The future of "great Windows applications," we're told, lies with Longhorn's next-generation presentation subsystem, Avalon, which will reboot software development sometime in the latter half of this decade. Of course, even Microsoft can't wait until then. Consider InfoPath. It's a great Windows application and a rich Internet client that had to ship in 2003. Its foundation is none other than Internet Explorer -- or rather, the suite of components and Internet standards on which Internet Explorer depends. Could InfoPath have been built on a Mozilla foundation instead? You bet. And the result wouldn't just be a great Windows application. It would be a great application, period. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

12:48:08 PM    

First Toolbar with RSS Support

Yesterday, Lycos Hotbot joined the fray with its combined Explorer Bar/Toolbar, the first ever with a RSS reader. It allows users to choose from hundreds of included RSS newsfeeds. You can add custom RSS feeds or subscriber-based feeds, although the stepped-up security default ActiveX settings of Windows XP Service Pack 2 does seem to make that a daunting task.

The Hotbot Desktop boasts another feature that no other search Toolbar has, so far: it will index and search all of your Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail and files in Microsoft Office, .pdf, and most text-based formats, much in the same way a freebee program called Altavista Discovery did a couple of years ago.

12:40:22 PM