VirtualBox
Computerworld’s
Steven Vaughn-Nichols tested
VirtualBox 3.0 on a variety of systems and platforms, concluding that
“you owe it to yourself to try VirtualBox… It’s never been
easier and VirtualBox has never been better.” Jack Wallen from
TechRepublic came to the same conclusion, calling
VirtualBox
“one of the easiest of all virtualization products available,”
and made special mention of its “amazing” Seamless mode. Blogger
Tara focused
on VirtualBox’s speed when she wrote, “VirtualBox’s disk throughput
is phenomenal, in fact, this is the first time I’ve seen
almost-native speed disk in [a] virtual machine,” concluding that
“it’s an awesome app.” Rounding out the group was a blogger who praised
VirtualBox’s seamless mode and noted that “the graphics also feel
nicer and run faster.”
JavaFX
Praise
for JavaFX this week started with blogger Matt Van Bergen, who discussed
how
the RIA platform of JavaFX makes Internet based applications much
more user-friendly and intuitive. Osvaldo Pinali Doederlein focused
on JavaFX 1.2’s overall update, concluding that 1.2 was “a much
needed update that fixed important holes and performance
bottlenecks.” Blogger Jim Weaver turned
his attention to the JavaFX-powered Indaba online recording
studio, noting that JavaFX “enables recording high-quality audio
directly onto the client platform.”
NetBeans
NetBeans
beat out the competition this week starting with a longtime TextMate
user who made the switch to NetBeans, calling
the IDE’s features “just amazing.” A different blogger wrote,
“I’ve
tested many, many IDE’s and options for programming and getting your
work done. But…NetBeans gets the first prize.” Finally, blogger
JJ Behrens, who has been using NetBeans for six months, noted
that NetBeans is “way easier to get up to speed with than Eclipse.”
OpenSolaris
Bloggers
highlighted a range of Solaris and OpenSolaris features, with blogger
Alan Fineberg, a computer science and engineering student at
University of Washington, calling
Dtrace “awesome.” ZFS Mirror also earned
a thumbs up from a blogger who explained how much easier Solaris 10’s
ZFS Mirror makes the difficult work of breaking down a large task
into smaller sub-tasks. A third blogger then gave
a step-by-step guide showcasing how “easy it is to recover your
favorite OS after installing” for what he called a “glorious
recovery.”
OpenOffice
OpenOffice.org
won new followers this week, including a blogger who reported
his surprise with “the incredible power of OpenOffice.org”
writing that “it has completely blown me away.” Blogger Peter
Daley described
OpenOffice as “a very sophisticated office suite,” and called it
“a viable alternative” to Microsoft Office. Finally, blogger
Travis Hampton got hands-on with OpenOffice, posting
the first part in a series of tutorials on how to prepare an
OpenOffice.org document in book form.
MySQL
Kicking
things off was a blogger at Rawseo, who explained
why developers should opt for MySQL
instead of Access, naming features such as MySQL’s attractive free
price tag, multiple-user
access, better management of large databases and increased security.
Other developers focused on making MySQL even better, with one providing
a list of the chief principles for optimizing PHP and MySQL scripts,
while Linux
Magazine’s Jeremy Zawodny, who has used MySQL for almost a decade, offered helpful
tips based on MySQL problems he’s seen in the past. |
