Category: xml and web 2.0

Tomboy notes, be afraid evernote

Snowy showing Tomboy notes

I can't even remember when this was mentioned. It might have been at BarCampSheffield or a event before that. But the news that someone was working on a web front end/web application for tomboy notes totally shook my world.

Snowy is a online service that syncs with Tomboy notes to allow complete access to your notes online. Its uses Django to create a REST API for Tomboy notes, so other applications beyond Snowy can take advantage of your notes too. This means you can easily create a web app for your mobile phone or other devices. Hell, you could consume your notes into yahoo pipes or other mashup tools. Unfortunately its still early days for Snowy and so isn't all there quite yet. However its GNU's Affero General Public License (AGPL) and built to take advantage of developments like HTML5. So you can imagine how easy it would be to build this into google wave and many other clients. Being AGPL also means it will take a similar route to software like la.conica. I expect there will be services which will host snowy for you such as Canonical's Ubuntu One service (lets not go there now about it) and Apple's dot mac. But you can also host it yourself too, which may work better if your worried about privacy or want to share between a small group of people.

I had no idea Tomboy Notes was available on Windows and Mac too. I had only come across it when I switched to Ubuntu. I also had no idea that there was already a Firefox addon for tomboynotes but I had heard of the Tomboy Android app (which might have been the thing which got me looking a little deeper into snowy). I like Evernote, it works but I'm frankly pissed off with the evernote attitude to the Linux platform. They refuse to create a application because theres not a big enough market, but they create a windows mobile version? They also seem to be about the shiny shiny, I mean a palm pre version but not a symbian or android version? I also expect the Windows mobile version will be dropped soon as version 3 is rolled out. Anyway, I'm also getting frankly fed up of the single nature of it too. You can't share notes and its engineered that way, its part of the evernote philosophy (till a few days ago). I just think although I like evernote, somewhere along the line my relationship with there service is going to get even more broken that it is now. Its bad enough having to run Evernote through Wine or Prism, neither work well and theres no way its just a app which you can leave open.

This is why I think I should just convert to Tomboy notes now and dump evernote. The client is on almost every machine I use, its seemless on the gnome desktop. Theres already API, good syncing and the ability to get linking data versions of the notes. More and more applications are intergrating with tomboynotes. For example Gnome-Do searches and allows me to write notes super fast, Conduit can sync notes and Gwibber now allows you to save messages out to Tomboy. I have seen all types of addons for tomboynotes including the ability to even blog from Tomboynotes (which if it works, will solve one of my long running problems with linux). If I could get Evolution to work with Tomboy, I'll be dancing around the room.

So the long and short of it is that the alternative to evernote via tomboynotes is certainly possible. Some would say, well your missing lots of things evernote does but I'm sure you can either write a plugin for it or even provide a online service for it.

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Gdgt: The data siloed web

GDGT sticker

So I've been checking out Gdgt.com which is written and created by Peter Rojas and Ryan Block previously of Engadget fame. Its a small social network around a database of user inputted data. Its not bad but 2 things urks me a little.

The inputting of data is painful, one because its too american centric so for example you need to put the release dates in the US. I tried to add the pacemaker to the list but it was rejected because it was already submitted to the database by another user, however when search for the pacemaker I still get nothing except the option to add it the database again.

The second thing for me is the data portability of the data. There's no API and although theres rss feeds I was expecting RSS feeds across the whole site no matter what type of view or cut I choose. I also kind of expected very rich rss feeds more like RDF linking data.

For the GDGT guys this is all good stuff, with their reputation and expert knowledge they could pull off the biggest database of gadgets online. It would be so much more easier if you could pull in gadgets from else where such as Amazon.com. It would also make population of the database so much quicker and with added information not elsewhere. I would have liked them to do something a little more radical like the use of DBpedia or even Freebase. Right now, I feel there in a lesser place that even Techcrunch's Crunchbase. At least Crunchbase has a API and licences all its data under creative commons attribution. Once GDGT allow much deep access into the data for purposes beyond listing what gadgets I have, want to own or have owned. Good luck guys, i'm sure you'll pull it off soon.

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The next mass collaborative platform for the world? Google Wave

Google Wave, yes I want it to have my first born. So I'm sure you've all read or heard about it but I only just watched the whole video over my HSDPA/3G connection due to being away from home in London. I did actually have the chance (thanks Google) to watch the whole Google IO event live from Google Headquarters in London but didn't come out of a meeting till late and decided that by the time I would get to Victoria, it would have been in full swing. And there is nothing worst that coming into packed room late and having to step over everyone to get a seat.

So as you'd imagined, I'm pretty excited by Google Wave and I've not even used it yet. Why? Well for me it stands for almost everything I've been trying to do elsewhere outside of email, but not only that they are right its about time email moved over and it got upgraded to a world where the internet is ubiquitous. I've had James Cridland's blog open for a while because I've been meaning to reply to his post about the email culture of the BBC and how to deal with email. But I don't think I will now because Google Wave has lead me to true realisation that Email is broken. Its not progressed and although its served us well in the past its time to look elsewhere. Elsewhere, seemed to be heading towards the silo groupware products. Even the non silo ones were some what centralised. Google Wave is much closer to the way email works that the project based systems I even use to date. What makes me smile is that Google could have locked this down a lot but instead they allowed you to create plugins and extensions. Then totally threw it to the community by opening the wave protocal. So you can make a Wave client for anything and deploy the server code on anything you like. Just like email. In practice just like email only a few people do run the server but other enterprising types will happily run a server for you and charge you for the uses of it.

I don't want to talk too much about individual parts of Wave because it is early and theres a lot which is covered by the video but there was a couple of bits where I was thinking oh they've really thought about this stuff. The client of Wave working on a command line, the bit where they showed wave via a plugin watching a blog comments (this is going to be so useful for certain people in the BBC) and when they showed the secret option. There's no doubt that Microsoft and others need to quickly jump on Wave and build there own clients and servers. I can't see much which will hold back wave from being adopted once Google get the developers on board. And why wouldn't you? If Wave could be as big as IMAP? There's going be a lot tension as this service opens to the public, I mean if you work on a groupware system like Lotus Notes, this is a total threat, I had thought maybe the likes of Basecamp would also be in trouble, but the thing they need to do is build plugins for wave as soon as possible. I mean imagine having a Doodle plugin which allows you to do planning of meetings in a simple non-intrusive way. Google really have out innovated everything else in this area and made it very hard to not jump on board. A++ to Google….

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Software ahead of the curve: ZOË

Zoe in action

I've been thinking about doing a series of blog post about software and people a head of the curve, so here's number one of many.

I got talking to Dj Adams at a recent Manchester Geekup. Dj Adams is one of those guys who I followed like jon udell and when I was getting into web development and xml. One of the things we talked about was a piece of software called Zoe.

Zoe is a web based e-mail client with a built in SMTP server and Google-like search functionality that lives on your desktop. Zoe is written in java and uses Lucene technology to provided instant searching and threading of your e-mails.

Zoe was a very interesting project but dropped development a few years ago. Looking back on it, there was some guiding principles/concepts which were ahead of the curve. Dj Adams in his blog post talks about Twitter's killer feature, Everything has a URL.

and everything is available via the lingua franca of today’s interconnected systems — HTTP. Timelines (message groupings) have URLs. Message producers and consumers have URLs. Crucially, individual messages have URLs (this is why I could refer to a particular tweet at the start of this post). All the moving parts of this microblogging mechanism are first class citizens on the web. Twitter exposes message data as feeds, too.

Even Twitter’s API, while not entirely RESTful, is certainly facing in the right direction, exposing information and functionality via simple URLs and readily consumable formats (XML, JSON). The simplest thing that could possibly work usually does, enabling the “small pieces, loosely joined” approach that lets you pipeline the web,

Zoe had this feature, now admittedly Zoe was meant to be run locally and not on a public server (there were little or no controls for privacy, it relies on other stack elements like https and certs to do that.) but it was great because every email had a addressable url. Searches and RSS also benefited from having urls which was great. At the time, this wasn't even mentioned as a feature and that might have been because one the focus was on googling email (this is pre-gmail too) and two because the urls were pretty damm ugly. If I understood Java, I would rewrite this part of the application and give it nice clean urls.

Zoe was well ahead of the curve and we're still not even there yet. Stowe Boyd got me thinking about Gabriel García Márquez's quote Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life. I like the idea that I can sometimes share some aspects of my inbox with other people. I also like the idea of being able to delicious some of the stuff I get sent. There are lots of issues around permanence, but of Zoe us just pointing the way. I can see Google adding permalinks to Gmail in the future but there needs to be a killer reason for the change. Right now I can't quite work out exactly what that is/will be.

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Wolfram Alpha?

There's been lots of talk about this new service, which to be clear isn't a google killer. Its not even a search engine its computable knowledge engine, which aggregates knowledge from data around the web and tries to make sense of it then relays the knowledge back to the user. For me Google returns Information while Wolfram Alpha returns Knowledge.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

I do wish it had results you could copy and a API or even a feed for results, I mean check out the results for redbull. Sweet but none of the information is actually in text. You can download a PDF but to be honest that's not much use. So technically amazing but the experience needs a lot of tweaking. Step in the direction of the Semantic web? Maybe, maybe not.

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Getting out of the inbox

Stowe Boyd's talk from Next09 has inspired me again to rethink about my email usage. There's something very stressful about email and actually now can put it into words. Secrets. Its all about secrets or the practice of secrecy. Its a pain in the ass to remember all these secrets and to be honest only about 2% of them should actually be secrets. I've been trying to use other communication methods when possible, say a email thread which goes on too long can be quickly ended with a 5min telephone call. Or a blog entry instead of mass email out. I don't utilise our internal BBC stream (yammer) much yet because most of the things I have to say are ok for public consumption, so I end up using Twitter. I would use IM more if there wasn't this internal/external split. Don't get me wrong some things are secret and thats what email should be used for but right now theres so much going on in my inboxes that I miss stuff which shouldn't even be in there.

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JaikuEngine vs Laconica

In addition to the post I wrote about slowly moving to Identi.ca. I found this very nice forum thread about Jaiku and Laconi.ca in Jyri's bookmarks. Some take aways….

However the code runs on Google AppEngine. This means setting up your own instance takes less than 5 minutes. You don't need your own hosting. You don't have to pay any money for hosting unless you get enough traffic that you go over AppEngine's free quota: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas.html

In general my advice is that you sign up to both Identi.ca and Jaiku.com (as they're the single biggest instances of both Laconica and JaikuEngine) to get a feel for how the two systems work. Not only will this give you an understanding of how they compare to each other but you'll see how they differ from Twitter and be able to interact with the respective development teams.

Generally Laconica is a little further down the path but both are mature enough for large scale use. Jaiku has a advantage of running on Google App Engine, which means it can be setup fast and scale super large. Laconica has better support in clients because of the Twitter like API it uses. Federation support is also unique to Laconica at the moment but Jaikuengine does have plans for that and the Twitter like API support. The only other thing which separates them is one is Laconica is PHP based and is AGPL while Jaiku is Python and Apache licensed. So as Evan says in the comments So, wouldn't it be awesome if this were the main question people were deciding right now?

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Profiles – Plaxo, Linkedin and now Google

Google Profiles

Its all over the tech press recently, Google giving users the ability to slightly influence search results on themselves with Google Profiles. Here is mine. But I'm not totally sure this is the best way to solve this problem. For example, my plaxo profile has all the same information and better controls, surely it would be better if Google just picked up on the information and the structure of the plaxo profile page? Further more, what about Linkedin, Facebook, etc? It strikes me there's no need to duplicate everything again. What would be very cool would be if they could copied ping.fm and become a sort of super aggregator or broker.

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Asserting equivalence between tags

Stowe Boyd's come up with a interesting and simple solution to the problem of multiple tags for events and things.

Today, on Twitter, I introduced a simple mechanism for asserting equivalence between tags — making them explicitly synonyms — using the equal sign '='. For example:

#web2expo = #w2e

This has the immediate impact of informing people following one tag that there is another they might want to follow too. And it shows up in searchs for any of the tags. Here's the first post in which I used tag equivalence:

[from http://twitter.com/stoweboyd/status/1649219359]

#aporkalypse = #snoutbreak = #hamdemic = #h1n1 = #swineflu = #parmageddon = #epigdemic = #pigpox

Obviously, tools that track or do anything interesting with tags could benefit from taking advantage of these synonyms. And those involved with creating 'beacons' — predefined tags, often associated with conferences or events — would be smart to start publishing the synonyms, too.

This is just another interesting example of microstructure cropping up in the Twittosphere, to help us make sense of the torrent of information flowing through the microstream.

,,,,,,,,,

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The Verse, a wired 3D future

So I was blown away by a new game which revision3's Coop (ex 1upshow) previewed, according to the site, the description is this.

Eskil Steenberg is the sole developer of the game Love. He dropped by the week of GDC to give an extended demo of this 200-player, persistent, and uniquely beautiful game world in which players have complete control–even over the very landscape. Created with tools of his own making, including a 3D modeler and renderer, Love is an incredible example of just how far a solo project can go.

Its all highly impressive stuff, and so I hit the web to find out more about the game and the tools Eskil built to create the game. What I found was something very different from just a game. Eskil has a complete technical demo online which you can download and play with. The editor (Loq Airou) is also downloadable but the whole project seems to be a front for Verse. Verse being a real time network protocol that lets 3D apps talk to each other. Like a 3D aware XMPP? Blender3D already has Verse support and so does GIMP via a plugin. 3D studio max has a plug which has been built too, but thats about it for now. So back to Love, Love is a side project of Verse and so the Love engine is just a client using Verse? Its quite a bit to get your head around but currently the whole thing is freely available. Eskil has said he might make it either donation-ware or open source in the future, which is great news. I think I'm going to have a play tomorrow to see if I can get it working.

Verse sounds utterly amazing, and its good to read some of the thinking behind verse. Wired did cover this a while back but I missed it.

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