). So you can connect to it with just about anything for basic IM (read: Linux and OS X). They don’t actually have instructions up currently for Adium (my OS X client of choice), but they’re pretty similar to those for Gaim (client of choice for Linux/Windows). Just be sure to include @gmail.com in your Jabber ID. Sweet! Oh, and if you add buddies in other clients, you need to be sure to include the @gmail.com in their buddy name too.
I know this was posted last week on slashdot, but it looks like the website for OpenSUSE finally went live. Pretty exciting stuff. First RedHat split their distro into a commercial, “enterprise” class distro and the bleeding-edge, completely open distro Fedora (open in the sense that more than just RedHat employees were actively contributing to its development and direction). Now Novell has opened up SUSE. If I remember correctly, it used to be an exclusively commercial distro if I remember correctly… wasn’t available for free download. Good stuff. I know they’d opened up some of their management tools (YAST for example), but it’s nice to see the whole thing opened up. Might have to go check it out…
Apple is full of interesting surprises this year. First they announced they’d be ditching PowerPC in favor of x86. Now, they’ve gone and released a multibutton mouse. But without any buttons. Er… something like that.
In place of buttons, it features touch-sensitive capacitive sensors beneath the top shell (ala the iPod) that “detect where your fingers are and predict your clicking intentions”. Or at least that’s according to their marketing speak. By that, what they really mean is you click the entire mouse (like an Apple Pro Mouse), but it detects whether you were pressing down on the left or right half of the mouse using these sensors. It also features a couple of side sensors that detect when you’re squeezing the mouse for another “button”. To top all that off, it features a tiny trackball where you’d typically find a scrollwheel. Idea is you can scroll in any direction as opposed to being restricted to vertical scrolling (or the hacky side-to-side tilt I’ve seen in some recent scrollwheels to support horizontal scrolling). And of course, you can click the “scroll ball” for a fourth button.
Looks like Apple even made the driver configurable. All four buttons may be programmed to perform left/right clicks, access Exposé, Dashboard, Application Switcher, Spotlight, or some other app of your choosing. Pretty slick. I gotta wonder who in marketing came up with the silly name Mighty Mouse. If you look at the bottom of Apple’s page, you’ll notice they’ve given copyright credit for the cartoon of the same name.
Oh, and be sure to check out the Ars review for the actual hands-on experience from a bunch who probably forgot to put their Apple rose-colored glasses on before using it. 
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