Software Survivors Fend Off Microsoft. Database FileMaker, digital-imaging program Photoshop and accounting-software leader Quicken have managed to stay independent and develop markets amid direct or indirect competition from Microsoft. (Seattle Times via MyAppleMenu) [Macintosh News]

Even if FileMaker has been under Apple's control for some time, this is something that has not happened in Windowsland, uh?

A couple of days ago we opened the new version of this e-commerce web site and while we were looking at the orders management back-end we realized that it would have been cool to distribute notifications about new orders via an RSS feed (together with the regular e-mail messages). It didn't take much to implement with the IdeaTools framework (rss feeds are rendered trough our xsl system).

There are a couple of things to consider about this solution:

• The feed has to be password protected, but the only authentication that aggregators can manage is basic authentication, with username and password included in the feed's url. It's relatively simple to do with Frontier or any other web server;
• A nice thing I found out about the Aggregator in Radio is that it does not include password protected feeds in the mySubscriptions.opml public file (thanks UL);
• What we are doing at this level is just plain notification, meaning that we're just publishing some basic data about the order to be rendered in the aggregator, the next step is going to be defining a namespace for the orders and using this feed to interface to the accounting system.