Ok, so it’s not like I like to ask for favors often, and hey, the competition is tight (especially against that cute dog), but y’know, when it’s your lady up at the plate, you totally want her to swing for the fences.
And hit it out of the park.
So, you know what to do.
And for those of you who have already cast your vote, thanks!
Scott pointed out a gaping hypocrisy at LinuxWorld today: since when is LinuxWorld only for “business professionals”? And more offensively, only for those 18 or older?
What is this, the Linux draft?
Scott writes:
Jonas Luster mentioned this sign to me when I ran into him at the Socialtext booth and he made a great point about the fact that many lead linux and open source developers are under the age of 18. Also, what about Linux geeks with children? So if Linus Torvalds stopped by with his kids to show them the world that their father helped create, I guess they would be turned away. As far as I’m concerned this all goes against the nature of Linux and open source itself. As for “business professionals only”, well that’s just a load of crap. Someone needs to cut off of Tux’s tie and put him back in a t-shirt and sandals.
Such BS.
Someone please save the penguin!
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In case you missed it (I know I did), a friend from abroad pinged me about the openBC openDESIGN contest — basically an opportunity to design the Business Card 2.0. (Haven’t heard of openBC? You should!).
They’re looking to drum up interest over in the states, so I figured I’d pass the word along. Heck if you win, it’s pretty good money, so I don’t mind doing a little PSA.
What’s in it for you? Well, according to the contest challenge page, you’ll:
Sounds good, eh? What’s in it for me? Well, in exchange for pimpage, there’s a good chance they’ll be doing up their new profile pages in hResume and hCard (now to keep them to their part of the deal… heh.)
Now, the site redesigners have been keeping a log of their efforts across the whole site, almost like watching the Tour de France of web design (getting quite contentious at times). Things are nearing the last leg though, with only a week to go before the contest is up… So, if you want your shot at €10,000, get your entries in ASAP. Veloso, Stamatiou and you 9rules folks — I’m lookin’ at you!
I’d never thought about it, but man!, wouldn’t it be amazing if you could use all the Mac developer gooodies to develop any website? XCode for web apps? AppleScript instead of JavaScript? WebKit on Rails?
I mean, by all accounts, AppleScript is much more readable and human friendly than JavaScript… I wonder if it would it be possible to abstract JavaScript to a point where I could write something as simple as this (which is AppleScript syntax)?
tell application "MarsEdit"
activate
make new post window
tell post window 1
set title to "[[pageTitle]]"
set link to "[[pageURL]]"
set body to "[[bodyText]]"
end tell
end tell
Imagine this, just for example, running in any webapp:
tell webapp "30boxes"
activate
make new vcalendar event
tell post vcalendar event 1
set title to "[[eventTitle]]"
set link to "[[eventURL]]"
set body to "[[bodyText]]"
end tell
end tell
Ok, so again, I’m not much of a codesmith, but that seems pretty simple, even for me.
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”.
In case you consume my feed rather than simply visit my blog daily (there’s apparently around 1,000 of you, give or take, according to FeedBurner), I’ve added a once-a-day summary of my Ma.gnolia links as well as photos from my Flickr account tagged “screenshot” since I think they’re usually fairly interesting and they get no love since I’m NIPSA’d.
Let me know what you think about these change — good, bad or indifferent!
Noel has the details on a pretty ridiculous rule change on sidewalk usage and parade definition in NYC. In response, there’s been a protest called Aug 23.
At the same time, Noel’s kickin’ up dust about getting a CoworkingNYC space started up in the Big Apple. He’s proposed a meeting coming up soon, so drop him a note (noel at nonecknoel dot com) and let him know that you’re interested.
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:
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.
Factory Joe 