The Pandora technology story and a bit more.
Mindjet MindManager is being presented at the opening session today at Gnomedex. Designed for people who think non-linearly. Designed to support thinking associatively. Think first and then use drag and drop to organize your thoughts. They call it “information mapping.” Their customers use it for brainstorming/thinking. Nice pen interface for Tablet PC uses specially designed gestures for quickly entering ideas and organizing them. (Tags: gnomedex)
I’m sure that I’m the last gnomedex’r to post about the rss announcement that Microsoft made this morning here in Seattle. They’ve announced that Longhorn will have a set of system services for synchronizing RSS (and atom and rdf) content to your machine. This is a background service that pulls down the feeds when they’re updated and tries to respect other processes that might require bandwidth at the same time. It will use the same background data transfer mechanism as Windows Update.
They’ve also updated IE (in the form of IE7 which was publicly demo’d for the first time today) to facilitate subscription. Apparently they’ve been paying attention to what Apple is doing with SafariRSS in Tiger because the UI is, quite literally, identical. In fact the whole UI for IE7 looks more like Safari than I’d have ever imagined. The version demo’d had a brushed metal skin, a very simple toolbar, a flexible search box to the right of the URL entry box. Very similar.
A good bit of time was devoted to the power of RSS with enclosers. They demo’d Outlook calendar population driven by RSS with iCalendar enclosures and a photo slide show powered by an RSS feed with jpg enclosures. So, pretty much it’s the whole “embrace” thing… they were very clearly saying “we love RSS” and it will be everywhere in Longhorn.
Now… for the inevitable “extend” bit. They’ve also published today an extension to RSS 2.0 to make it capable of delivering ordered lists. This new tag makes it possible to use RSS to describe, well, lists. For example: Playlists, Events, Wish lists, To Do lists, Top 10 lists. Unlike publication feeds, lists need different semantics - in particular the ability to reorder or delete items. The tag makes that possible. They’re also adding an extension for describing how item metadata (via namespace extension) should be interpreted in the context of a list. For example, which attributes should be used for filtering.? Which should be used for sorting? What is the datatype of each item? All of these extensions have been released under a Creative Commons license. It’s not clear to me what exactly the value of that bit is, other than the PR benefit. (Tags: gnomedex)
Gnomedex is underway… Dave Winer just finished his keynote on his new GPL-licensed open souce OPML editor. Good discussion with the audience; no drama. The Microsoft guys are on stage now getting ready to talk about “Longhorn Browsing and RSS.” This is going to be the big one for the show.
Well look at this. That has me very curious about just what’s going on at Microsoft right now. I’m very much looking forward to hearing about it first hand on Friday.
This week palmOne finally released a firmware upgrade that make the Treo 650 feel like a solid little performer. The first two firmware revisions all had their issues, in particular a sluggishness that made the entire experience vary between frustrating and downright painful. It’s not a good thing when your phone takes 20 seconds to dial a number. As a bonus DUN works with Sprint now. I’m happy. If the phone had worked this well when I bought it I certainly would have been a huge evangelist. As it is, the whole thing has left me feeling like it’s a pretty fragile device. Oh well.
I’ve been really heads-down the last few months hard at work with my team here at Savage Beast on a brand new product. So, even if it’s not cool to be in stealth, I’ve been staying quite on a whole bunch of things while we toil away on our own product. We’re getting really close to telling the world about it, so I’m sort of coming out of my seclusion. As part of that I’m going to be up at Gnomedex starting tomorrow. Who knows maybe I’ll even give a demo or two… (Tags: gnomedex)
If you’re going to take a 5 month break from posting, my advice is to make sure your last post has some really pretentious title like “Isomorphism & canonical Form.” That way the people who do stop by get a really accurate picture of just what a twit you can be. 
