This morning I read about Synergy in Mordy Golding’s blog. It’s open source software that lets you move your mouse between computers, without having to use any kind of switch. All you do is plug in the hostnames and voila!

I installed it on my Mac and PC here at work, and it’s working very well. I didn’t expect it to be this easy. :) And I can even copy and paste between the two, which is quite nice.

The only slight disadvantage is that I’ve now kind of lost two of my hot corners on my Mac (but I can still get to them if I move the mouse slowly; I just can’t fling my mouse in the corner anymore, eliminating the usefulness). The mouse movement also feels kind of slow on my PC, but it may just be my innate expectation for it to be thus. :) And if I’m in screensaver mode on my Mac, I can move the mouse on the PC but if I click and hold, the mouse moves on the Mac instead. But that’s not really a big deal — I can’t think of any situations where I’d need to have the screensaver up on my Mac and work on my PC at the same time.

For the moment, anyway, the benefit of not having to have a second keyboard and mouse on my desk far outweighs any disadvantages.

Technorati Tags: Synergy

I’ve been tinkering around a bit with OpenLaszlo, since here at work I’m about to start writing an RIA for doing online extraction of genealogical records, and it would be really nice not to have to re-invent the wheel. :) The advantages of OpenLaszlo are that it’s free, it compiles to Flash (which is on pretty much every computer out there) and soon DHTML, and it looks like it’s conducive to fast development. And there are a lot of high-profile apps using it (like Pandora).

So I spent half an hour throwing together a quick prototype of our app — no functionality, just the layout — and I think I’m liking it. It’s basically XML with a healthy dose of Javascript. Using XML this way feels almost like Lisp somehow, incidentally. :) So far I haven’t run into any huge roadblocks, so we’ll see if OpenLaszlo works for what I need.

Technorati Tags: OpenLaszlo, Flash, Pandora, XML, Javascript, Lisp