Category: Web building

Hyperscope and the future of the past

The mother of all demos
Photo by John Lester.

I can’t quite tell how significant this is, but I know that it’s been a long time coming and that, only over time, will we begin to understand what this system will really mean for information systems.

In classic understated flair, Doug, Eugene and Brad will be releasing the Web 2.0 version of Doug Engelbart’s Hyperscope to the world tonight.

It’s hard for to describe succinctly, but basically it’s taking hypertext and adding the “hyper” to it (today’s web linking is kind of like the Model-T compared to Engelbart’s space age original 1968 vision). You’ve really got to try it for yourself to see what I mean; what at first seems like a big outline (it’s cleverly built on top of OPML) quickly becomes an immersive experience that other system pale in depth and flexibility to.

In some respects, this kind of learnable system is what I was talking about in my post on learning from game design. The only presumption, or goal, of the Hyperscope system is that you’re interested in working with knowledge and information — how you go about finding, linking to, appending or operating on that information is up to you.

All that and it’s built on Alex Russell’s Dojo Toolkit is an achievement in open source cross pollination that should be also be duly recognized.

Congrats guys.

A lesson from game design

Spore preview
When I was at Flock, one of the things that I advocated for most vehemently was to take more inspiration from game design — to look to influences in , World of Warcraft, the The Sims and others to come up with novel approaches to socially browsing the web.

Well, Aaron Ruby, writing for NextGen, captures exactly what I wanted to add to the open source design process:

And that’s what game designers do: they create objects that invite play.

The Microsoft Office model of interface design no longer applies; rows of buttons simply aren’t fun and because they’re not fun they actually reduce focus and productivity.

Though there will continue to be a need for transitional browsers, I’m looking to games like Spore to set the stage for next generation interaction models and work/time flows.

On open letter to Blogger

bloggerformatsWith Blogger in the throes of a new beta cycle, it seems the ideal moment to get support into one of the more popular blogging platforms on the web.

With that goal in mind, I sent an open request letter to the Blogger-Help discussion group. No responses yet, but if you’re interested in seeing this happen, please follow up in whatever way you think might be most effective… tanks!

Hello,

Not sure to whom I should address this request, but I’m very excited about the Blogger Beta and that it represents an open opportunity to add support for microformatted content.

You can read more about microformats at microformats.org, but to summarize, microformats are community-developed standards for identifying certain kinds of information in webpages using your typical HTML tags and classes.

In particular, this is my wishlist of microformats that I would love to see Blogger support:

  • : okay, you already took care of this one, so kudos!
  • XFN: WordPress already supports this, and it’s especially useful for representing lists of friends in blogrolls.
  • rel-me: from the XFN family, being able to link to other pages on the web using rel=”me” creates an informal means of “claiming” other places where I publish online. Read about Ma.gnolia’s addition of rel-me.
  • : marking up personal profiles in hcard means that if I add personal contact details, people can click a link to add me to their address book without any extra typing. I’ve done this on my main blog. Clicking the “Add me to your address book” link will convert the HTML content in that page into a .vcf file that most address book programs can recognize.
  • : In order to make it easy for my readers to add events that I’ve blogged about to their calendars (Google Calendar or others, like iCal), I can use hcalendar to mark up this information with a link to add the events to their calendar. Here’s an example.
  • hAtom: This one is fairly simple to implement since you’re already classing most of this information already. hAtom uses element names from Atom as class names. This allows people to subscribe to blogs directly, without the need to subscribe to RSS. You can read more about this.

Though the benefits may not seem immediately obvious to supporting microformats, the amount of effort required to add support is fairly minimal compared with other, more substantial features that you’re probably already working on. Furthermore, our community would be happy to help with the process of adding support to Blogger, validating your work and providing guidance along the way. This initiative is also not a commercial effort; rather, it represents the work of a large, distributed, worldwide community that wants to build out the value of the “lowercase semantic web” and to make data storage in web pages a reality.

In some respects, we are at a chicken-and-egg crossroads but the more support that we see for microformats in the wild, the more tool makers, publishers, browsers and other applications will reap the benefits of this effort to essentially modernize the web, incrementally building upon the existing infrastructure.

Thanks for your consideration and please let me know if there is any way that I can be of service.

Chris

SilverOrange looking for a designer

SilverOrange dude SilverOrange, the fine folks behind the Digg design and Mozilla dot org are looking for a new designer.

Personally I’d jump at the opportunity, but as you probably know, I have a source of prior employment.

What might be interesting to note is that my entire foray into Silicon Valley life came to fruition because of a post I read on Steven Garrity’s blog in August 2004 about Mozilla looking for volunteer designers. I replied, got pulled into their backend intranet doing design volunteer work, a few weeks later we pushed out Spread Firefox and the rest, as they say, is history.

So I’m just saying, this could be the opportunity that sets you off in whatever direction the fates have picked out for you.

P.S. And no, this doesn’t mean I’m starting a job board (heh). I’m just doin’ a favor for some friends.

CrossOver Beta brings PC apps to the Dock

IE6 on the Mac

My open source buddy-slash-analyst Raven Zachary (who also brought me news of the Green Phone) pinged me to tell me that CodeWeavers have launched the beta of , a full WINE environment port to OSX that lets you run Windows apps without… Windows! (…unlike Parallels which is a virtual machine.)

I wrote about this idea in July and it appears that the reality of OSX subsuming Windows is coming ever-closer.

Though many of the folks whoa are most excited about this are gamers, Raven’s screenshot proves how valuable and convenient this will be for Mac web developers who have been locked out of native Internet Explorer testing.

Oh, and pre-ordering saves you $20, gets you 3 months of extra service and a free upgrade to CrossOver Mac 6.0 (just an FYI).

Converting SEC Edgar Filings into hCard

Joe Pezzillo of pinged me that he’s shipping a new version of his web mining tool called that can convert SEC Edgar Filings into the hCard microformat:

So, introducing SEC Form 4 Info to hCard Format, a new ready-to-run solution included with Anthracite. It’s a set of three Anthracite documents and an Automator workflow to tie it all together. The latest form info is scraped from the SEC, a particular filing type is extracted, and then all those filings are harvested for contact information which is then converted to the hCard microformat. You can use Technorati to convert these hCard pages into Apple AddressBook .vcf files, I’ve seen it work with my own eyes! It’s pretty slick, if I may say so, and I know that many customers (and soon-to-be-customers) are going to like this, too.

Oh, and I never thought I’d be in the position to say this, but, a note to potential would-be review requesters (I’ve only had two to date): adding support for either or in your product greatly increases the chance that I’ll blog about you! Huzzah! (Of course, having a good product helps a great deal as well).

Ma.gnol.icio.us

magnoliciousWow. Ma.gnolia is so rockin’ lately.

I mean, I’m biased, but that’s ok.

I have a longer post coming soon that I’ve been saving up, but I wanted to get this out ASAP so all you folks out there with del.icio.us tools can port your apps to work with my favorite social bookmarking service…

Why now?

Because Ma.gnolia now supports the del.icio.us API. Oh yes. Check it out. And let crew know what you think!

Alex Bosworth’s API tips

has some great pointers on building web APIs. We’ve been advising many of our clients on building out or planning APIs for their products and this advice is very much in line with our advice (we’re also partial to OpenID and microformats).

Oh, and if you forget your API or microformats at the door, Sebastian has developed a way retrofit your site with microformats using Dapper. How cool!

Follow up on the mousetrap

Apparently I could have been more clear in my post on the Google Authentication mousetrap, so here’s some additional summary points:

  1. It’s not so much about lock-in as it is that Google can steamroll over independent competition because of their ability to integrate and cross-promote services. In the first bubble, they called this synergy and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s better for users, but worse for upstart competitors.
  2. As web apps become the norm, being able to move your data between them will become essential, and since almost all web apps require some form of authentication, you need to be able to share your credentials between these web apps to transfer the data.
  3. Microsoft Word already runs on OSX and so you already can copy and paste data between it and Appleworks. My point is that that’s not the case on the web today. Because commercial use of APIs are restricted, you have to wait for companies to forge business deals before you get the kind of interop that you already have between different company’s desktop-based applications.
  4. I feel that my view is squarely looking at reality — looking at what will happen if we don’t open up data formats and authentication protocols. I am placing my hope on microformats and OpenID — not because I care so much about the technology, but because until we have open standards for transferring data and open protocols for authenticating, it’s going to continue to be a disempowering situation for your typical end user. Like me.