Entries from May 2007 ↓

Go check out the website.

Incredible thanks to both Karl and John for their long efforts, and everyone I’ve mentioned on the credits page for making Interclue possible.

I had a great chat with Jon Udell last night. I noticed on his blog that he was coming to Wellington and left a note for him to get in touch if he was coming to Christchurch. He emailed me to say he was heading over here that very day! Bizzarely, the first I ever heard of the GOVIS conference he was keynoting at was via his blog post, if I’d found out about it earlier I would have been there, brandishing Interclue. Looks like there were some really interesting presentations there.

Among other things, we talked about how the internet is transforming education, and I mentioned that I’d spotted a video with some fantastic stats a while back that was originally designed to help educators understand what they were up against, and that I’d blog about it. He’ll probably recognise it when he sees it. But as JP mentioned recently, there are still a lot of other people out there who haven’t seen this one, and they really should.

Some background and references for the statistics.

He mentioned the real thing scaring American Universities was that soon more parents were going to start auditing podcasts from their kid’s lecturers to see if this education they were paying for was actually worth $x/minute!

We also chatted about his new job a bit. He said he went to Microsoft with a mission to help more people get value from the power of technology – to spend some time helping out on the trailing edge after so many years on the bleeding edge. I told him I thought Microsoft was showing pleasing signs of trying to build more value from co-operation than competition – he said Microsoft was still competing plenty hard but they were continuing to move towards less destructive forms of competition.

Then I came home and saw this. Sigh…

If you’re a webgeek like me, you have probably figured out that we are living in some very interesting times right now. Microsoft and Sun made significant announcements and improvements to their new RIA platforms this month, and Sun has released their new JavaFX Script (ok, now really, who came up with that name?)

Given that we’re also about to take the covers off Interclue May 2007 is likely to go down as a month of intriguing events for the future of the web. (BTW feel free to ping me if you want the password to the site, otherwise, add me to your feed reader and stay tuned for Wednesday)

So Silverlight wasn’t open source. Or at least, not in any significant fashion. The big reason #10 that Tim mentioned was in fact the inclusion of a cutdown CLR in Silverlight so that developers have access to a subset of .NET without needing the users to have installed the whole runtime environment on their machines – which is a big win for Silverlight given that the CLR does not have 100% penetration even on windows, let alone on the Mac.

But if it’s not open source, the Silverlight team must have another reason for thinking they have something that will compete with Flash/Flex/Apollo, Ajax, and XUL.

I think what it boils down to is that Silverlight is a way to give their existing developer base a way to migrate their .NET skillset, components, and tools onto the web. So it’s all very exciting if you’re a .NET developer, but less so for everyone else. I can see how it has a chance, because there will be a lot of windows developers feeling that windows applications just aren’t where it’s at these days, and Sliverlight gives them a migration path.

One wonders if this is what Sun has in mind with JavaFX. There isn’t any talk of a cut down JRE to be deployed where the full version isn’t installed, but they have said that there is “more to come” for JavaFX, so I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this came about. And JavaFX is open source. GPL in fact, like almost everything Sun is doing these days. Which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

Arguably, it will work for Microsoft and Sun in the other direction as well – if web developers start using Silverlight / JavaFX and gaining an understanding of XAML or Swing, that will mean they’re more likely to use them for desktop or mobile versions of the same.

Despite the hype, neither Silverlight nor JavaFX will eclipse development with Flash, XUL, or the various Ajax libraries anytime soon, because ubiquity trumps functionality in an awful lot of cases. But there are certainly tasks for which they will be well suited, and with the massive developer and developer support teams of Microsoft and Sun involved, it seems likely that both these new platforms will grow a significant presence given time.

All this activity by major players has caused a bit of a ruckus in the Mozilla Community, with Chris Messina arguing that Mozilla should focus more on platform (ie XULRunner) development to counter these moves by other players, while Mitchell Baker (Mozilla CEO) among others, argued that the best course of action was to focus on the users rather than the developers, and keep pushing Firefox while it’s on a roll. I tend to agree with her, even though I have this really cool app idea I’d love us to build with XULRunner once our addons are launched and we get some funding (and more staff) for Interclue….

Pssst: Apparently the Mono project will attempt to port Silverlight to Linux.

Anyone who wants to check it out ahead of time, ping me for the password to the site if you haven’t got it already.

Interclue is a browser extension (for firefox currently, but for IE pretty soon) that helps you stay in flow while you’re surfing the net. It’s a great boon for knowledge workers, bloggers, and other heavy web users.

We’re probably not going to tell the world what it does before Wednesday, but:

• It’s free. No signup required either.
• It’s not spyware or adware.
• It takes about a minute to install and although it has many options it works great “out of the box” for most users.
• The learning curve is two minutes long. After that it starts saving you time.
• If it’s not for you, it uninstalls just as fast.