A brighter future for mobile applications?

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 …

Google Chrome OS

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 …

Mozilla and WebKit, browser platform wars.

This post began as a comment on Matthew Gertner’s blog post The Browser Platform Wars. It’s a rant not an article, don’t take it personally. In my experience (8 years building Mozilla based products and playing with WebKit since it was first released as WebCore in 2003) there are a few clear technical and social …

A Different Model For Web Services Authorization

In my last post I set out to describe how easy it is to extract private keys from desktop software. As I was concluding I stumbled on an alternative approach that might be more secure in some circumstances. I didn’t really go into details, so here’s an expansion of the idea. Current API authentication mechanisms …

Twitter Translation

My friend Britt mentioned today that he was about to launch twitter.jp. How exciting! But I don’t understand Japanese. If only I could easily translate all those tweets in languages I don’t understand. I played around with Google’s new AJAX Translation API before and I wondered how hard it would be to use that from …

Google AJAX APIs outside the browser

Google just announced their new Language API this morning. Unfortunately their API is another one of their AJAX APIs – that are designed to be used from JavaScript in web pages. These APIs are pretty cool for building client-side web applications – I used their AJAX Feeds API in my home page – but I …

Out with the old, in with the goo(gle)

[flickr-photo:id=28961855,size=m] Some time ago I reworked my home page to feature content from various other sites I post to (blogs, flickr, delicious) by using some JSON tricks to pull in their feeds. I blogged about how to do this with Feedburner’s JSON API, so that my actual page was just static HTML and all the work was done client-side.

Last week I decided to revisit this using Google’s new AJAX feeds API. Feedburner‘s API never seemed to be well supported (it came out of a hackathon) and it forced me to serialize my requests. In the process I neatened up a bunch of the code.