B. Mann Consulting

I thought that Apple was going to do a big product release of *some* kind on April 1st, their 30th anniversary as a company. But, obviously, releasing Boot Camp, software that lets you easily install Windows XP on your Intel-based Mac, would really have been regarded as a practical joke, so they waited until today.

Dual-booting is really not that interesting. You don't really share files, and you can't switch back and forth without restarting the system and rebooting completely. I've been speculating if Apple will actually support Xen, an open source virtualization technology that lets you run multiple environments simultaneously. Perhaps Boot Camp is just a start -- Apple has already said that it will be included as part of Mac OS X 10.5, aka Leopard, so perhaps that is when Xen support will be rolled into the base of the operating system.

I'll be looking for mentions of Xen as people dig into the details of Boot Camp over the next couple of days. 

Roland already did the podcast for Bryght Radio with Dan, but I owe him a post talking about some of the ideas we discussed regarding outliners, OPML, the universe, and everything.

Dan is aiming high. He's here in Vancouver doing heads down work on Focus, the best outliner for Windows. Basically, he says he wants to build the Omni Outliner for the Windows outliner market. I asked him all sorts of devil's advocate questions, like what about web-based outliners, or cross platform ones, or Dave Winer's OPML Editor. Well, for starters, he's got a wiki filled with all the outliner apps he can find, so he's definitely surveying the competition. The next part is that he's got some definite market segments in mind. He's going to build his outliner so it meets the needs of Getting Things Done disciples. And he's building it on Windows because he a) wants to make money and b) thinks there's room for a great desktop outliner on Windows (maybe cross promote with Omni?).

I bugged him a bit about open source, but there are very few examples of great desktop apps in that category. As well, Dan plans on a plug-in architecture -- actually, embedding Python via the .NET framework to make the whole thing scriptable. Sounds pretty cool, and pretty much the equivalent of AppleScript on the Windows platform.

I think he's got some other plans with regards to "instant outlining" and connecting with Dave's OPML editor, but I'll let him make the big splash about that.

So, welcome to Vancouver, Dan. I'm sure we'll see you at some more Vancouver Web 2.0 User Group meetings, and of course, if you're a supporter of the Innovation Commons concept, go add your name to the list.