 |
Updated: 19-12-2005; 10:01:25
Paolo's Weblog.
 Martedì, 28 settembre 2004
 So here we are: as announced Frontier's kernel is now open source, under a GPL.
I have listened to Dave's Morning Coffee Notes about the release and I'm still trying to figure out what this will mean for us as a company.
At evectors we have been working with Frontier for the last 6 years.
Our content management system, IdeaTools, is based on Frontier and we
have used to power hundreds of web sites of all sizes. K-Collector also
runs on Frontier.
Frontier is a quite unique piece of software, it has some problems but also several advantages.
And now what?
We will keep paying fees to UserLand for all IdeaTools or K-Collector
licenses that we will manage to sell. Technically even if our products
have nothing to do with Manila there are some parts of the code which
are not distributed with the open source version (for example the mainResponder).
But most of all Frontier is very reasonably priced and anyway for
several reasons I think that paying UserLand is the right thing to do.
Now that we have access to the source code we might decide to kernelize
some parts of IdeaTools. It would probably improve significantly the
performance allowing us to optimize some parts of the application. But
to do so Simone would
have to remember his C and start working on a different development
environment, most probably not an easy nor a quick task.
And since these would be very targeted developments, most probably it
would not make sense to include them in the main distribution of
Frontier leading very quickly to a fork.
But learning how to work on Frontier's kernel might also allow us, at
some point, to fix one or two bugs or maybe improve some parts of the
application. We invented all kinds of tricks in these years, I'm sure
that we could contribute significantly. Of course, an open source
Frontier would also mean that some other developers might improve it
and consequently help us.
I'm also wondering about how this news would impact our sales process.
Being dependent on another company's technology has (quite rarely to be
honest) been an issue with a few customers. Starting today, regardless
of what will happen to UserLand, Frontier has the potential to live
forever, and this might make somebody more comfortable.
Update: MainResponder will be relased. Manila.root, of course, will not. Apparently many other very useful Frontier technologies will also be relased under GPL. Lunedì, 27 settembre 2004
I can finally play a little with MarsEdit. It has been sitting in my downloads folder for a few days, now I finally found the time. I was able to set it up quickly and easily, I can see the last posts I wrote in Radio and my categories. Hitting the "Post" button will send this words to my weblog, cool
The application is nice and elegant, like all Ranchero apps.
Unless I'm missing something, there's no WYSIWYG editing. There are tools to help me write html tags, there's a nice html preview, but no WYSIWYG.
Brent is a very smart person, there probably is one or more very good reasons for lack of WYSIWYG editing in his product. Maybe Ranchero users simply don't care, maybe it will appear sometime in the future.
The more I'm using MarsEdit, the more I'm liking it. Writing in a real app is waaay better than writing in a browser!
This brings me to another question: will there be a way to extend these applications?
If editing is done in browsers extending UIs and features is relatively simple. For example we have developed tools to allow users to add ENT data in their posts using Radio, Manila and MovableType. ENT is a little thing, there are many emerging types of microcontent and there will be the need to edit them somehow.
What about some kind of plug-in architecture to allow developers and users to extend tools feature sets? Are current API extensible enough to allow such features? Venerdì, 24 settembre 2004
Guess what we have been doing for the last week? Implementing a WYSIWYG editor for our product (now it works btw).
Guess what I was using to write yesterday's rant about google and browsers? Yup, a browser.
Still I forgot my no. 1 request for any browser developer: a good writing environment.
Of course Dave didn't forget and in a comment he wrote:
So there's some obvious enhancements, steadily improving the text
editing function of the browser. I've been writing about this for years
and years.
I couldn't agree more. As a web developer and a web writer I keep stumbling in this major issue. Can you believe that in 2004, 20 years
after Apple introduced to the rest of us the concept of WYSIWYG
editing, the vast majority of weblog writers, literally millions of
them, are still writing html tags if they want to make a font bold.
This is sick.
Sure, there are hacks that can help. Right now I'm writing in a browser
using a WYSIWYG editor, but let's face it: this kind of experience is
miserable, it's only an hack. It's by no way similar to what you get
using Word or any other serious desktop application, both featurewise
and in terms of feeling and reliability.
Then, about Microsoft, Dave he says:
They've been protecting Office by not allowing MSIE to evolve into a two-way environment.
This reminded me of the early days of SOAP. As soon as we discovered
that Microsoft was involved with the new standard I (along with many
others) thought: cool, they are going to build SOAP into Windows and
Office, soon we'll be able not only to write to our blogs using Word,
but even to review our shopping baskets with Excel and have millions of
other intergations between the most used productivity tools in the
world and the web.
This didn't happen. Afaik Word is only aware of the web because it turns into a link every word that begins with "www" (I hate that feature!). It's time for some serious innovation, I hope that somebody at google (and everywhere else) is listening. Giovedì, 23 settembre 2004
News about the google and the fabled gbrowser are everywhere. Whether they are true or not, let's try a little gdreaming.
Let's say that an google-branded version of Mozilla is announced sometime soon. What will they add to our Internet experience?
Most probably their first step is going to be optimizing the applications for the existing gservices.
The email client could nicely work with gmail, maybe allowing users to
take advantage of the collaborative spam filtering technology to keep
also non-gmail accounts clean.
What could google add to the browsing experience? Besides a souped up
google bar, it would be another brand-named browser. Switching from a
Microsoft to an open source browser could be hard for some users,
switching from Microsoft to Google might be a lot easier.
And then, of course, there's the whole desktop business. Both Apple and
Microsoft are working on new versions of their operating system where
search features will rule. They are looking for an alternative to the
20 years old "folders on desktop" metaphore and, with Internet and
Google, users are now quite comfortable with searching information
everywhere using keywords.
Would google's technology work on the desktop where their pageranking
algorithms, based on links, will not work? Google has plenty of
engineers and of cash to come out with a new technology and, again,
they have the most powerful brandname of the web to play with.
Great minds think alike. :-)
Mercoledì, 22 settembre 2004
Flickr is offering a lot of RSS feeds with lots of pictures, I love them. For example, this picture by Euan popped up this morning in my aggregator. It looks like a scene from Metropolis, but apparently it's
Westminster Station.
Lunedì, 20 settembre 2004
Ted Leung:
If anyone has a good way to batch transfer photos from a Nokia 6600 to a Powerbook, I[base ']d love a tip!
Here[base ']s the tip: when browsing a list with your 6600, whether it be
SMSes, the Gallery, email messages, whatever, to select multiple items
just hold down the little pencil key and move the joystick down (or
up!). This selects multiple items you can delete, send via Bluetooth or
anything else the options menu allows you to do.[ CRISTIAN VIDMAR: My Public Weblog]
No more sending, deleting, moving, editing images one by one. Thanks! Venerdì, 17 settembre 2004
Cristian is wondering if I removed comments from my weblog because of what he or Dave
wrote. I removed them because the comment server wasn't working very
well and it was slowing down page downloads. Now I have put them back.
I don't like comments the way they work today as I wrote
some time ago, but I prefer having them because they allow me to get
valuable feedback which I don't want to loose. Personally, I don't like
to leave comments on other sites, I would like to be in control of all
my contents, including my comments. Trackback is a first step in the
right direction but it's still missing something.
I think that weblogs are only the first step in the direction of private/public space management applications.
Before weblogs we all had a public space on the internet: our mailbox.
Everybody could leave us a message in this space and we could retreive
it when we wanted.
In a way weblogs represent the contrary: our weblog is a space where we
can write and let other people retreive our content. This space can be
open to everybody or only to a group of people, it's a tool help us
connecting with the rest of the world.
Weblogs are only the first widespread application that use this public space, many others will follow.
While some may have a different idea, I think that this public space
should not exist only on one server or be provided by one vendor. Users
should be able to pick services and features from different providers
and easily connect them together.
But we need good plumbing (APIs) to develop this vision, we must get to
the point where everybody will be able to connect tools with a single
click.
Yesterday my little RSS experiment didn't work very well. I'll run it again next week. Thank you for your help.
 Swimming with the Razorfishes: Now that Paolo has stolen this gif from Dave, I have to link to it. I'm absolutely mesmerized by this animation.
My wife got the image in a message of a mailing list, she forwarded it to me, I posted it, Marc picked it up, Dave too, no thefts. :-) Giovedì, 16 settembre 2004
I'm running a little RSS experiment.
Mercoledì, 15 settembre 2004
Milan - In Santa Maria delle Grazie, 2.000 people was sitting on the floor to listen to a lesson about Dante Alighieri. Vittorio Sermonti was the wonderful teacher. Professionals, workers, "housewives", students, were there all together, to learn about the Purgatorio. It was beautiful to see that people want to know better about the greatest Italian poet of the Middleage. But it is also a new mass phenomenon. And it is not easy to understand what does it mean. Surely it is not religiuos fundamentalism! It is a sort of historical view of the world that people is looking for. And this is very, very good for the future of Italy.
[ Luca De Biase] Martedì, 14 settembre 2004
I'm not sure for how long Firefox has been reading RSS feeds, anyway today I discovered the feature called live bookmarks.
They are using the bookmarks concept to visualize RSS. Basically all
items with a title in a feed are displayed as bookmarks (and, of
course, automatically updated). Here's how bookmarks in my top bar look
like after adding 3 feeds:
Adding feeds is very easy, if a site incorporates the meta data in its
code, an RSS icon automatically appears in a corner of the window*.
I have always thought of RSS as a way to transfer contents, not links,
so I'm not sure about how much sense this implementation does. It's
good that browsers are becoming RSS aware, and it's also good that
different developers are doing it in different ways, I appreciate the
fact that somebody like the 3 panes approach, somebody (me, for
example) like the "all posts in a long page" approach, other will
probably like this bookmark approach.
Btw, my RSS feeds don't work with Firefox, I get a "Live Bookmark Feed Failed to Load" error. :-(
* It would be nice to be able to click on the RSS icon and subscribe in my aggregator of choice. Sabato, 11 settembre 2004
Played a little with Flickr today. I added a cool Flickr photostrip in the right column (scroll down a little) with my pictures and I can post pictures there from my cameraphone. Quite cool.
This also means adding yet another element (after comments, trackbacks
and google ads) which is not served by my server and which could
potentially break my blog :-) Venerdì, 10 settembre 2004
We're having a good time with Marc,
Lisa, Mimi and Lucy. Marc's daughters are great, they have the most
amazing interactive multimedia toy ever invented: Marc.
Steve Gillmor:
In a world of Longhorn Interruptus, a free, advertising-subsidized,
combined e-mail and RSS aggregator client will have an even better
chance of eating away at Microsoft's control of the desktop. [via scripting.com]
After Microsoft reduced the size of some RSS feeds, suddenly everybody
is talking about RSS bandwdith usage. There are a lot of ideas,
solutions, opinions on Robert Scoble's site (don't forget to check comments).
There seem to be an idea in the air which I absolutely don't like: aggregate feeds only once per day.
Quite often weblogs host conversations and in conversations timing is
important. I want to know asap when people I often have conversations
with post something to their blog, it can't wait 24 hours because it
would make my reply old (let alone further replies). I also use my
aggregator to be up-to-date with my colleagues, and even in this case I
need to be updated frequently.
But these are almost exceptions. I could very well poll other feeds
maybe not only once per day but less frequently than once per hour. A
very simple feature that aggregators could have would be letting users
decide how frequently they want to poll every feed they subscribe to. While some feeds might require hourly scanning, other could be scanned every 2, 4, 6, 12 or 24 hours.
Extending this philosophy, a preference could be set also at feed
level, indicating how frequently a feed should be polled (why keep
polling it if it doesn't update?).
I also think that every effort should be made by feeds publishers and
aggregator authors to enforce good practice habits. Gzip compression
and conditional gets can significantly reduce bandwidth usage, maybe
not providing the final solution but at least giving us some more time
to figure out alternatives. Mercoledì, 8 settembre 2004
Tonight I'm picking up Marc & family at the airport in Treviso. We'll spend a few days together, have good food and even a microcontent dinner in Trieste on Saturday.
In these days, everytime I mention I'm a friend of Marc, whoever I'm
talking to says "yeah, me too". Then I have to explain that I don't
mean in the Orkut of Friendster sense... Lunedì, 6 settembre 2004
In a few comments to my last post Danny says that RSS feeds from Apple and Microsoft music stores are not standard:
comparing the Apple and MSN data it only goes as far as being XML with a root <rss> element.
It's true, both feeds don't validate.
When I first found those feeds I didn't check their code, I subscribed
them with my aggregator, and they worked. This is what most users will
probably do.
I'm not saying that standards are not important, they are, Apple and
Microsoft should do their best to fix their feeds. But I appreciate the
fact that while in a perfect world there might only be one standard and
no errors, in this word we have a bunch of standards and a lot of
errors. Still we manage to improve a little every day, allowing users
achieve new things with new tools. Isn't this cool? Venerdì, 3 settembre 2004
Scripting.com: Microsoft's new music service supports RSS with feeds for the top 100 songs, albums and artists. Nice job. The top songs feed even has enclosures with an excerpts of the song. Excellent.
Excellent indeed. It's good to see big companies creating competing
services but using the same standards: Microsoft with these new feeds,
Apple with the RSS Generator of the iTunes music store. Competing services, same standard.
PS: Of course, it would be nice if they would be using the same standard also for music files.... Mercoledì, 1 settembre 2004
 Yesterday I installed the new beta version of Skype for MacOS X.
There's a lot of excitement around this new product. I didn't have the
opportunity to test it very much. The main problem I have is the lack of
audio preferences in the application, which means that if I want to
listen a conversation using my USB hearphones, I have to route all the audio of my Mac
to the hearphones.
Anyway, it's a beta version, I guess that most issues will be fixed in the next releases. Meanwhile, I'm on Skype :-)
|
|
|
|
comments: trackback: 
