The Pandora technology story and a bit more.
Look at this neat thing that Jeffrey found:
Ephemera Forever: I was randomly searching for some stuff for a little personal project I’ve been working on when I ran across ‘I Remain,’ an archive of digitized documents at Lehigh University. At first glance it looks like this dry historical repository – and it is – but the things the curators chose to include is pretty interesting. It’s all ephemera, condolence notes, thank-you cards, and so forth.
It’s like a real-world Nick Bantock book!
Oliver Steele some weeks ago wrote an amazing essay about the right presentation model for rich client applications:
I’ve been watching server-side developers try to figure out how to serve client-side web applications for a few years now. Different developers, that is it doesn’t take years for any individual developer to figure it out. There’s often an initial stumble, which is caused by a mismatch between the obvious way to deploy a client-side web application, and the right way. The right way is simpler, but elusive.
This is something I saw first hand at Kenamea where we built a platform for rich client applications and worked with clients who were building applications. Oliver has done an amazing job describing the right approach. As the world moves to systems like gmail, oddpost, and laszlo this kind of stuff should be required reading for UI developers. It’s the future.
Mitch Kapor has written an interesting post on web application interfaces. He focuses particularly on the gmail interface. Pushing the state of the art with respect to what can be done in a browser is pretty exciting I think. It was at the core of what we were doing at Kenamea. It’s pretty encouraging to hear him saying:
for any new application project I get involved in starting, my strong predisposition is to think in terms of a web interface as primary.
Not just some applications, but any application. Even applications where the user sits in front of the app for many hours a day. Being able to delivery the kind of productivity required for those sorts of applications using a web development model will be a fantastic thing.
We’ve had this technology for some time – heck we were building “rich client” browser applications at Relevance in 1997, but only now is it really becoming ubiquitous. One great thing about the ascendancy of Firefox is that we finally have a good cross-platform base upon which to build interesting dynamic web applications.
The final frontier does look to be offline use. We had some of this working at Kenamea some years ago; web applications that you could run regardless of whether or not the network was connected to your device. Then for a while there it looked like Adam Bosworth was going to make it happen at BEA. I’m sure someone will step in and solve this…
Robert Scoble dropped by the Savage Beast offices the other day. It was great fun to get to show him our product. The amazing thing about Robert is what a great job he does with folks he’s never met face-to-face. I suppose there are quite a few out there that feel like they know him even though they’ve never actually met him. Watching him at the geek dinners is pretty cool; he’s great at putting everyone at ease.
Just a quick post to kick things off. I’ve been thinking about the year in music and decided I’d post a few of my favorites for the year…
Bark Psychosis – Codename Dustsucker
The Blue Nile – High
Carina Round – The Disconnection
Iron & Wine – Our Endless Numbered Days
Jay Farrar – Stone, Steel & Bright Lights
Modest Mouse – Good News for People…
The Mountain Goats – We Shall All Be Healed
Preston School of Industry – Monsoon
Wilco – A Ghost is Born
