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Just in Time for Christmas: Vista in the Crosshairs
Or, Give your computer the bird.
Computers are frustrating. Creating documents, finding files, sharing information — why do everyday things still seem so tedious and counterintuitive?
Dave Kushner interviews Blake Ross and gets a preview of his new Parakey venture in the November issue of IEEE Spectrum. Ross, a 20-yr old wunderkind and one of the driving forces behind the Firefox browser, has teamed with Joe Hewitt of Firefox and Firebug fame to create an absolutely disruptive new approach to computing. Quoting from Kushner’s article:
Just as with Firefox, Ross began this project by asking himself one simple question: What's bad about today's software? The answer . . . resided in the gap between the desktop and the Web. . . . The problem, according to Ross, is there's no simple, cohesive tool to help people store and share their creations online. Currently, the steps involved depend on the medium. If you want to upload photos, for example, you have to dump your images into one folder, then transfer them to an image-sharing site such as Flickr. The process for moving videos to YouTube or a similar site is completely different. If you want to make a personal Web page within an online community, you have to join a social network, say, MySpace or Friendster. If you intend to rant about politics or movies, you launch a blog and link up to it from your other pages. The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications. Ross's answer is . . . Parakey, "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox's.
Thus, Parakey aims to bridge the divide between desktop operating systems and the Internet, using the browser as the common user interface. Parakey will give users the ability to easily host their own Web sites via their desktop. Even though Parakey works within the browser (all leading ones are to be supported), it actually runs on the local computer. This enables developers to do many things not allowable in a traditional Web site. By the use of easily assigned “keys”, the desktop owner can also easily and simply post or allow access to content of their choosing — from documents to photos to files — to become “public” to the distribution lists associated with these keys. Remote users get issued cookies so that their access to the local resources is seamless and without friction.
Similar to the models of the Firefox plugin or Web services, the basic Parakey platform can be easily extended. Ross and Hewitt have created a programming language, JUL (for ‘Just another User interface Language’), likely similar to the Mozilla XUL, for developers to write these components and extensions. Though the launch date for Parakey is being kept under wraps, all signals point to before January. The pre-launch company site allows interested parties to enter their email address to receive formal notification of the launch.
It is rather amazing that this article came out on the same day, yesterday, as John Milan’s blog post on Elephants and Evolution – How the Landscape is Changing for Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Adobe on Richard McManus’s Read/Write Web blog. In that post, Milan posits Mozilla as another one of the gorillas (elephants) in the room and Adobe’s Apollo project as another “under the radar” approach to the desktop/Internet browser convergence.
All of this seems rather ironic as the world (Redmond) awaits the release of the long-delayed Windows update, Vista. Even the mighty do indeed live in interesting times.
[...] What is most compelling about these trends is the emerging centrality of the browser as the dominant software application in most users’ computing lives. This is part of the ongoing trend to Web OSs, as my earlier post on Parakey noted (whose founders are Firefox developers with a strong background in XUL). Firefox is truly notable for the beauty and clean design as a platform for hosting Internet applications. Using XML, XUL and its chrome files, virtually every aspect of the Firefox platform is open to extension. The Javascript examples and the fact that many of the available extensions are also fully available in source code with non-limiting open source licenses provides many examples and exemplars for still further extension innovation. [...]
[...] So, what Zotero is exemplifying — beyond its own considerable capabilities — are some important implications. First, full-bodied apps, building on many piece-parts, can now be expected around the Fireflox platform. (Indeed, I earlier noted the emergence of such “Web OS” prospects as Parakey, whose developers also come from earlier Firefox legacies. One of those developers, Joe Hewitt, is also the author of the impressive Firebug extension.) [...]
[...] Joe is a Mozilla developer, who also wrote the original Mozilla DOM Inspector. Joe is a co-founder of Parakey, which I profiled in an earlier post. [...]