Today another set of WWDC videos was posted on iTunes. The ADC on iTunes section in the iTunes Store now has two sub-sections with video’s available, the Leopard Sessions from WWDC 2006 and the new WWDC 2006 Sessions. The two remaining sub-sections Scientific Poster Session Podcasts and Foundational Sessions have yet to be filled with content.

When I attended a session it was made clear every time the session would be recorded, either slides and sound only, or using video for the bigger sessions. At WWDC everybody was already wondering if the sessions would become available on DVD like a few years ago. In 2005 the sessions were only available as video streams the size of a stamp, with the additional disadvantage that you had to re-stream them if you wanted to view them again.

So no DVD’s this year, but in my opinion an even better solution, video’s on iTunes. The video’s can be downloaded without DRM, and replayed over and over again.

According to the Apple developer website only Select and Premier Members can download the videos. I’m a student developer who visited the WWDC this summer, so it seems everyone who visited WWDC can download the videos too, cool!

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On windows and linux the menu bar is usually attached to the window. On OS X however the menubar is always at the top of the screen. When creating an application using Java and Swing the menu bar will be attached to the window by default, even when you run the application on OS X.

All OS X applications also have an application name named after the application with menu items like Hide Application, Preferences and Quit. When using java the application menu is named after the main class which can be quite user unfriendly.

To make a Java Swing application more like a native application on Mac OS X you can use the following system properties use a global menu and change the application name in the application menu. The System.setProperty calls are wrapped in a try/catch block to prevent errors in a Web Start application.

I usually add this code to my main method. You can use this code anywhere else, but beware, you have to set the properties before using any Swing classes, otherwise it won’t work. So setting the properties in a main method in a class that extends from JFrame won’t work, because the extended JFrame is loaded in the static context before any properties are set in you main method.

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try {
  System.setProperty( "com.apple.mrj.application.apple.menu.about.name", "Ted" );
  System.setProperty( "com.apple.macos.useScreenMenuBar", "true" );
  System.setProperty( "apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar", "true" ); // for older versions of Java
} catch ( SecurityException e ) {
  /* probably running via webstart, do nothing */
}

Google launched Google Talk today. It’s an intant messenger with voip capabilities. Google Talk is based on the xmpp protocol for text messaging. Negotiating a voice chat is also done over xmpp. All used sound codecs are documented and the voice chat negotiation will be documented too. This makes it possible for other jabber (xmpp) clients like Adium to implement the voice chat too. So in the future we will see more clients compatible with google chat for voice chat I hope.

The Google Talk help center contains pages on how to get third party clients like Adium and iChat to work with the talk.google.com server. This unfortunately doesn’t work yet, but that might be just because not all features are fully available yet.

[update] Adium on the other hand is working without any problems. I don’t know anyone with a gmail account who is using Google Talk, so if you feel like taking up some space in my contact list add me using my gmail account: joris.kluivers.

Late last week I was completely baffled by my own ignorance. Usually I’m fairly aware about what’s happening on the web. But this time I discovered something that I shouldn’t have overlooked. My sister invited me to join Hyves, a friends network website like orkut or Friendster, nothing very special I thought. I signed up for orkut before but stopped using it since no-one I knew was really actively using it. After my orkut experience I kind of ignored all other invitations I got for any service like it, dismissing them thinking people would stop using it after a while like I did.

But like I said, my sister insisted I’d sign up for Hyves. Like I suspected Hyves is very similar to orkut, with slightly more features (though some features are rarely used). But when I started to search for people I knew, Hyves surprised me a lot. Every yes, every search I performed returned the person I was looking for, I couldn’t (and still can’t) think of one name that didn’t return a match. Friends I see regularly and people I know vaguely or which I havn’t seen for over a year all signed up with Hyves. It appears Hyves is very popular in the Netherlands (especially with people from my own generation) and I had not even heard about it!