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)
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.)
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’.
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.
I decided to try out the optimized MOOX Firefox builds today (I used the SSE-ready M2 build of Firefox 1.0). An interesting quirk I observed is that the text reflow bug #217527 that caused havoc on Slashdot goes away with this build. This is consistent with how timing bugs sometimes vanish, although by the same token the MOOX builds could introduce several other bugs. I have now switched off Raefer Gabriel’s Slashfix extension and Slashdot renders well again. Lucky me.
If you use Firefox and visit Slashdot, especially as a logged in user, you may have noticed Firefox mess up the rendering on the home page and many inner pages. This is due to Bug #217527 and it seems it will not be fixed in Firefox 1.0 (but is scheduled to be fixed thereafter). I wish the Firefox devs would reconsider, it’s never a good idea to render one of your biggest booster sites badly.
That said, workarounds exist: hit Ctrl+ followed by Ctrl- to reset the display. Or download the latest Mozilla trunk builds. Or (gasp) use IE, it works great with Slashdot.
Update 9 Nov 2004: Hardgrok has a handy little hack extension that sort of fixes this problem, although /. pages opened in background tabs still get borked.
Though I have been skeptical about current approaches for rich net apps, I’ve been looking at Macromedia’s Flex and Laszlo for some time to see if they come up to scratch. Of late, both have been in the news — Laszlo because they open-sourced their app server, and Flex because Macromedia announced its giving away the software to qualified non-commercial users for $9. This is all good, however, neither of these two quite leave me satisfied.
Both currently compile to Flash. Flex (I believe) is wedded to it. Laszlo, while theoretically target-independent, currently supports only Flash. Flash is known to be fast (even though non-Windows implementations have typically been a tad slow) and is used widely for ads, animations and short games; however looking through simple demos like the Amazon store shows that the the UI is far more sluggish than a standard HTML interface.
Also, both approaches currently are lousy, accessibility-wise. Even considering the work done by Macromedia to improve accessibility in Flash 7, I cannot imagine Amazon converting every page on its store to this format (and if it didn’t, there wouldn’t be any point implementing the order/checkout process in Flash, since that would mean subjecting shoppers to two different interfaces).
Then there are the developmental hurdles of declarative programming (not necessarily a bad thing; but it is unfamiliar to many developers and needs a good WYSIWYG IDE to be productive) and a costly application server sitting between your data and your users. And what does all this buy you? Why, Drag and drop! Data binding! Platform Independent Fonts! Sigh — supposedly obsolete IE has handled all of this since version 5, and has 85% of the browser market. The Mozilla crew is catching up, and the WHAT-WG process will ensure Safari and Opera do, too.
I can understand there may be a market for these products among those who need rich net apps right now, but those looking at this from a strategic point of view would do well to either target IE only, or wait for XAML (which is going to be baked into IE in Longhorn), or work with other browser vendors and the WHAT-WG to ensure that Web Forms 2.0 ships ASAP (and withstand a diversity of UIs as browser vendors work to iron bugs out of their Web Forms implementation, as they did with CSS, for a while).
Bottom line: upgrading the browser results in a far superior user experience than hacking together kludges on the server that execute on the client via plugins. And because of this, Flex and Laszlo, while attractive, look like products whose windows of opportunity are closing — fast.
Update Oct 12: Dr Dreff comments; he says Rich Internet Apps (RIAs) have a future without MS — he specifically mentions Apple — and MS never ships on time anyway. True, but Safari developers have been active on Web Forms 2.0, and his points do not invalidate my proposition that delivering your entire UI through a “presentation server” and requiring a plug-in to view it has no future when HTML itself can be extended to support modern UI niceties like drag/drop, fonts and autocomplete. In fact, if Adam Bosworth’s Caching Framework ever sees the light of day, it could, in conjunction with a modern widget set, revolutionize the way web apps are done — web users can finally get the same experience current Lotus Notes users do when they work with their apps offline.
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Firefox’s support for feeds via Live Bookmarks is great, but it’s support for the RSS 2.0 spec is wobbly, to say the least. For example, as of now (version 1.0PR), feeds without a link subelement within item will not load, with a message “Live Bookmark feed failed to load” that’s as unhelpful to the user as it is to the feed author who’s trying to figure out what’s going wrong.
This bug makes it impossible to use Firefox to subscribe to heavily-subscribed feeds like, for example, the Scripting News feed. The Firefox community really needs to expand their testcases for this feature if it’s to not look half-assed when 1.0 ships for real.
Packetyzer is a Windows-based packet analyzer based on Ethereal that’s much easier to use.
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Gmail Notifier is Google’s official Windows-based Gmail biff tool. It’s in beta, but works well for me.
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