Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Dan Wood is co-owner of Karelia Software, creating programs for the Macintosh computer. He is the father of two kids, lives in the Bay Area of California USA, and prefers bicycles to cars. This site is his weblog, which mostly covers geeky topics like Macs and Mac Programming.

Useful Tidbits and Egotistical Musings from Dan Wood

Categories: Mac OS X · Cocoa Programming · General · All Categories

Fri, 23 May 2003

We need a good printed Magazine on general computer technology

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I was thumbing through the latest printed catalog from O'Reilly, and I realized that there are a ton of titles that piqued my curiosity. They weren't topics that I would necessarily buy a book about, because maybe they aren't quite what I'm working on, but I would still like to get familiar with those technologies. (Or maybe I would buy a book, but I might not know why

I realized that what the world needs is a good, new, printed magazine -- something you can thumb through offline, not researching on the web -- to keep computer professionals up to date on the latest cool stuff. Something like Dr. Dobb's, being platform-agnostic, but geared toward more than just coders.

I'd like to get a magazine with articles that provide a general overview of up-and-coming technologies, major updates to existing technologies, cool new RFCs that have been approved or are in progress, and even ground-breaking web sites or desktop applications that will have an impact on the way we use, administer, and program computers.

For instance, these technologies mentioned in O'Reilly's catalog would make interesting articles:

  • What's new on the RSS front-lines
  • Introduction to Zope
  • What is new in Java 1.5
  • What is BEEP?
  • What is BLAST?
  • A quick overview of Extreme Programming (XP)
  • What are Jakarta Struts
  • Overviews of innovative applications like NetNewsWire and Spring (winners at the recent ETech conference)
I think the perfect publisher for this would be O'Reilly! Articles could even be written by the authors of their books, and obviously plug their books for readers interested in learning more. What do you think, Tim? "O'Reilly's Zoo"? "On O'Reilly's Radar"? "O'Reilly Horizon"?

(And if anybody reading this post thinks that there already is a magazine like what I'm looking for, let me know!)