08 Jun 2005
I got an IM today from a friend and former colleague who works for a company (not to be mentioned here) that develops software incorporating substantial use of XUL. Besides the recruitment offer, I was intrigued with their usage of XUL. In their case, XUL makes perfect platform sense and is a necessicity but that’s a point for future discussion.
To date I’ve had only a cursory understanding and interest in XUL. Conceptually it’s pretty cool but until tonight I had never taken the time to look a little bit under the hood. So I’ve spent the last few hours working through a few tutorials getting a grip on the general GUI design/layout aspects. No real brain science here and it’s quite trivial to throw together a nice looking UI.
Yesterday I downloaded Visual C# Express 2005 and built a little app that connected to GMail and would read my messages to me. Pretty simple and C# is on my list of languages to brush up on, shouldn’t be a big deal given my day in – day out exposure to Java. Now if only Microsoft provided some better voices in SAPI. I’ll upgrade to SAPI 5.1 but I doubt it’ll improve matters.
Tonight was XUL, and who knows what the rest of the week will bring. I like the challenge that picking up new technologies presents and I’m going to try and dedicate more time to it when outside of the office. Immediate plans for further XUL exposure is the cloning of a few existing native application user interfaces. Shouldn’t pose that big of a challenge but at the same time will force exposure to the entire XUL specification.
07 Jun 2005
Jeremy Zawodny has a good writeup where he poses the question, what if search engines listened to pings? or offered a compatible ping API?
I’m not involved with search but I do agree with his four critical variables about getting search right. Now I’ve only taken a cursory look at Google Sitemaps and haven’t yet attempted to roll it out, but from what I’ve read of the FAQ the concept will improve comprehensiveness and help freshness to the extent that we can provide hints on update frequency, pages to index, etc. Basically it will make the job of the crawler easier and hopefully more relevant. Google does provide ping-like interface for submitting (and re-submitting) sitemaps so functionality-wise, it isn’t all that different from weblog pinging, just a lack of support by existing tools.
I’m also not convinced that by opening a public weblog-like ping service that the amount of bunk requests (from spammers or otherwise) would pose an unsurmountable problem to a company like Google (or Yahoo or Microsoft for that matter). I agree with Jeremy’s comment that with an installed base of several million ping generators, does it really make sense to re-invent the wheel.
I see support for sitemaps as a step along the evolutionary trail towards more comprehensive indexing, improved ping support might come next, who knows? Some might consider Google Sitemaps to be a step sideways in implementation, but I’ll wait and see what kind of value it presents before passing judgement.
06 Jun 2005
Although its still in an incubation stage, Microsoft recently released part 3 of their start.com initiative. You can check out the latest incarnation here or here (if you want to skip the little puzzle).
Start.com is still in a preview phase but offers an interesting insight into what Microsoft might be planning for their next generation portal. Everyone in this game is trying to one up each other, I wouldn’t call Google the pioneer of AJAX but they definitely did bring it to the mainstream. With competition comes innovation so it’ll be interesting to see what Microsoft and Yahoo bring to the table. Anyone have a Yahoo 360 invite to send my way?
On the blogging front its nice to see the portal incorporating feeds and supporting opml. However I haven’t experiemented enough to see if it holds promise to replace my current web-based feed reader, bloglines. I’m a fairly demanding user in this respect and would rather use a multitude of tools to get the job done than one do-it-all cludgy tool. Once firefox support is rolled out (it is coming right?), I’ll play with it more.
The start.com UI is pleasant to look at and might prove usable once tuned for customer usage patterns. Will it replace Google News? I don’t think so, but it could offer competition when/if it goes live in some incarnation. My immediate suggestion beyond Firefox support, is the integration and sharing of different types of content… rss support is a good start though. For the record I stopped using Google News when they withdrew support for RSS feeds.
You have to remember that it’s all just an incubation project and might never see the light of day. That being said, I showed it to a couple people today who were impressed with the overall L&F aspects of the site.
The start.com program manager’s blog is available here.