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Good interview with Charles Jolley - SproutCore - WebKit (met Charles at Web 2.0).  He has left Apple and started a SproutCore Web App development company called "Strobe".  Looking very good Charles! The Blended Brew Apps have become a preferred way of accessing information on mobile devices. But developers want to provide a unified experience, and that is why Jolley believes that we will soon have apps that use HTML5 inside a native app wrapper. "People are looking for an either/or solution, but it is not going to end up like that," he said. Think of Strobe's offerings as a way to create an experience that is a blend of HTML5 and native mobile apps. How this works is that an application is developed in HTML5 instead of proprietary formats. It is wrapped in a native app wrapper for, say, the iPhone, but when accessed through a web browser on a PC or any other device, like tablet, it offers the same user experience. This is a good way to solve a problem that is only going to get compounded many fold as multiple endpoints for content start to emerge. The co-existence of web and native apps also means content publishers need to think differently about content and how it is offered to consumers. The multiplicity of endpoints (iPhone, iPad, TV and PC) is going to force content producers to think differently about how they build the user experiences for different sets of screens. Jolley argues that the best way to do so is to stop taking a document-centric view that is part of the PC-era. In the touch-based mobile device era, folks need to think of ways to have a single technology stack married to the ability to create unique experiences for different devices. And if you do that, there is no doubt that HTML5 and native apps can live in harmony.

Notification of this article also appeared in the Diigo Document Wars Group..... WebODF...   An especially interesting project that was presented is WebODF, which wants to bring ODF to the web. Jos van den Oever started from the observation that a lot of office suites are moving into the "cloud". Examples are Microsoft Live Office, Google Docs, and Zoho. But where are the free software alternatives for the cloud? For OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord, and Gnumeric, there are none that have a cloud version with ODF support. That was the motivation for Jos to start a project to fill in this gap and let users view and edit ODF documents on the web without losing control of the document into some company's servers. The strategy Jos followed was to use just HTML and JavaScript for the web application. The application then loads the XML stream of the ODF document as is into the HTML document and puts it into the DOM tree. Styling is done by applying CSS rules that are directly derived from the and elements in the ODF document. That is how WebODF was born; it is a project with the initial goal of creating a simple ODF viewer and editor for offline and online use, implemented in HTML5. The small code base consists of one HTML5 file and eight JavaScript files, each of which is a few hundred lines of code. The most interesting part is that it doesn't need server-side code execution: the JavaScript code is executed in the user's browser and saving the document to the web server is done using WebDAV. It supports both the Gecko and WebKit HTML engines. There is also an implementation on top of QtWebKit, which is for better desktop integration, and an ODFKit implementation. This means that WebODF is an easy way to add ODF support to almost any application, be it in HTML, Gtk, or QML. KO GmbH has received funding from NLnet to improve the current WebODF prototype and see how far the idea goes. Interested readers can try the online demo

What a dumb ass statement: "That's certainly one reason Microsoft still holds a giant lead in market share." The SFGate article compares Google Apps lack of service to Microsoft's Productivity monopoly, suggesting that Microsoft provides better service?  That's idocy.  Microsoft's service is non existent.  Third party MSDN developers and service businesses provide near 100% of MS Productivity support.  And always have.   Where Microsoft does provide outstanding support is to their MSDN network of developers and service providers.   Google will have to match that support if Google Apps is to make a credible run at Microsoft.  But there is no doubt that the monopolist iron grip on the desktop productivity platform is an almost impossible barrier for Google to climb over.  Service excellence or not.

See also the NIEM coverage map at http://www.niem.gov/organizationsMap.php Progress on government information sharing in the U.S. 

Excellent must read!  Best explanation of what is currently driving Silicon Valley.  Charlie puts all the pieces in context, provides expert perspective, and then pushes everything forward to describe a highly probable future.  MUST READ stuff! excerpts:  I've got a theory, and it's this: Steve Jobs believes he's gambling Apple's future - the future of a corporation with a market cap well over US $200Bn - on an all-or-nothing push into a new market. HP have woken up and smelled the forest fire, two or three years late; Microsoft are mired in a tar pit, unable to grasp that the inferno heading towards them is going to burn down the entire ecosystem in which they exist. There is the smell of panic in the air, and here's why ... We have known since the mid-1990s that the internet was the future of computing.  With increasing bandwidth, data doesn't need to be trapped in the hard drives of our desktop computers: data and interaction can follow us out into the world we live in. .....Wifi and 4G protocols will shortly be delivering 50-150mbps to whatever gizmo is in your pocket, over the air. ......  It's easier to lay a single fat fibre to a radio transciever station than it is to lay lots of thin fibres to everybody's front door.... Anyway, here's Steve Jobs' strategic dilemma in a nutshell: the PC industry as we have known it for a third of a century is beginning to die. PCs are becoming commodity items. The price of PCs and laptops is falling by about 50% per decade in real terms, despite performance simultaneously rising in real terms. The profit margin on a typical netbook or desktop PC is under 10%.  At the same time, wireless broadband is coming. As it does so, organizations and users will increasingly move their data out into the cloud (read: onto hordes of servers racked up high in anonymous data warehouses, owned and maintained by some large corporation like Google). Software will be delivered as a service to users wherever they are, via whatev

The company halted its work on Wave, but aspects of its radical approach to communication have been reincarnated for business collaboration. When Google Wave launched in 2009, the company suggested the program was a "new category" of communication because it combined the virtues of e-mail, instant messaging, and methods for sharing pictures, links, and other documents. Among its other features, Wave went a step beyond IM by letting people see what their message partners were writing as they typed it. That meant that the people on the receiving end of your messages would see characters appear onscreen even before you had finished formulating a sentence. It was a radical approach. I tried Wave myself and found it very distracting to watch people type, delete, retype, and misspell their thoughts. People I had persuaded to try it with me never signed in again, unsure as to how it was useful. We weren't alone in our confusion: last year, Google announced it would stop developing Wave. And yet, Google Wave lives on-in business software.

Make LucidChart your online whiteboard and bring your team together to brainstorm. Capture the ideas in an impressive mind map with LucidChart's online collaboration software.  Replacement for Visio.  Import existing Visio charts. visual diagramming.

Jonathan Deutsch and Ryan Nielsen left Apple late last year to join Y Combinator's accelerator program and help designers build animations in HTML5 as opposed to Flash. Friday, the two-man team is releasing Hype, the first product of their startup Tumult, on the Mac App Store. Hype, which sells for $29.99, uses WebKit to render pages and has been crafted so that anyone comfortable with using Keynote or PowerPoint can start building animations in HTML5, no code required. "It's pretty clear that HTML5 is the future of the web," says Deutsch. "It will, of course, run not only on desktop machines but also runs really well on any modern smartphone or tablet like the iPad. The problem is that there are no good designer apps for creating animated HTML5 like there are for Flash." Hype presents the user with a blank canvas with a timeline at the bottom. The user can then drag in images, video and text, arrange those elements and use keyframe-based animations to define where those pieces of content go.

A must-see video if you're interested in the dance of sugar plum documents, what can be done with HTML5-plus, and an outside-the-box approach to online collaboration. Google just may have a winner in Wave.

What a giggle, public spying on NSA and its contractors using Big Data. The interactive network graph with its sidebar display of relevant data derived from LinkedIn profiles is just too delightful.