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Excellent commentary from Nova Spivak; about as well thought out a discussion as i've ever seen concerning the future of the desktop. Nova sees the emergence of a WebOS, most likely based on JavaScript. This article set off a fire storm of controversy and discussion, but was quickly lost in the dark days of late August/September of 2008, where news of the subsequent collapse of the world financial system and the fear filled USA elections dominated everything. Too bad. this is great stuff. ..... "Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?" .... Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today? ..... The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service ..... The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop ...... The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention ...... Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders. ...... The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence ....... The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in ....... Interactive shared spaces will replace folders ....... The Portable Desktop ........ The Sma

Reverse engineering the MS Office SharePoint Protocol: CMSwire has a good review of Alfresco's latest feature, the repurposing of MSOffice as an editing and collaboration front end for the Alfresco Open Web Content Management System.
Microsoft ha sof course been very busy re-purposing MSOffice as a front end editor - shared collaboration space for their own MOSS WebStack - CMS. Thanks to the EU, Microsoft was forced to publicly disclose integration and interop methods used to wire together MOSS. Alfresco seized the disclosure to create their own re-purposing.
IMHO, this is exactly how the Microsoft monopoly needs to be cracked. Instead of replacing MSOffice at great cost and disruption to business users, tap into the same re-purposing methods Microsoft uses as they try to shift that monopoly center from the desktop to a proprietary MS Web.
"... The Office SharePoint Protocol is one of the big achievements that Alfresco has come out with to sell Alfresco Share as a true viable alternative to SharePoint in the enterprise....
"... Microsoft Office is still the most widely used productivity suite in organizations today. That's a huge reason why SharePoint has been so successful - Microsoft created a protocol to enable Office to interact directly with SharePoint. This means you don't have to leave the discomfort of our Office application to create, edit and manage documents and calendar events in SharePoint." For Alfresco, the break came when Microsoft released a number of technical specifications to the public (including the spec for SharePoint 2007) in the name of interoperability. Alfresco used this information to implement the Office and SharePoint protocols as a compatible server - thus the same functionality users get working between Office and SharePoint, they can now also get natively with Office and Alfresco.

Apple has posted an interesting page describing Safari technologies. Innovations and support for existing standards as well as the ACID3 test are covered.

Many people think that the Apple WebKit-Safari-iPhone innovations are pushing Open Web Standards beyond beyond the limits of "Open", and deep into the verboten realm of vendor specific extensions. Others, myself included, believe that the WebKit community has to do this if Open Web technologies are to be anyway competitive with Microsoft's RiA (XAML-Silverlight-WPF).

Adobe RiA (AiR-Flex-Flash) is also an alternative to WebKit and Microsoft RiA; kind of half Open Web, half proprietary though. Adobe Flash is of course proprietary. While Adobe AiR implements the WebKit layout engine and visual document model. I suspect that as Adobe RiA loses ground to Microsoft Silverlight, they will open up Flash. But that's not something the Open Web can afford to wait for.

In many ways, WebKit is at the cutting edge of Ajax Open Web technologies. The problems of Ajax not scaling well are being solved as shared JavaScript libraries continue to amaze, and the JavaScript engines roar with horsepower. Innovations in WebKit, even the vendor-device specific ones, are being picked up by the JS Libraries, Firefox, and the other Open Web browsers.

At the end of the day though, it is the balance between the ACiD3 test on one side and the incredible market surge of WebKit smartphones, countertops, and netbook devices at the edge of the Web that seem to hold things together.

The surge at the edge is washing back over the greater Web, as cross-browser frustrated Web designers and developers roll out the iPhone welcome. Let's hope the ACiD3 test holds. So far it's proving to be a far more important consideration for maintaining Open Web interop, without sacrificing innovation, than anything going on at the stalled W3C.

"..... Safari continues to lead the way, implementing

I doubt that MSOffice ODF will make a difference. ODF was not designed to be compatible with MSOffice, and conversion from native binary to ODF will result in a serious loss of fidelity and business process markup. If the many ODF pilots are an indication, the real killer is that application specific processing logic will be lost on conversion even if it is Microsoft doing the conversion to ODF. This logic is expressed as scripts, macros, OLE, data binding, media binding, add-on specifics, and security settings. These components are vital to existing business processes. Besides, Microsoft will support ISO 26300, which is not compatible with the many aspects of ODF 1.2 currently implemented by most ODF applications. The most difficult barrier to entry is that of MSOffice bound business processes so vital to workgroups and day-to-day business systems. Maybe the report is right in saying that day-to-day business routines become habit, but not understanding the true nature of these barriers is certain to cloud our way forward. We need to dig deeper, as demonstrated by the many ODF pilot studies.

Virtually all of the big ECM players have joined the OASIS CMIS TC, but how many are there to collaborate and how many to obstruct? See . The Alfresco Labs FOSS CMIS and BPM hub seems to be gaining by leaps and bounds and now offers even more app interop connections including -- vitally -- with Sharepoint. CMIS is a standard we might keep an eye on.

Tailoring a Web application for iPhone, BlackBerry, and other top devices has many advantages over costly native development, and new techniques and approaches are closing the functionality gap. This article walks through the many different issues confronting Web developers and, the many innovations developers are using to close the gap between the Web and increasingly visual devices. Excellent article! Covers the iPhone WebKit - CSS transformations, iUI and PhoneGAP

Excellent overview of where applications are going. Richard Monson-Haefel, (whom i met at the 2008 Web 2.0 Conference) explains the convergence of four emerging application models: Web Clients (Browsers), RiA Clients, Client/Server, and Widget Engines. He comes up with a convergence point called "Fit Client", offering Adobe Air as the leading example. Richard walks through each application model, discussing limitations and advantages. Good stuff, especially this comment: "The widget engine is really a wonderful architecture that gives you the power of the desktop (via the widget engine) and the management of the Web (via widget downloads).  Widget engines can out-perform RIA solutions and they can store larger data sets.    The limitation of Widget engines is not in their architecture, it is that they have been designed for applications with fairly weak capabilities compared to client/server. Widgets tend to be single-purpose applications with limited access to the native operating system. That said, the widget architecture itself - the separation of the platform from the applications - is important. It makes it possible to create applications (widgets) that are portable across operating systems and are packaged for easy download and installation. "

While every blog and media has been covering native mobile applications, there's one thing: Android's web browser is based on WebKit, the same engine used in the iPhone, Safari 3 (avalaible both on Windows and Mac), the Google Chrome web browser, Adobe AIR, plus other mobile phones such as Nokia's N60 and E series. For me, the Google Phone hails the supremacy of WebKit, and means that Web Developers should from now on add it to their skills. WebKit has many advantages as both a browser engine and, a converged desktop-mobile device- web server application development platform.

Google "Rich Snippets" is a new presentation of HTML snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages. Rich Snippets give end-users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. Google is currently supporting a very limited subset of data about reviews and people. When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name. It's a simple change to the display of search results, yet our experiments have shown that users find the new data valuable. For this to work though, both Web-masters and Web-workers have to annotate thier pages with structured data in a standard format. Google snippets supports microformats and RDFa. Existing Web data can be wrapped with some additional tags to accomplish this. Notice that Google avoids mention of RDF and the W3C's vision of a "Semantic Web" where Web objects are fully described in machine readable semantics. Over at the WHATWG group, where work on HTML5 continues, Google's Ian Hickson has been fighting RDFa and the Semantic Web in what looks to be an effort to protect the infamous Google algorithms. RDFa provides a means for Web-workers, knowledge-workers, line-of-business managers and document generating end-users to enrich their HTML+ with machine semantics. The idea being that the document experts creating Web content can best describe to search engine and content management machines the objects-of-information used. The google algorithms provide a proprietary semantics of this same content. The best solution to the tsunami of conten the Web has wrought would be to combine end-user semantic expertise with Google algorithms. Let's hope Google stays the RDFa course and comes around to recognize the full potential of organizing the world's information with the input of content providers. One thing the world desperatel

"The purpose of this project is to implement a set of administrative applications, user level applications and supporting framerks using GNUstep and for GNUstep. These applications create together a workspace or desktop environment. Our goal is for each application, tool or framework, if possible, to: support maximum portability to all GNUstep supported platforms, including Windows create a corresponding Cocoa/Mac port: this is very useful for many applications that are then available natively on Mac and helps testing and comparison of the application against Cocoa support of the widest range of compiler versions, minimum dependency requirement allow the usage without requiring other GAP framework and applications or, if, a minimal set of them"

"I'm sitting on 1TB of Google Drive storage and have 40GB going unused on OneDrive. And yet it's Dropbox, with my massive 2.5GB allowance, that I rely on daily. Why? Because it's cross-platform, a reason that will only strengthen my love of it when it (along with other cloud storage providers) gains native Chrome OS file manager support next year."

Excellent comment focused on the clash between Flash and Apple. Apple promotes JavaScript, CSS and AJAX: the WebKit- SproutCore recipe

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InfoWorld's Tom Yager makes the case for the WebKit visual document model over AJAX. The problem with AJAX as he sees it is that it's JavaScript heavy. And that breaks precious Web interoperability. He makes the point that if something can be done in CSS, it should. He also argues that WebKit is the best tool because the document model is that of advanced HTML5 and CSS3.

"... These [WebKit] browsers also share a stellar accelerated JavaScript interpreter that makes the edit/run/debug cycle go faster. They are also the only browsers that deliver on CSS4 and HTML5 standards (with some elements that are proposed to the W3C standards body). Sites that are visually rich may start sprouting "best viewed with Safari" banners until other browsers catch up. The banner would also let users know that your site is optimized for iPhone....."

Humm. Did you catch that? CSS4!!! I guess he's referring to the WebKit penchant for putting advanced graphical transitions and animations into CSS instead of relying on a device specific or OS specific API.

Placing the visual interface instructions in the documents presentation layer (CSS4) is a revolutionary idea. The WebKit model will go a long way towards creating a global interoperability layer that rides above lower device, OS, browser and application specifics. So yes, by all means let's go with CSS4 :)

Links to two posts from Stephane Rodriquez.