I find it very odd that the release of a two-button wireless mouse makes headlines in the tech world. Is this not 2006? The press is once again headlining the release by Apple of a two-button mouse for the Mac. I tip my hat off to Apple not for product this time, but for marketing. Our quote of the week:

"We cut the cord on our popular Mighty Mouse to give consumers more flexibility when using a Mac," said David Moody, vice president of Apple's worldwide Mac product marketing team, in a prepared statement. "A Bluetooth-enabled Mac desktop with an Apple wireless keyboard and Mighty Mouse is the ideal cable-free setup at home or in the office."

A sleepless night for Earl Miles late last week provided the Drupal community a replacement to his Dashboard module. Earl Miles announced a successor to Dashboard at his site, Angry Donuts. The new module is the Panels module and I expect we'll be seeing it used a lot by Drupal's users, especially newcomers of Drupal and those less inclined to dig into the PHP code.

Dashboard the previous module, allowed Drupal developers an easy way to implement "simple" two-column layouts of content (called nodes in Drupal) that are not sidebars. While you can put blocks about anywhere in Drupal, the core doesn't offer an easy way to put content outside the "main body". While dashboard overcame the "single column" for content obstacle, it required knowledge of PHP to implement.

A couple days ago I opened my Thunderbird e-mail client on my Windows XP system and found an e-mail from Joe Audette of the mojoPortal project. "Mojo whata?", I asked. I thought I knew most of the content management projects (CMS) projects around, but this one didn't ring a bell. After reading his e-mail, I understood I likely have not heard much about his project because my focus on CMS has been a little too narrow lately.

In his e-mail, Audette writes, "Hi, just wondering if you only cover CMS's using php technology or if you would consider giving any press to .NET/Mono based projects? Any coverage of my project mojoPortal would be much appreciated."

As I've mentioned in past posts, I have a strong desire to cover more than just PHP Web applications. mojoPortal, named after Audette's dog, is written in C# and runs under ASP.NET on Windows or under mono on Linux or Mac. Already the talk of a CMS using a blend of Microsoft and open source tools was peaking my interest.

Gallery has a new demo site for users to show off their photo sites using the online application. The new demo site provides a significant improvement over the previous forum to showcase albums. Some information on the new site by Gallery themselves found below:

"The equity a corporate blogger builds up is portable, in other words. Rather than sticking to the company, it will follow the blogger—even if the blogger heads to a competitor."

- Nicholas Carr, Lessons in Corporate Blogging, BusinessWeek Online, July 17, 2006.

Does Drupal make the grade? The answer to that question evidently depends on who you ask. Last week, the Tech Republic posted a review by Justin James on the Drupal content management system. Mr. James concluded that "Overall, Drupal does not make the grade". This week the Drupal community is all a buzz over the decision for IBM's developerWorks to use Drupal for designing, developing, and deploying a collaborative Website.

Just wanted to write a quick note that the first actual beta for Firefox 2 has been released. I'm proud to say that I'm currently using the beta Internet browser as I'm writing this post. The built-in spell checker for text boxes (found in on-line forms and Web content management systems) works great! I'm also pleased to say, that the spell checker works with TinyMCE.

A couple months ago, I posted some of the features that were likely to be included in Firefox 2.0 once it reaches final release. My original list of features wasn't too far off the mark. According to the release notes, the following are new features that have been included since Firefox 1.5 was released:

Mozilla's Mitchell Baker wrote an interesting post about product development. As you develop a product and customer loyalty there is a risk to making too many changes to a product. However, the success of your product likely came about because of innovation. If you kill off introducing new ideas and concepts for your product you are also likely to kill off the reason your product became successful in the first place.