Monthly Archives: November 2009

A brighter future for mobile applications?

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Since the Chrome OS announcement the other day I’ve been thinking more about what a world with rich enough web APIs to support all general purpose applications might look like. I’m not sure that it’ll happen, but it sounds like Google is putting their weight behind it and they’ve been successful in the past at moving our industry in new directions (remember the world before GMail and Google Maps?).

A richer set of standard web APIs might form the basis for a cross-manufacturer mobile platform. The Palm WebOS stack already kind of looks like Chrome OS (though with local HTML+JS apps rather than remote ones) and the original iPhone application model was exactly what Chrome OS proposes. The limitations that forced Apple to create a native developer platform are exactly the ones that Chrome OS plans to address.

Of course Google’s own mobile platform is decidedly non-web and Apple’s much larger volume of applications discourage it from supporting standard APIs. The handset manufacturers, OS developers and carriers are all making a ton of money selling applications in a model that’s reminiscent of pre-web software models. The only real winners from a move to a web model for mobile applications would be the users.

Users’ names and usernames

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A few years ago my friend Jack built a cute little application. It was a text message multiplexer. You could send it a text message and it would send that message to all of your friends. You signed up using your phone number and gave it your name. It was somewhere between addictive and annoying but completely social, since basically all of the users were our friends. We mostly used it as a free-form Dodgeball, to work out when friends were out at bars and inevitably they added the ability to send a message directly to a contact. There were no usernames so twttr would cleverly work out who you meant based on the first name you supplied and your contacts list. This never worked right, they added usernames and now I’m @ian. Unfortunately then the whole @reply thing happened and people do just use their friends first names. Look at how many people use @ian – most of them are not talking to me, but other Ians.

Facebook resisted giving people anything other than a free-form name and a numeric user ID for the longest time. They finally gave in and let people pick vanity URLs but still refuse to make that URL useful for anything but getting to your profile. When they added @ support they pop up UI to autocomplete friends names from your contacts list. It works really well, but it depends on a rich message composition UI, something that’s not possible on the simple mobile devices that twitter was targeting.

I wonder how the next site will approach this.

Google Chrome OS

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If I was building an OS today I’d be building what Google just announced.

Like most heavy technology users I’ve been moving heavily toward hosted web applications over the past few years. I don’t use Evolution or mutt anymore, I use GMail. I don’t organize my photos on my laptop and use my own hosted Gallery, I use Flickr. I’ve never been a big office application user, but when I’m forced to open a Powerpoint deck, edit an Excel file or print out a Word document, I do it using Google docs.

I’ve also spent the past four or five or so years working on blurring the line between what’s on your desktop and what’s online. At Flock I worked to synchronize your bookmarks to online services and between machines, to integrate personalized web search into your desktop workflow and to make publishing media from your devices as easy as publishing text from your keyboard. At Songbird we developed APIs to allow web apps to interact with your desktop media player and APIs to let your desktop media player access content from the web. At Rdio I worked on similar things, from a slightly different approach, I don’t think I can talk about them yet.

I’m really excited that Google has the balls (and the skills) to go all out. To commit to offering enough APIs to web applications to allow them to provide the same functionality and user experience as desktop applications would. This isn’t the first time that this has been attempted, but I think this time it just might work. Just a couple of years ago when the iPhone launched and Apple announced that the only way to write applications was to write web applications users and developers rebelled. The iPhone browser wasn’t capable enough. Google have taken the right approach by committing to improving the web platform to support whatever APIs are needed before shipping the product.

I’ll never be running Chrome OS. I rely on too many specialized applications, but I am looking forward to when Flickr can pull photos right off my camera and GMail’s offline features are widely tested enough to actually work right. Much of the innovation in Chrome OS will benefit us all.