don't explain

Tue, August
26th

Web, meet Ubiquity.

Posted by clint

on August 26, 2008

Today, Mozilla Labs announced yet another new product to add to its long list of experiments and prototypes. First things first -- let us pray that this experient will fare better than its predecessors (Weave and The Coop, I'm looking at you...).

With that out of the way, let us examine precisely what it is that we so fervently wish to preserve.

To hear Aza Raskin of Mozilla explain it, you would fall under the impression that Ubiquity is essentially a dream, and that dream is to make natural language processing a reality in the context of bringing web mashups to the masses. The following ultimate example goal sums the project up fairly well:

Book a flight to Boston next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Boston friends the itinerary, and add it to my calendar.

To which the system responds:

Leaving from SF to Chicago on March 20th at 9am. Returning on March 24th at 7pm. Itinerary will be sent to Andrew, Margaret, and Josh.

Elegant, efficient, and if done right, revolutionary. Essentially, Mozilla Labs wants to make that old Apple Newton web ad a reality.

However, the current prototype does not reflect this goal. Instead, it exists today as a launcher, a necessary menagerie of smaller plugins which connect to various different web applications and services, the composite whole of which may yet someday form this natural language beast that Aza and his team have envisioned. This shouldn't faze anyone, however -- in fact, I'm actually here to argue that the prototype is brilliant as is. First, some background.

Inarguably the most powerful utility on Mac OS X is Quicksilver. To most people, Quicksilver is simply a faster alternative to Spotlight for application launching purposes: if you need to load Word, just hit Ctrl+Spacebar to pop up Quicksilver, type "Word", and hit enter. Much faster than going to the dock, and definitely better than the half second lag that Spotlight suffers from for the identical operation. However, Quicksilver is much more powerful than that, and represents in fact an entire philosophy, which creator Nicholas Jitkoff once detailed in a Google Tech Talk.

In the standard operating system shell paradigm, the goal of the OS browsing interface is to get you to the application. From there, you're on your own. Thus, browsing the filesystem is the key and the model on top of which most operating system shell interfaces are developed -- Windows Explorer, Nautilus, Finder, etc are all designed to let you browse through your hierarchy of files and eventually select a file or application to execute.

The key philosophy behind Quicksilver is that this barrier is an artifical construction, one that need not exist. Sure, Quicksilver will let you browse the filesystem and launch applications faster than anything else on the market, but the real beauty behind Quicksilver is how it lets you step past the filesystem. There is no need, for instance, to stop once you reach "iTunes.app" -- you can, within Quicksilver, navigate straight into iTunes and browse your Library as if it iTunes were merely a folder and you were still browsing the filesystem. This far-reaching mentality is what makes Quicksilver truly powerful and flexible, and is where most power users spend their time with the utility.

The filesystem-application barrier is artificial and need not exist.

Now, let us at last take a look at the current incarnation of Ubiquity. As demonstrated in the screencast, the plugin is currently essentially a launchbar, from which contextual actions may be launched. You can, for instance, highlight an address, call Ubiquity, and tell it to "map," which will not only load Google Maps, but let you drop it into an email you're writing. Similar functionality exists to find things on Yelp and other web services. It also lets you do things, such as highlight foreign language text within a page and ask Ubiquity to translate it in-line, TinyURL a URL, or tweet about things that you see around the web.

Thus, I would argue that Ubiquity is currently Quicksilver for the web. And perhaps it wouldn't be so bad to keep it that way. Essentially, Ubiquity allows Firefox to become more than a web browser, in a nonobtrusive way: it becomes an active component of the web. You can execute actions on any webpage through the browser to any supported web service.

Essentially then, the core philosophy [at the moment] is that the browser/URL-web application/services barrier is artificial and need not exist.

Ubiquity is tons of fun to play around with, and will probably become a core part of my Firefox experience before long. But does it need to be anything more? Quicksilver for the web is already an ambitious goal, and while natural language programming would be nice, this set of features and this paradigm is here now. And I think the web is ready for it.

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Tags: tech, impressions

Amsterdam: "Oh my God, everything is Helvetica!"

Posted by clint

on August 26, 2008

On 27 July, 2008, I left Seattle to go to Amsterdam for a month-long study abroad program hosted by the University of Washington Honors Program, the International School for Humanities and Social Sciences at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, and the Virtual Knowledge Studio. I now sit at Amsterdam-Schipol airport, typing a small series of articles detailing some of the more interesting points of the trip; I will refrain from speaking about the program itself, however – on that subject, suffice it to say that it was at times and alternately exciting, interesting, frustrating, tiring, and confusing. With that said –– Amsterdam!

Upon touching down at Amsterdam-Schipol nearly a month ago, my immediate thought was "oh my God, everything is Helvetica!" Schipol is a very impressive airport, even if it lacks the huge glass façades of Sea-Tac or the immense scale of O'Hare; it's quite simply very modern, with a reasonable layout and cozy lounge areas. And everything is in Helvetica.

Not just Helvetica the font, however – the overall design and aesthetics of the airport reflects strongly the Helvetica mentality: bold, vibrant, and modern, but not forceful. Cheerful yellow signs point you around the rather inviting lounge areas, which were substantial, even in the international terminal alone. And that wasn't the only thing that was cheerful: the customs official let me through within ten seconds. After buying a ticket, I wandered downstairs to wait for a train to Amsterdam Centraal Station, which was about a 6 minute wait. The train was similarly nice; the sneltrains are almost all fairly new, and run fairly smoothly and pretty much completely quietly.

And along the way, that same Helvetica impression held. Building after building was modern, with shameless "look at me!" type architecture-for-architecture's-sake. Cubes on top of cubes at ridiculous angles, glass panelling, and a curious combination of unique buildings juxtaposed with lines of identical condominium towers proceeded to interest, and almost even impress me. Sadly, I'm not a terribly huge fan of architecture that doesn't have a point, and so "almost even" was about as close as it got.

As an aside, that train ride was also the first point at which I became very annoyed at tourists – and my own home country. I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in front of a woman on the train, who absolutely could not cease babbling about how incredibly terrible and disgusting that honestly nice and clean train was. Her husband sat across the aisle – I gave him what I hoped was a sympathetic glance.

Ah, but at last I arrived at glorious Amsterdam Centraal... and proceeded to walk out the back exit by accident.

Let me tell you about this back exit.

It's bad. There used to be doors. Now, there very clearly aren't – and the exit opens up to a wide concrete path surrounded on both lateral sides by chain-link fence struggling to hold in abandoned construction, and on the top by a crumbling overpass. I can see why they're redoing Oosterdokeiland. I ventured out into the semi-putrid air past the homeless people staggering about for about half a minute before determining that something was amiss and wandering back into the station, through the doors that were striving so hard to be.

Somewhere along the line, Helvetica wandered off and committed a sad, silent suicide.

But not to fear! After wandering back through the train station, I found the main exit. Happily, excitedly, I stepped out the sliding glass doors and into fresh ai––

––into a huge whiff of marijuana smoke?

"That bad?"

I should qualify my use of the word "bad." I have absolutely no problems with pot: stoned people generally don't get into cars and kill people (and themselves), and are also usually quite a bit quieter. But the first bit of proper air I breathe in Amsterdam and it's a huge whiff of it? That's a bit unexpected, for sure. I'm now fairly convinced that someone just stands in front of Centraal and smokes weed just to catch people like me off guard... this was pretty much the only such occurrence.

I then walked the mile and a bit to our dorms, failed to locate Albert Heijn to buy food (which I hadn't consumed in about 14 hours), and collapsed. Go international travel.

More to follow...

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Tags: amsterdam, impressions

Sat, December
22nd

Duck and Weave

Posted by clint

on December 22, 2007

So, Weave. Essentially, Mozilla wants to create a persistent desktop and services platform for your browser across any computer you run into with Firefox. It's a good concept, and it works pretty well (as advertised) after you get past the buggy signup page and email server (I just gave it a few shots and on the fifth try the request went through). As far as I can tell from using it so far, it only really tracks your bookmarks and history thus far.

It will be interesting to see how the concept develops and evolves on its march to fruition, as Mozilla's exact intentions aren't exactly clear just yet.

The Internet is already the most pervasive and important persistent platform in existence. Anywhere you go, you can log into the same accounts on the same sites and services and - trifling details such as browser compatibility aside - be presented with the same experience as you would on your own machine. We all know this; this is why it's so popular, why Google's plethora of web-based applications, most notably GMail, are as popular as they are.

Mozilla appears to be unsatisfied with stopping there, and the basic concept behind Weave appears to be to extend this fundamental nature of web browsing up one level of meta to the browser itself. This, however, raises some interesting questions.

For instance, even in its current incarnation, Weave appears to displace at least one aspect of at least one major web service - del.icio.us. At least one reason of del.icio.us's fundamental utility is that it allows its users to persist their bookmarks across the web. There are many, many other reasons for del.icio.us's existence and popularity, but who's to say that as Mozilla's initiatives to push social browsing and persistence into Firefox via The Coop (speaking of which, whatever happened to The Coop?) and Weave, that del.icio.us won't slowly be forced out of the equation? Mozilla's well-being is based largely upon Firefox's, and Firefox's well-being is based entirely on the web. At what point does a browser cease to become a better browser and begin to impinge upon the sites and services whose job it is to render?

Of course, the above is just a question. There is no accusation, there is no prediction in that question. It's too early to tell what Mozilla's plans and direction for Weave is just yet. However, if we make the assumption that Mozilla will recognize such scenarios as being contrary to its interests and missions, all of a sudden Weave becomes a lot more meaningless, a hollow manifestation of its promise - after all, at the point that Weave is restricted to merely persisting the existing browser experience and functionality across multiple machines rather than extending that experience, we quickly find that Weave has already reached its full potential. After all, the only horizontal growth Weave could find in this regard is, as far as I can tell, to also provide each user's favorite extensions across machines, which would make it, and Firefox immediately and immensely improved. However, this feature is a technical and security nightmare, and not likely to see the light of day.

Thus, color me skeptical about Weave thus far. However, it's extremely early, and the Mozilla Foundation may yet surprise us all. Most of what I have presented are merely questions, and perhaps they will, or have already, answered them all.