I care about… – Page 16

American Idol for apps launches

Bottom line: Phill Ryu’s MyDreamApp contest launches — could the open source community take some hints from this exciting contest?

I got a chance to hang with Phill Ryu and a few other Mac dev types during WWDC and he told me about his soon-to-be-revealed plan for an “American Idol of Software”. Well, he’s let it out of the bag and ideas (and lots of coverage) are already starting to roll in to the project called MyDreamApp.

The rules are rather interesting, since they leave the creator only 15% of month-to-month sales, with the rest going to the contest’s organizers:

Payment. If Your Submission is Accepted, You will receive royalty payment via PayPal equal to fifteen (15) percent of the net income of the Apple Macintosh-compatible product developed by MDA based upon Your Submission. Payments to You will commence 30 days after the product makes its first sale and will continue at 30-day intervals provided that the product is profitable.

On top of that, the inventor retains zero ongoing interest in the application’s intellectual property:

Ownership of Submissions. (I) When You send MDA your submission, You are assigning MDA all rights and interests – including all intellectual property rights – in the Submission, and MDA shall be the absolute owner of all rights and interests therein;

For some, these issues aren’t a big deal and if your idea isn’t chosen, well, you keep the rights. Besides, this is pretty standard boilerplate legalese given most contest rules — and with some pretty decent prizes and an opportunity to show off your wares to folks like Kevin Rose, Guy Kawasaki, David Pogue, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, it’s worth given up the IP rights for a chance at stardom… right?

Well, in spite of the hype, on the one hand it is. It’s pretty satisfying to see a bunch of independents and friends pull something together like this (though I didn’t realize how male-centric the Macdev community was!). It takes a lot of work and dedication to make this kind of thing happen, and so in some senses that 85% that they retain is a bet that the best ideas that come in will actually be lucrative enough to offset their efforts in organizing the contest.

On the other hand, and this should come as no surprise, I’d like to see something where the results are open sourced at the end (or at least given the choice of being open licensed), opening up the opportunity for more folks to get involved in the building out of a basic premise (and no, I’m not suggesting another centralized Cambrian House). In fact, I’d love to see the Mozilla Labs folks pick this one up and, I’m sorry to say this, but rather just than talk about it, put on your own DreamApp contest for the open source community and see what happens — hell, you’ve got the money, mindshare and, really, SpreadFirefox could use some love as the release of Firefox 2 approaches.

What better way to celebrate the launch of Firefox 2 then to sponsor a web-wide contest that results in something of real consequence for the open source community?

Building a better mouse trap

I’m struggling to make sense of something here. In Blogger’s announcement about its new beta was an interesting tidbit that didn’t get much pickup: Blogger now has a Google Data API.

There’s a lot that I could say about this, and my initial reaction was actually wrong. It seemed to me that Google was going off and inventing its own blog-publishing protocol, pulling the same NIH crap that it did with its non-standard Event Publisher API (using random values that don’t map directly to the international icalendar standard.

But, no, it turns out that GData is actually just Atom “plus some extensions for handling queries”, but branded as a proprietary Google format (kind of ironic, given the long and pained open development of Atom).

So whatever, Atom is what comes next after RSS and MetaWeblog (in particular as hAtom).

The important thing that started to dawn on me was this part of the announcement:

Authentication is fully documented for both Installed Applications and Web Apps
Your GData code should be easily reusable across other GData API apps, such as Calendar

So just as Yahoo had done with Flickr (inspiring a fairly wide backlash), Blogger is going to be fully absorbed into the Google Auth-borg. This continued amalgamation of services behind the Google Account Authentication has consequences beyond the momentary outcry over Google’s supposed steamrolling of companies.

Business is business and competition is a threat to any member of an ecosystem, which is why you’ve got to keep innovating, adapting and bettering to survive. But it’s different when it comes to setting protocols and standards and the seamless moving of data in and out of disparate systems. When those protocols are closed or locked up or can be sealed off at any time, the competitive environment becomes very different.

The problem that I see is Google’s ability to shut out third party services once you’ve imported yourself into the proverbial gLife. No doubt there are feeds and the aforementioned GData APIs but it’s not an open system; Google decides which ports it wants to open and for whom. Think you’ll ever be able to cross-post calendar items from 30boxes to your Google Calendar? Only if Narendra strikes a deal on your behalf — even though it’s your data. Think you’ll ever be able to share your Picasa Albums with your Flickr account? Don’t bet on it. Or — or — how about sharing your Google search history with your Yahoo account? Or merging your buddy list between Orkut and Flickr? Not a chance.

In simplest terms, with the state we’re in with centralized authentication in web applications, it’s like waiting for Microsoft and Apple to strike a deal enabling you to copy and paste from Appleworks to Word. And on top of that, you’d need to have to had created an account in both apps to even boot them up. So from a “normal person perspective”, this is a situation that you’d never want to have to worry about.

But that’s essentially where we’re at.

To put it in greater perspective: Web2.0 should have been the “great wide opening” — that is, where you could be in utter control of your data and move it in and out of services at your whim, just as you can with your money, in and out of banks depending on the quality and diversity of services they offer. And indeed, they’ve got to compete just to keep your business — if you leave, you won’t be stuck with a bunch of expiring pre-loaded debit cards.

But there’s a new trend, seen in Google’s spreading account authentication that foretells of the inevitable Passport-like lock-in that sunk Microsoft the first go ’round. You see, Google’s Account Authentication API makes it easy for you to add more and more of Google services by simply using your Gmail credentials. For Google, this leads to huge network effects, because they can essentially merge behavior data from across its entire network of services to build out a better picture of you — leading to a kind of competitive advantage that no one else can touch.

The problem though, both for you and for independent developers, is that you can’t pick and choose who or what Google works with. They’ll make themselves just open enough to be above reproach but not quite open enough to allow third parties to compete with them on their home turf (man, it’d be nice if there were a “Reply by Skype” link in Gmail — oops, Gtalk only!).

And this is how Google will build a better user mousetrap by leveraging its superior cross-product integration that its authentication system affords them.

(Aside: 37Signals partially benefits from the same kind of integration in typing Writeboards into Backpack but could go further by sharing accounts between different Basecamps).

Trolltech’s open source “Green Phone”

Raven pointed me to Trolltech’s exciting open source Green Phone project built on top of Linux with developer APIs for accessing GPRs location data. The possibilities of a phone like this in the hands of open hardware hackers is immense; the question is, will the carriers allow it?

A combined view of the world

In a post titled “The new Combined View and hybrid web/desktop apps“, Brent Simmons reveals that’s he’s starting to see the power of AJAX-powered interfaces in Mac apps, namely NetNewsWire (beta 3.0b7 now available).

Going one step further, he makes a very important observation:

The key to the whole thing is JavaScript. When something happens in the page—you click on a news item, for instance—the page calls back into the app, and the app tells the page how to update.

It’s kind of like Ajax in that way, except that the communication channel is not http and it’s synchronous (which it can be, since it’s right there on your machine).

And in that, he’s beginning to pull away at what very likely will become the next generation platform of the next revolution in web development.

For some time, people have gone on and on about the LAMP stack — made up of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. It’s certainly a veritable and productive bundle of technology — if you’re always online. The truth of the matter, however, is that our local content stores don’t sync well with the remote stores… that my local LAMP don’t talk much with remote LAMPs. And in terms of offline productivity, that makes for huge dilemmas.

I’m seeing a third generation stack emerging that holds a great deal of promise for sewing up the future of offline-sync-online experiences.

That stack looks a bit more like Rails, SQL Lite (which the next rev of the Firefox bookmarks will be based on), Microformats, some blend of JSON/AMASS/jQuery/behaviour.js/scriptaculous/prototype and, yes, WebKit. What do they have in common? Well, enough inter-woven stickiness to make the heart of a true web geek start to murmur.

The missing link? The client and server OS component to tie them all together. Now, I’d love to see hAtom used as the data transport and storage mechanism in the OS. It would simply so much… but alas, it looks like RSS is the chosen son in the near term.

Why do I say that I wish hAtom were used for this purpose? Well, consider this. The language of the web is, for whatever you make it, HTML (and lately XHTML). This means that any webpage you visit, and indeed, any feed that you suck up, probably has some of this markup in it. In fact, rendering engines are getting better at both supporting web standards and as well as enabling some crazy cool things that you might not have thought possible before. All the while, XHTML is becoming the modern day ZIP format, able to store rich media as well as metadata about that data in microformats.

The browser is also constantly caching this data for you, in order to load sites faster and faster.

Now think about that: where are you doing most of your work in any given web app? Not surprisingly — in the browser! So you’ve got this cached version sitting on your harddrive with all the JavaScript, all the XHTML source, all the graphics and all the CSS, but nowhere to stick the data should you re-instantiate or open that page from the cache. Which is kind of ironic, since AJAX is all about asynchronous messaging… that is, sending messages non-immediately.

So, the thinking here is… if we’ve got this new “stack” at our disposal, it’s only a matter of time before we rewire our web apps to learn to write to a local SQL Lite store, using Rails as the delivery system, meanwhile storing the views and interactivity later, like Brent has done, in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. In fact, most of the entire stack will end up as strictly JavaScript and XHTML storage unites once we see some diversification in microformat schemas. There’s no reason why you couldn’t save your bookmarks, your emails, your blog posts, your IM conversations, your documents, your financial records and the whole lots of content that means something to you in simple, basic, readable-everywhere, XHTML.

And so I appreciate, very much, that Brent is starting to see this — and the power that might be found therein — not just for him or for his app, but for anyone for whom the web and its online-offline machinations has caused great consternation. An XHTML-driven world, though potentially messy at first, offers a great deal of flexibility, of efficiency and of reuse and cross-polination.

If only I could get Brent to use hAtom… and if only I could get Microsoft and Apple to support hAtom in the OS like they all do for RSS… We’d begin to bear witness to the promise of this so-called “semantic web”.

A Flock podcast, changes therein; related tools

Geoffrey “Fredo” Arone seems to be stepping up as the public voice of Flock now that he’s in the position of Chief Strategy Officer and Bart‘s taking on the more abstract role as chairman.

In a recent interview with Richard MacManus, Fredo talks about Flock someday becoming a mainstream browser alongside the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Not sure what I think about that — (sure, ok, whatev) — since I think Flock’d be wiser to try to build to an extremely dedicated niche audience and then work outwards from there — preferring slow but constant iterative growth, like the iPod found… as opposed to Tech Crunch boom-and-bust sign-up and vacate cycles betacoms have come to know and despise.

It’s good to hear, however, that with Erikka Arone, Apple’s former iPod Product Manager in the Worldwide Product Marketing Group, coming onboard as Flock’s Senior Director of Marketing, they’ll have some real experience in their court to help tailor whatever strategy they adopt.

Meanwhile, Flock will suffer another bummer of a loss this September when Lloyd, heretofore Flock’s most exceptional QA Lead and unofficial staff photographer, will migrate back home to Canada. Mum’s the word on his future plans, but at the least, it’s clear that the OSM looks after its own.

. . .

Oh, and for those interested, I found a couple stand-alone Mac apps that offer similar features to those already found in Flock:

Pukka and Postr — tools for submitting your bookmarks to social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Ma.gnolia
PictureSync — support tons of web services, Flock really needs to open up choice in its photo sharing tools
Tickr — developed by one of those Slide folks, provides a good model for the disputed photo topbar
Sidenote — similar to the original Shelf concept that Daryl implemented

Note that these don’t suggest that Flock’s a bad idea (it’s not), it’s important to be aware of what else is out there that might provide opportunities to learn from.

Calling FUD on Godin

The media we use to represent ourselves has a tendency to consume us.

Or so it would, should we allow it.

Seth Godin says that The prevalance of online video, constant skype connections and the multiple threads of data we get online, combined with the enormous overhead that flying now brings might just change the [value of showing up, of being there in person, of establishing a face to face relationship with the person on the other side] for a long time to come.

Just because we’ve got all these wires and nodes and cables to keep us remotely connected offering up pixelated approximations of the real thing doesn’t mean that that basic desire to meet and to be seen and congregate shall whither. Or that the impossibility of airtravel will keep us from seeing one another in the flesh as often as we like.

Fuck that. Leila‘s right: the time has come to tap innovations, creativity and apply these to air travel and security.

…Even if that means avoiding commercial air travel altogether.

Indeed, the pilgrimages we make in the future may be fewer and further between, but that will be because we’ve built up the local ties and connections to feed our desire to connect to other — with our BarCamps, our Coworking spaces, our Citizen Spaces, across our self-run Munified networks… we will build the alternative infrastructure to support the kind of old fashioned social networking and serendipitous person-to-person reality that we’ve always craved.

The airline industry is one of the last vestiges or a foregone error that’s fought innovation at every turn to its folly. The worse it becomes for passengers, the more it exacerbates the need for something better, something more communal, something more open and distributed. Ironically, it’s easy for me to say on a blog, but I don’t think that the answer is bowing down to the threat of terror — which continually proves itself too slippery to contain… instead we need to reduce the threat and reinvest in our roots and in where we are. BarCampEarth is a celebration of our global community — proudly proving that these loosely-connected tightly-woven local communities represent more than the sum of their parts… and that our ultimate strength is found in the connections we share, no matter whoever, whenever, or wherever we are.

Fight Terrorism — Drive an Electric Avrocar

Given the terror thing on a plane over in the UK and the banning of computer and liquid carry-ons, it’s clear that the next step is flying nekkid, as Greg “Fotonotes” Elin has said.

Seems to me when you have a system like this w/ many points of big possible failure instead of one, you gotta make those points smaller and less impactful. Like individuals driving cars and/or crashing them.

Time for personal electric flying machines if you ask me (since the whole car-thing didn’t work out so well).

Safari on Windows

Safari on WIndows

With nary a peep from the XUL Runner folks on the recent proliferation of WebKit apps, I was going to say, “Man, Firefox is so effed” but I shouldn’t say that without backing it up. And being more specific and saying “Man, Gecko is so effed” isn’t all that helpful either. And anyway, I wouldn’t be entirely correct, since really what I mean is that “the collective Gecko and Firefox community seems to be taking a long time shipping a widgetizeable and stand-alone platform for running web applications as desktop applications compared with the WebKit community”.

But anyway, in the meantime, WebKit (whose party I attended last night) is steaming right along. Especially now that you can run Safari on the PC things are going to get very interesting in the rendering engine space very quickly.

Can we get a Linux port already?