After Jim Balsilie’s Phoenix Coyotes bid is for the final time rejected by the American judiciary, RIM remembers to give a specific date to the relase of the new Blackberry Mac Desktop Manager. Turns out it’s tomorrow! The new software will be available as a free download on the Blackberry site to eagerly awaiting Mac users, excited to futher synch their cult-like Mac lives.  I am not a member of this cult, but my wife is. Now there can be synergy between their Mac contact lists, schedules, tasks, and reminders and their Blackberry- I’m surprised society has held it together for this long without this kind of synchronicity. Maybe we can blame the recession on this? The software will also allow users to schedule back-ups, encrypt files, and install new software updates for their ever usefull BlackBerry devices.

In other related RIM news, the software and ICT giant recenlty announced a partnership with Queen’s University. The company will be working with the school to tackle the growing challenges in dealing with massive amounts of customer data. According to the Globe and Mail “…RIM and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada have invested $5-million to create a new industrial research chair in software engineering at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.”  The research will tackle problems of efficiency and optimization in “huge” systems. Citing companies like Facebook and Amazon whose databases include hundreds of millions of entries, the research will be looking for problems in ecommerce transactions, or looking at other processes where deviations, anomolies and irregularities occur; within massive quantities of information these can sometimes be hard to spot and it can also be hard to see trends when they are burried within these large amounts of data. Like looking from above for untied shoolaces at a stadium or hockey rink full of people. You like that analogy? I didn’t want to use needle in a haystack, like chairholder, computer science professor and former RIM employee Ahmed Hassan who spearheaded this partnership. I wanted to really creatively explore my simile options. Maybe I’ve got Vancouver Canucks on the brain. Season opener! Go ‘Nucks! I wonder who Mr. Balsilie will be cheering for this season? Better luck next time Jim. You might not have a hockey team, but you’ve got a great company.

Do you ever feel that your computer treats your favourite web-applications like second class citizens compared to desktop software? Sure, Gmail is slick, but it doesn’t get to sit in your Mac’s Dock and show you how many unread messages you have. You probably check your Facebook Newsfeed far more than you change your screen resolution, but Display Settings gets a permanent spot at the top of your screen while Facebook is three clicks away. A funky little application called Fluid can help elevate any web-app to first-class status on your Mac.

Fluid allows you to create an application that lives in your Dock or Menu Bar out of any website or web-app. These applications are cleaner and simpler than a typical instance of a web browser. A Fluid app has no address bar, or back and forward buttons, letting you forget you are using a website at all. Gmail users will appreciate the fact that Fluid shows your unread message count in a badge on the dock icon, just like Apple’s native mail application. It even automatically creates an attractive icon out of the site’s favicon. iPhone users will be familiar with the concept of Fluid, since it has been a feature in the iPhone OS for over a year.

As more and more desktop applications become replaced by web-apps, Fluid will only become more useful. Fluid helps make these rich web-apps more stable by having each of them run in their own process. If the flash game you are playing crashes, you don’t have to worry about losing your half-written Facebook message (or Basecamp update – we know you work hard too), because each Fluid app is totally independent. Fluid runs as a native Cocoa app in Mac OS 10.5 and uses the Webkit engine (the same one that sits under the hood in Safari 3), so it is fast and reliable.

Best of all, Fluid is completely free. You can thank Todd Ditchendorf on his blog or via Twitter for this fantastic app, or just directly download it here.

A web-app filled dock, thanks to Fluid