Movie trailer mashups are going to be the next big thing after Photoshop contests. Check out the hilarious Sleepless in Seattle recut as a horror movie and Back to the Future inspired by Brokeback Mountain.
SmallWindows is an excellent open source Exposé-workalike for Windows. It’s still in beta and has some some rough edges, but it’s a snap to download and use. Recommended if you (like me) have 20+ windows open most of the time. (via)
Google Talk users can now connect to other Jabber/XMPP users.
I get a lot of flak from people for saying that the web can never be a serious application platform until it gets Offline right. I’m usually told ubiquitous wifi and 3G/EVDO will make offline apps obsolete. Or that Adam Bosworth obsesses far too much about “the person on the airplane [when] airplanes are actually getting Internet connections.”
Of course, anyone who has faced a broadband outage (or traipsed around small Welsh villages without cellphone signals) will know that losing your apps along with your connection doesn’t sound like fun. On the other hand, Alchemy seems no closer to shipping today than it did when it was first announced.
However, Julien Couvreur’s new “Take It With You” Wiki shows what can be done today with a bit of imagination. TiwyWiki is rudimentary but gets the online/offline experience exactly right. Neat hack, and I’m definitely going to try and apply this in some of my own projects. (This requires Flash 8 to be installed, but future variations on this technique could just as easily use the browser’s own scriptable security/storage model when the browser vendors get around to implementing such capabilities.)
After getting excited (against my better judgement) about today’s Google+Sun announcement, it’s turned out that the all the noise was primarily about a marketing junket — the most notable software announcement was an earthshaking Google Toolbar bundling deal.
I was expecting some noise about Google and OO — perhaps a Save to Google Storage in OO’s Save As dialog, or beefed up OO document search powered by Google. In retrospect, of course, both of those were silly — Google’s ’standards’ approach would mean the only way they’d ever offer file storage would be WebDAV and Google Desktop already searches OO files just fine.
Of course, the Web 2.0 types who got excited about a ‘webified’ OpenOffice (like many of Scoble’s commenters) had better not hold their breath. Current browser technology, even with AJAX, is very fragile (Gmail’s autosave, for example, is very flaky and I’d be very interested to see if Yahoo’s new mail handles drag/drop well — Oddpost had frequent problems) and definitely not the platform you’d want to build a solid productivity app on. And OO.o’s desktop heritage pretty much precludes it from being an effective browser-based cross-platform app… Google would have better luck with Mozilla’s XULRunner (and given Google’s wooing of the Mozilla foundation and Eric Schmidt’s refusal to get into discussing Open Office today I believe they have come to the same conclusion).
Consequences for Google: What is interesting is that with today’s announcement it’s the second time Google fans have expected red meat but come away disappointed. As a Google user since google.stanford.edu, I associate Google with simplicity and simplification — i.e., Google’s products reduce noise, not add to it. Google Search obviously reduced search noise, Gmail (either by itself or by scaring the bejeezus out of its competitors) reduced noise by removing the tedium of constantly having to delete email. Google Talk added to the noise by adding Yet Another Client to an already crowded market, and today’s announcement did not help matters. Google’s upcoming Calendar product had better be orders-of-magnitude stunning for the company to recover some of its mojo.
Robert, stop conversing with the market and start shipping something that people can actually use. Neither Apple nor Google converse much with the market and both are doing quite well, from what I see.
That said, since you wanted a conversation, forget about RSS for a minute and get your fundamentals right — that means Mail. Calendaring. (My MSN, thankfully, is in much better shape.) I pay $20 a year for Hotmail and it’s embarassing that it still doesn’t have autocomplete, or that last I checked it won’t allow me to save a message into my Sent Items folder unless I click a checkbox. Every freaking time. You invented Ajax. Great. Use it. Time was when IE4-powered DHTML ran circles around NS4. Why are you ceding the space to Firefox today? And if you’ve got people who can make start.com, why are they kept in a sandbox and not allowed to touch the rest of MSN?
The way I see it, Microsoft has taken a strategic decision that Firefox and LAMP have commoditized the web so it’s time to cut losses, stop spending millions on IE and squeeze profits out of the fraction of users who will pay to have a marginally richer ‘integrated’ experience (with IE7 and XAML). Prove me wrong. Ship something to show me Microsoft still cares about putting great, usable apps on the web.
Is Project Aardvark a remote desktop service that works through firewalls using an HTTP-based reflector, like GoToMyPC and MyWebexPC, given some of the hints the Aardvark team has been dropping? Given the team’s working with a lot of GPL code, maybe they’re extending VNC?
Incidentally, I find myself using MyWebexPC a lot these days and it’s quite good (and the basic version’s free for upto 5 PCs) … if you find yourself working on several machines, you might want to give it a try.
Update: Hadn’t noticed this: Michael Still has discovered what Aardvark is: SidePilot, a service that allows ‘people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by temporarily controlling their computers via the Internet’.
From 9am on Sunday 5 June to midnight on Friday 10 June, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast every single note of Ludwig van Beethoven. Every symphony, every quartet, every sonata
Like most of the BBC’s programmes, this will be available to internet listeners as an audio stream, and the Evening Standard says that the BBC will make it easy for listeners around the world to catch up with what they’ve missed:
These concerts will be [...] “streamed” for a week on the website … Anyone from here to Hong Kong can slip a disk into the drive and download a set for keeps. Allow five minutes on broadband for Symphonies One to Eight, 10 minutes for the momentous Ninth.
I’m guessing this means mp3 downloads will not be available, which is a pity, but those who don’t mind listening to the lo-fi streams can try out Total Recorder.
Updated 8 June: It looks like they really meant it when they said ‘download for keeps’ — you can snarf the MP3s from Radio 3’s website now.
There’s been some buzz about ‘AJAX’ apps this week, and the one thing they got right is that — long term — proprietary web layers like Flex and Laszlo are dead in the water (the jury’s out on Avalon-based web apps simply because of Windows’ huge potential reach).
That said, AJAX is to rich web apps what C-based CGI apps were to web apps, period: an early, messy, easy way to give new features to users. I’ll be disappointed if in five years we’re still writing pages of Javascript just to get an autocomplete dropdown. If anything, the web of the future has already been imagined, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the Googles and Yahoos weren’t working towards it now (we know Microsoft already is, with Avalon’s blurring of the desktop app/web app boundary).
The interesting this is, the unsolved pieces of a standards-based rich web app become much more solvable given a popular open-source browser (check: Firefox), browser/plugin vendors working together (check: WHAT-WG and the plugin alliance) and a powerful compilable open-source runtime environment that binds it all together better than Javascript can (here’s where an open source Java — or a mature Mono — could help).
As Joel Spolsky noted, the pieces of the puzzle that remain unsolved are a modern widget set and compiled code that can access the browser DOM. To this I’ll add the problem of offline operation. The first two aren’t rocket science and are (say) 2 years work for a company like Google. The third is a deeper problem (and the fact that Alchemy is still not available publicly shows how far we have to go); however looking at Lotus Notes/Domino’s relatively successful replication feature we can say it is not unachievable.
Using Paypal to pay for things has been quite easy for folk who have credit cards in India, but until now accepting payment using Paypal was impossible for Indian sellers without a US/UK bank account. With Paypal’s new “Request a Cheque” feature, this is set to change.
Now Indians can get rupee cheques mailed to them from Paypal on request (minimum $150 equivalent with a $5 service charge). This ought to be a big boost for e-commerce in India because it’s now a lot easier for most Indians to sell on eBay or over the web than it was previously.
