After having sent in my Macbook Pro Core Duo 1 in for repairs last year, with a broken motherboard, I was sort of pissed since it took 3 weeks to get back to me. I had to rent another machine to be able to continue development since I was heavily using Parallels. I easily got over it though, since I knew it was the first revision of the hardware platform and that there were bound to be problems like this.

Anyway, when the Macbook Pro Core Duo 2 was released at the end of 2006, I decided to get one. The much improved ventilation (virtually silent), more ram, a faster CPU and a glossy screen were too tempting to pass on. It's been a smooth ride, until the day before yesterday!

I was happily working when all of a sudden, the Mac Gray Screen of Death slowly slides from top to bottom. Yeah, I've been having them so frequently over the past two years, that they can start competing with Windows' Blue version. As usual, I do a hard reboot and ... nothing. Screen stays black, no startup chime, nothing works. I tried everything, resetting the PMU and PRAM, starting from a DVD, starting from another volume, using target disk mode, ... nothing. I call Apple Support, they make me do it all again while being on the phone, surprisingly the results are the same (another hour lost), and they tell me that I have to bring it into an official repair center.

I really dislike this new policy where you have to bring a laptop yourself to a store, even when you have bought the additional Apple Care support. A few years ago, they at least had FedEx pick it up at your place. Now, the burden is on you.

So, I drive over to the nearest qualified store (doPi in Mons, 35 kms from where I live) and drop off the machine. Yesterday was spent setting everything back up with my 'old' Core Duo 1 machine.

This morning the phone rings, it's the store where I left my Macbook Pro. They tell me that they're being put out of business by the state and that I have to hurry to pick up my machine, otherwise I wouldn't be able to recuperate it. So I drive back to them and then to another store in Brussels.

Bottom line, I drove 150 kms today and 70 kms the day before yesterday, just to hand over my machine for repairs ... 6 months after I bought it, and while having an extended Apple Care warranty.

Apple tech support in Belgium sucks!

I already bumped into some RIFE users on the conference floor and I thought it would be nice to at least set a time apart to have some drinks together and exchange war stories .

I propose that we meet today, May 9th at 17h30, at the Thirsty Bear. This is right before the JavaOne bloggers party, so you don't have to miss that. Maybe we can even spread the word about our favorite projects!

Even if you don't know open any of the projects in detail but are interested cutting-edge web development, native Java continuations, Rich Internet Applications, ... you're welcome to stop by for a chat.

If you don't know what I look like, here's a recent picture:

After reading a blog post about choosing RIA frameworks, I can't help but think that OpenLaszlo is not really seen for what it is and a lot of wrong assumptions are abound. Even friends of mine on IRC need clear clarifications about OpenLaszlo's direction and features.

The first one is about OpenLaszlo's support for multiple runtimes. Contrary to Java it doesn't intend to be Write Once Run Anywhere The multiple runtimes however allow you to have exactly the same architecture for building different applications or different parts of the same application. Some things are better done in DHTML (internationalization, accessibilty, native feel, font rendering, execution performance, memory footprint) and others are better done in Flash (video, music, multimedia, rotated fonts, high amount of animations, ...). You can reuse a lot of your code and most of it does work across runtimes, which is a nice benefit. I encourage everyone to try out OpenLaszlo's DHTML engine, it's quite impressive even at this first stable release status.

This brings me straight to Flash support and the apparent fact that Flex and Laszlo are at least on equals footing here. Some people actually seem to think that Flex has the edge since Adobe controls Flash too. In reality however, Flex only runs on Flash 9 while OpenLaszlo runs on Flash 7, 8 and 9 and does proper optimizations for each specific version.

A last one I regularly hear is that people seem to have an adverse reaction to the fact that XML is used to declare the UI. Strangely, I rarely hear people complain about (X)HTML being XML. In fact, it turns out that for describing user interfaces, a declarative XML approach really works extremely well. I admit it, initially I had a problem with the XML approach too, until I started actually working with it. Now I wouldn't want anything else. It allows for some pretty neat class libraries and reuse. In some applications even, I generate the Laszlo XML through XSLT from a data model. This is pretty powerful. Also, I much prefer Laszlo's Javascript than Flex's Actionscript. It is a lot closer to what you write using DHTML and just feels consistent and right.

I hope this will shed some new light on OpenLaszlo for you. The project deserves some decent attention, instead of dismissing it as a supposedly poor clone of Flex (btw. OpenLaszlo exists much longer than Flex).