John Milan: “The days of purely desktop-based applications are clearly numbered, but so are the days of exclusively web-based apps. Both Microsoft and Google are racing toward a happy medium. However, they aren’t the only players in town, not by a long shot.”
Jeff Licquia: “Ian has been filling my head with tantalizing visions of replacing my hosted boxes with online apps. I think I’m going to give some of these a spin, but I’m not convinced yet. It seems to me that the lesson to learn–don’t put all your eggs in one basket–argues equally well either way.”
“Work Offline”: What’s the point?
I’ve long wondered what the point of the “Work Offline” option in Firefox is (it’s in the “File” menu). All it really seems to do is take you to a helpful (cough) error screen when you’re working offline that tells you you can’t view the page you’re trying to view till you’re online again. If the page is in the cache, it’ll display it, but that seems to happen only rarely. I jacked my cache up to 4GB, but much to my surprise, that doesn’t appear to result in a noticeably higher cache hit rate.
IE has a similar option, but it actually does something. In fact, it’s quite slick. When you add a page as a favorite, you’re given a “Make available offline” option. Once that option is selected, you can click “Customize…”, which launches a wizard that allows you to mark other pages the favorite links to as available offline as well (useful for sites like Slashdot that primarily link to other sites). You can also specify when the page(s) should be synchronized (manually or on a predefined schedule, such as every day at 5am).
The Blackberry browser has a similar option too, though I haven’t used it much (most of my offline time tends to be on airplanes, and I’d much rather view the web on my laptop). The Blackberry does have a neat feature IE doesn’t have though, which is if you try to load a page that isn’t available offline, it’ll offer to queue up the request and download it once you’re online again. As with everything on the Blackberry, the page will show up in the universal inbox along with email, SMS, missed calls, etc. No more trying to remember what pages you wanted to load when you were offline or resorting to tricks only a hacker could love. Imagining a feature like this integrated with a Gmail/Google Reader combo that supports offline operation makes my mouth water.
As I said in the opening paragraph, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I’ve never actually gotten around to writing about it. What inspired me to do that today? Scrybe, an amazing online productivity suite that has a variety of unique and killer features, including excellent use of AJAX to preserve context as you move around within the application, a novel approach to scheduling across timezones, full integration between the calendar and to-do lists (why don’t more calendar applications do this?), and more. Watch the video for yourself.
The most interesting feature from my point of view, though, is the offline support: Simply select “Work Offline”, and everything works, well, offline, no browser extension required. It even appears that changes will be synchronized when you’re online again (i.e., it’s not just a read only copy). The beta isn’t publicly available yet, but I can’t wait to see how they did this. My prediction: If this works as well as it looks, all web applications will eventually work this way. And it’s good to see that some companies are thinking about the offline problem, rather than just assuming ubiquitous Internet connectivity makes the problem go away in the very near future.
Mihai Parparita: “You may wonder why I felt the need to write a Greasemonkey script for my own product. The answer is that integrations are hard and generally require a lot of effort before you can even determine if they are worthwhile. Greasemonkey lets you experiment with UI concepts with minimal effort necessary from either team (I had to make exactly one change to [Google] Reader to better support this script, and that was the ability to force list view to be used, even if expanded view is normally selected).”
Oracle Joins The Free Standards Group As A Platinum Member
Oracle Press Release: “The Free Standards Group (FSG) and Oracle today announced that Oracle has joined the FSG as a platinum member. FSG is a nonprofit organization dedicated to strengthening and promoting Linux as a platform for application development. Oracle plans on contributing to FSG’s Linux Standard Base (LSB) workgroup and providing feedback and guidance on its requirements for developing and supporting enterprise applications for Linux. Oracle’s support of the FSG and LSB is a significant milestone in the development of the standard and highlights the LSB’s success in solving Linux application development issues.”
LSB Developer Network launched
Last week, the Free Standards Group launched the LSB Developer Network, a community resource for developers building portable Linux applications via the LSB (read the press release and the introduction from LDN editor Martin Streicher).
The LSB Developer Network (or LDN for short) aims to provide a well known starting point for developers looking to target the variety of Linux distributions available today without requiring a separate version for each distribution. It is the perfect complement to the LSB, which already provides a “highest common denominator” across the major distributions; and LSB Certification, which allows ISVs to indicate that their products will work with LSB Certified distributions.
The big themes of LDN are “decentralized” and “bottom up”—to paraphrase Darrin Thompson, it’s a developer network that’s actually a network. In other words, we’re not taking the usual path of hiring a bunch of people to construct a centralized “network” from the top down—after all, Linux is a fundamentally decentralized phenomenon so shouldn’t a developer network for Linux be decentralized as well?
Like the LSB, we see LDN as essential to the ultimate success of the Linux platform, an answer to similar programs for the centralized, proprietary platforms Linux competes with but built using the very techniques that make Linux what it is. Our fundamental belief is that “decentralized” doesn’t have to mean “fragmented”, and LSB and LDN are both key steps toward that end goal.
We’re off to a good start too: LDN has the backing of a broad range of Linux platform stakeholders ranging from distribution vendors (Novell, Red Hat, Ubuntu) to OEMs (HP, IBM) and ISVs (MySQL, RealNetworks) to tools and content providers (O’Reilly, SlickEdit). One upcoming feature I’m particularly excited about is the integration of Safari Books Online. Soon, you’ll be able to type, for example, a function name into the LDN search box and get not just results from the link directory but also results from O’Reilly titles and others you know and love.
We’re moving rapidly to add community content as well, including man pages and canonical reference documentation; and we’ll be hooking LDN into the LSB database, so you’ll be able to query the status of interfaces too, including whether or not those interfaces are in the LSB and what their status is in each of the major Linux distributions, to help make your applications as portable as possible.
If you’re a Linux developer, and particularly if you use del.icio.us to bookmark resources on the web related to software development on Linux, I urge you to contribute to the LSB Developer Network. It’s easy: Simply create an account and link your account to your del.icio.us account (you don’t need to provide your del.icio.us password, just your username), and as you bookmark, tag, and annotate pages, your bookmarks, tags, and annotations will be pulled into the LDN directory. Help us build a developer network for Linux, bottom-up style!
A practical solution to the Debian/Firefox problem?
While it’s interesting to debate who’s right and who’s wrong in the Debian/Firefox standoff, it’s doesn’t really get us any closer to a solution. While we were debating, though, “Peter” (sorry, I don’t have a last name) made a practical suggestion:
I think Debian’s stance should have been to distribute epiphany and move Firefox to the appropriate *verse repository.
That’s the best solution I’ve heard yet: Simply move Firefox to non-free (or drop it entirely) and make something else the default browser. That allows Debian to make its point without the destructive side effects of a fork (user confusion, extension incompatibility, fragmenting the userbase of the leading open source browser on the eve of IE 7, etc.). The end result is the same: Mozilla loses out on the additional users (at least until/unless it changes its policy), and Firefox is still there for those Debian users who want it. Best of all, it maximizes freedom—namely, the freedom of users to decide whether or not this is an issue worth switching over.
Portland is an important project, but don’t oversell it
Jeff Waugh: “I raised concerns about overselling Portland during the first [OSDL Desktop Architects] meeting, as it could harm long-term credibility with ISVs. Such unclear language has resulted in serious miscommunication, and was not rectified in the 1.0.” (Via Stephen O’Grady.)
I agree completely and have raised similar concerns—Portland helps solve an important problem, but it’s being dangerously oversold, and it’s certainly not a complete solution for ISVs by itself. The LSB has been around for a long time, and we’re just now reaching the breadth of features and distribution support that we’re comfortable positioning it as a practical solution for ISVs. Even now, we’re being extremely careful not to oversell (i.e., we consider our ISV certification program to be in the pilot phase). We (the Linux community) are only going to get one chance at this, namely the opportunity to present Linux as a unified ISV platform rather than a fragmented mess, and we can’t afford to blow our one chance with premature proclamations that the problem is finally solved.
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier: “If the Sun folks are really interested in luring Linux users over to Solaris or OpenSolaris, they should take a cue from Nexenta and adopt APT and dpkg for their package management.”
Eric: My comments weren’t directed at you. That would be shooting the messenger—after all, a quick read of the comments to my post the other day shows that you’re just going along with the community consensus.
My dismay is based on two basic things. First, while the web guys (you know, the ones we used to make fun of as not “real programmers”) are off inventing the future, the Debian community (or some significant subset anyway) sees this as the critical issue, and that makes me wonder how relevant free software is going to be in a few more years. It may be a matter of principle to some, but it paints everyone with the same lunatic fringe brush.
More than anything, though, it’s the, uh, inconsistency that really burns me. As I said in the aforementioned comments, I’ll be the first to agree that Mozilla is being overzealous, just like I thought Debian was being overzealous in its reaction to the Debian Common Core last year. As I said then:
I can say with 100% certainty that a trademark policy more restrictive than the one adopted by Linus Torvalds for Linux isn’t what the founder of this project had in mind.
Yet, now that the shoe is on the other foot, Debian is up in arms because another organization wants to enforce its trademark? Come on. You can’t have it both ways.