Lately there has been so much happening in ColdFusion open-source that it can be tough to follow. Therefore, I have decided to add what I hope will become a weekly blog post going over the past week's happenings (as long as there are items worth reporting). This was a particularly busy week, so here goes...

Robert Cringely speculates that Apple has been preparing to buy out Adobe sometime next year perhaps in order to better compete with Microsoft and solve Apple's "application vulnerability."

That's because for its core media and graphics markets Apple is as dependent on Adobe as it is Microsoft for the general office market. And now that Adobe owns Macromedia, Apple is even more vulnerable.

He claims that some anecdotal evidence suggests that they have been preparing for exactly this kind of move for some time. This is because Steve Jobs "needs the top ISVs who are currently writing for OS X to continue writing for OS X, and that especially means Adobe."

There's only one way to make that happen for sure, and that's for Apple to buy Adobe.

An interesting read for sure, regardless of your opinion of his conclusions. If he is correct, what would this mean for the future of ColdFusion? Bueller? Bueller?

A recent article by TechWeb does an interesting feature-to-feature comparison of the recently released IE7 Beta 2 and the current version of Firefox. The author believes that IE7 holds the advantage on interface, tab management and RSS support. He believes Firefox still holds a slim lead in security ("for now" he says in part because the security on IE7 has yet to be put to the test). He also believes Firefox holds the lead in extensions for customizability and password management. Lastly, he declares a virtual tie in web standards support (which is good to hear...though we are stuck supporting IE6 for some time anyway).

Based on his analysis, it is easy to assume that IE7 holds a slight advantage over Firefox (in its current form). However, it also doesn't seem as if their are any "must-have" features that will cause most of us who have already made the switch a compelling reason to go back, especially given what the author calls IE's "tattered reputation".

John Dowdell of Adobe posted to the user-group manager's list in response to questions regarding the recent outages of MXNA and asked that the word be passed on. In summary, he says that the outages are due to multiple issues such as 1) the need for a server upgrade; 2) surging traffic; and 3) Adobe/Macromedia site integration issues. He says that he expects the potential for outages to continue over the course of the next few weeks and asks the community for their patience in the interim. I figured since I have seen this come up on occasion in various blog posts, this is probably the best place to get the word out (especially given today's outage).

I have commented on this topic many times before, and it always seems like there is a new IE PNG fix out, but IE PNG Alpha Fix v1.0 RC4 is exciting for two reasons:

1. It automatically supports png background transparencies. My current solution is Sleight and while it benefits from a lack of lag time, it does not support background transparencies.
2. It requires 1 line of CSS to implement. Yes, you heard that right.

Here is example code taken from the source of their demo page:

<style type="text/css"> <P>
/* USAGE: All you have to do is include this one line in your CSS file, with the tag names to which you want the script applied: */ <P>
img, div { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc) } <P>
/* Alternatively, you can specify that this will apply to all tags like so: * { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc) } */ <P>
</style>

Once you strip out the comments you will notice we are down to a single line of CSS that is IE specific. That's it. This did appear to have a slight lag time (unlike sleight), but definitely nothing prohibitive. Definitely something I will be testing out. Thanks to the Wired Monkey Bites blog (who also mention a solution for PNG image maps as well)