walkah

Google Gears for Safari == Offline SSBs!

2008-08-26T00:00:00-04:00

I'm really excited about today's (beta) release of google gears for safari. Why? because, as I've just tested, but enabling the plugin for safari it makes it available for all of my fluid app Site Specific Browsers (SSB's).

If you pay close attention here, you'll know that I'm a big fan of fluid and the idea of SSB's in general. I use apps for Remember the Milk (my current task management / GTD tool) and Google Reader extensively. Both of these sites support gears already for use offline (read: on airplanes). However, by using Fluid (based on Safari's webkit), I had to forgo gears/offline access. Thus, when traveling, I'd taken to opening a tab in firefox for each of those sites (if I remembered, and as long as I didn't need to otherwise restart firefox, etc).

Well, I just had a wonderful experience. I downloaded gears for safari, installed it... and instantly all of my fluid instances were gears enabled. Love it!

Google SoC: Drupal, OpenID and Attribute Exchange

2008-04-24T00:00:00-04:00

Summer is coming - which means it's time for Google's Summer of Code. This is the fourth year of the project (and the fourth year that Drupal has been involved). We continue to be one of Google's favourite open source projects this year grabbing 21 spots - which means a $105,000 investment in Drupal development this summer!

I'm excited as this will be my third year as a mentor and my project this year will be OpenID Attribute Exchange support for Drupal. Attribute Exchange is one of the next important pieces in digital identity and one that I'm pretty excited about. My student, Anshu Prateek, has shown a lot of enthusiasm. I think it's gonna be a good summer!

Fluid: Desktop Web Apps

2008-02-27T00:00:00-05:00

Matt turned me on to a new app for OS X (Leopard only) called Fluid. Essentially, fluid lets you create website-specific applications - really just little webkit browsers as their own applications with their own icons. It's really simple to use and (so far) has worked phenomenally well.

I have two web apps that have become an absolute core staple of my daily routine: Remember the Milk (for TODO management) and Google Reader (for RSS feeds). Both of these are pretty "heavy" web apps (containing lots of JS/AJAX/etc) and I had been running Firefox extensions for both which ultimately weighed down my main browser (which is where I do primary development, etc). Having them as separate applications lets me keep Firefox running (a little) leaner, and I also get pretty icons and the ability to "cmd-tab" between them.

The coolest part, however, is that Fluid has implemented icon updating on a few sites (google reader being one of them) to show the number of unread items. Check it:

Now, if I can just get Google Gears for Webkit working (for offline support for google reader & RTM) I'll be one happy camper.

The desktop / web app convergence continues...

Jaiku and Google

2007-10-09T00:00:00-04:00

Congrats, guys! This is exciting... Jaiku, for those of you who don't know, is like twitter (and if you don't know twitter... well SHEESH!) as a system for providing "updates" - or "microblogging" - only cooler. It also happens to be where two of my smartest friends termie and ralphm work. Jaiku, amongst other cool things, has bit better concept of 'presense' than twitter and are doing some cool work with XMPP on the backend.

Early speculation as to what GOOG has in mind for Jaiku is just that... early speculation. I'll be anxiously waiting to see what comes from the acquisition. In the meantime, as a happy side-effect, Andy is moving back to SF... can't wait for our next adventures in California :)

Keeping myself in sync

2007-03-14T00:00:00-04:00

Here's what I want: ubiquitous access to my important personal data (schedule, contacts, etc). Now, currently this typically means using web applications for storing and editing your data. This has been working fairly well for me in the case of Google Calendar. The big issue with the web is sometimes I need this data when I'm offline - which, yes, sometimes happens. To circumvent this, I've been using gcal's iCal feed to see things in Apple's iCal (always loved that naming ambiguity). This has the added advantage of allowing me to sync this data to my phone. But, here's my complaint (you knew there'd be one): updates only happen one way. That means I can't add a new meeting from my phone, or even from iCal - I have to do it all from google calendar - which means I have to be online to do it. The situation is worse for contacts because I have yet to find a nice address book tool that will write to LDAP (my centralized store of choice). That said, here are some interesting things I'm playing with now:

Spanning Sync is currently my favourite and what motivated me to blog this - and timely as today they released v1.0. I've been playing with it for the last few beta releases. It's worked really well and is *exactly* what I want. The downfall is a $25/year subscription fee (or $65 one time). However, I like it enough that I might just bite the bullet for this one.

Address book X LDAP automatically sync's your OS X address book to an LDAP server - built to work with OpenLDAP (yay!). I haven't tried this one yet - it's also not free- but I've used AddressBook4LDAP (from the same author) in the past, so I have high hopes for this.

Both of these are OS X only tools (both using the iSync framework), but until I take action on my moving back to regular linux desktop usage - perhaps I should stop making such a big deal out of that fact.

Now, really, it would be nice if iCal and AddressBook (or maybe some elegant replacements from the mozilla community or elsewhere) worked like this out of the box. Sort of like how Mail.app and IMAP work together. I want a server that stores my data (ideally that has a web-based interface for the off time I don't have my own computer handy) with an offline mode. We have LDAP and CalDAV for server technologies... Dear Apple, I say pretty please. Am I the only one? What are other folks using?

Google reader-ing

2006-12-28T00:00:00-05:00

OK Google Reader, you got me. I'll admit, I *almost* switched when Boris did. I tried it at the time... sorta liked it... but had my concerns. But this week, I've re-thought my position, given it another try, and I think it might stick. What changed? Well:

Thunderbird 2.0b1 was released (more on that later). What does that have to do with it? Well, one complaint was that reader doesn't support authenticated feeds - which I use a *lot* of for work. Incidentally those are the same feeds I'm most interested in having access to when offline. I actually find Thunderbird's feed handling decent - and the nice part of having work feeds in my mail app is that I follow a similar workflow there as I do with my mail (including growl alerts for new posts), and there's a clear separation between stuff I need to pay attention to vs. the rest (although, most of the feeds I follow are work related - the ones I'm talking about here are bug reports and internal tickets, etc).
Getting the n91. Simple: a phone with wifi is amazingly useful. I can do a quick feed catchup anywhere with wifi without having to drag out my laptop. OK, maybe this mobile craze has legs.
Discovering the Google Reader Notifier extension for firefox. It helps me keep an eye on what's been posted without having an extra (or even an extra tab) open.

It took a little fiddling with the workflow, a bit of adjustment, and some time memorizing the keyboard shortcuts, but I'm finally pretty happy with things. And, I no longer have to worry about syncing issues.

I've been a long time user of both NetNewsWire and endo - and I love both for different reasons. But, man, google is actually making web apps I don't hate. *gasp*