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Gliffy Screenshot

Gliffy is a pre-launch startup, which makes a program for collaborative drawing. I signed up for the beta a few weeks ago, and just got invited today.

While I haven’t tried out the collaboration feature, I am pretty impressed by the program overall. First, I was surprised that it actually worked, until I found out it was written in Flash (after which the only surprise was that copy and pasting text worked). I am also impressed by the use of screen real estate. All of the features needed to do a drawing are given space, and it is much less cluttered than Microsoft Office (don’t even get me started on Office 2007 or Windows Vista). Another thing that impresses me is the versioning system built into it.

I think with the new crop of office applications, including those from 37 Signals, and a web app to tie them together that hasn’t been invented yet, we could start to see a shift from desktop office applications to the web in half a decade or so.

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I’m going to L. A. this weekend. Instead of comparison-shopping for airline tickets, I just went to southwest.com and booked my flight.

I’m not going to fly United or Delta or anyone who has gone bankrupt and continued to fly (and incur more losses) or anyone who’s received corporate welfare. This is for the simple reason that I’m not going to pay twice for my travel – first in tickets, then in taxes (or national debt, if you prefer to look at it that way) and in the strain on the economy caused by bankruptcy.

The trip should be interesting. The only times I’ve been to the L. A. area, I’ve either gone with family or just drove through. During the family vacations we were either in Anaheim, Valencia, or Dana Point. This time I’m going to stay with a friend at Thousand Oaks, and probably explore the areas south and west of there. I also want to go to Chinatown for dinner. It’s a goal of mine to go to all of the Chinatowns in major cities in the U. S. I told this to a friend, who asked if I knew Chinese. I sure don’t, but maybe I’ll learn a little. :)

Update: Southwest sure isn’t as fun to fly as JetBlue. In fact, in one way it’s worse than the (other?) big companies created by mergers. The seating is not reserved beforehand. On the other hand, I did help a person out with a spreadsheet on the way back and we had a good conversation. So it evened out.

JetBlue has a great website. It’s very usable, and has a nice picture where you can choose where to sit, that really beats the other airlines. Also, all of its planes are relatively new, which is nice, IMO.

Another update: The verdict is still out on whether I prefer reserved or open seating. The reason I didn’t get a good seat was that I reserved late on a holiday weekend. If I had been able to pick my seat in a web app I would have seen that all of the good seats were occupied.

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I got linked to an MSDN blog and noticed that the URL was http://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2005/11/08/490348.aspx. I don’t think that this is the actual folder structure on the server’s filesystem. I think it’s just what gets passed on to a script, that determines what content is being requested, and generates that content.

The “.aspx” must be deliberate. I think it’s an advertisement to anyone who programs computers that the website uses XML-based ASP (Active Server Pages, a Microsoft technology).

I think that this is pretty silly, because the extensions in the URLs are extra typing, are incorrect after switching languages, and don’t make things any easier for developers that are using URL dispatchers.

On the other hand, I think it’s a pretty slick move by Microsoft, and in some way I wouldn’t mind seeing it countered by Java, Python, and Ruby programmers.

Any thoughts?