Anyone here use Neoplanet? It is a skinnable browser that a couple of years ago was gathering quite a following.

I flew out to Arizona where they're located and visited them once. It was an amazing experience since it was so different than where I work (Stardock). They had resources. I mean REAL resources. $50 million in venture capital, incredible hardware on everyone's desk. They were at the time 4 times larger than us even though they only made the browser which is ultimately an IE control surrounded by a skinnable exterior (one might argue that Inet Tabs is better than Neoplanet).

Their website was a hip cool place to go. Very polished.

Recently though I went over there. I suggest visiting:

http://www.neoplanet.com.

Let me know what you think...

Some of you may hang out on the Kaleidoscope (a skinning program for MacOS) mailing list.

If you do, then you know what I'm about to say probably. Things aren't going so well in the customization community on MacOS. Why? Apple's shut and locked the door. MacOS X may be neat but it's much less flexible than MacOS 9 and earlier and it appears that Kaleidoscope will never work on it.

This is a real bummer because what really is skinning? It is the idea of people of diverse backgrounds saying "I work on these things all day, I want to have the power to customize it to suit my needs."

So if MacOS X is indeed as inflexible as I'm hearing (I haven't really used it yet), this is a sad thing.

Anyone here familiar with what's going on there and want to comment?

My office machine died last week. One of the CPUs went bad (one of two). Ticked off, I started looking at getting a brand new mega machine. My current work machine is a dual (now single) 650mhz P3 setup with 512MB of RAM.

So I go over to Dell's site and look at the top of the line workstations - 1 gig RAM, dual Xeon 1.7Ghz P4's, etc.

Then it dawned on me. Have computers simply lost their umph or has software simply not advanced fast enough to make getting such a mega system worth it?

I remember back in 1991 getting a 386SX-16 and getting a noticeable performance improvement simply by playing around with shadow bios.

But now, the various machines I have here at home don't really show much difference. I have a 1Ghz machine on the other side of this room that I"m not even using to type this (the P3-800mhz laptop is the main machine).

So what's the deal? Unless I'm doing CAD or rendering or something, what is a P4-1ghz (a dual no less) going to do for me, a developer, that a dual 650 setup won't be able to do in almost the exact same amount of time?

What are your views?

Anyone know of a site that has a TON of pop-up ads? Want to really put WebBlinds's SmartBlocker through its paces.

After years of almost being a major player, OS vendor BeOS has hung it up. They've been sold for $11 million (in stock) to Palm. Ironically, Be turned down a $125 million offer from Apple some years ago (doh!). It is believed that Palm will possibly use Be as a potential PDA OS. The desktop OS future looks grim though.

PocketBlinds is the first program for the PocketPC that fully skins Windows CE. It is essentially WindowBlinds for the PocketPC. With it, you can skin the title bar, menus, push buttons, and more. And it's free!

I've been a long time Palm III owner and am starting to think about getting a new PDA. But I'm not sure which to get. I'm starting to get somewhat frustrated with the lack of innovation and advancement with the PalmOS (low resolution displays, relatively limited abilities).

Is there going to be any major updates to PalmOS in the near future that would make it worth waiting for or should I look at getting the next generation iPaq when it comes out. What do you guys think?

For those of you who are interested in the latest greatest video cards, ATI is about to release the Radeon 8500 that is effectively as fast or slightly faster than the GeForce 3. But Nvidia hasn't been standing still either. Oooh it's exciting!

Lots of people ask where they can find news on various alternative shells for Windows. One of the places we all go to is called Shellcity. Check it out.

It has been said on occasion that a true skin portal needs to be created. One has been created by Jumbles! Go check it out!