Posts tagged as: webapp

Web App or Web Farce?

If you are feeling blue and need a good laugh to brighten your day, try out the beta of Microsoft's Windows Live web-based desktop app. It goes beyond buggy, to a place that can only be called Web farce. Yes, I understand what Beta means, but check out the bugs I was able to find in just a few minutes:

• To test out Windows Live as an RSS reader I imported my feed list as an OPML file. This worked fairly well, except that many of the feeds showed up in the main menu without titles.
• I haven't been able to find any way to tell the system to reload feeds, or to show feeds with new posts.
• When you pull down the menu with the feed list, it covers up about 1/3 of the screen on the left for the menu, even though the menu items take up only half of this space.
• When you click on a feed, only the first 5 items appear, even when there are many more in the feed. The funny part is that the pull-down menu stays down, covering the blog headlines. The only way to clear the menu is to click "hide sidebar."
• Gadgets are supposed to be a big part of Windows Live. These are little tools that you can load onto the home page to display some specialized information. The current beta only lists 5 gadgets: mail, weather, horoscopes, ticking clock, and welcome.Ticking clock is just a text line with the current time, and Welcome is a one screen help page.
• I tried the Weather gadget and entered my city as Lexington, Mass. The gadget displayed the closest weather station in the town of Medford, (I actually thought it was in Bedford, but this is close), but showed the temperature as 17 degrees. A quick check of Weather.com gave the current weather as 27 degrees. Wait. I just reloaded the page again, and now the temperature says 32 degrees. Boston's weather fluctuates, but not that wildly.
• The town name of Medford, Mass. is a link to what I assumed was more details. Unfortunately, the details were about Australia. That's right here's the link.
• Along with gadgets you can also place RSS feeds onto the home page so they display all the time. I tried this with a pre-defined feed from Reuters. This one was really weird. If I continually reload the page, the contents of the feed alternate between today's news and items that are apparently from last summer. The lead headline is "Bush picks Roberts to succeed Rhenquist." Believe me, I'm not creative enough to make this stuff up.
• At the bottom of the screen there are a bunch of links, including Privacy, which has a nonsense link of "http://g.msn.com/0PR_/enau", and Legal, which seems to work,but also shows a confusion over whether I am in Australia. Here is its link: "http://www.live.com/loc/en/au/tou.asp."
• Finally, there is a settings menu item, which doesn't help me refresh the RSS feeds as I hoped, but does give me a choice of nine different languages, including "English (United States)," "English (United Kingdom)," and "English (Australia)." Right now I have it set to Australian English, but it hasn't called me mate yet, or offered to put another shrimp on the barbie, which is the full extent of my Australian English. Wait a minute. Maybe that's why the system thinks I am in Australia. OK. I've switched to good old USA English, and the weather gadget dissapeared. I reloaded it and again put in the city of Lexington, Mass. and this time the gadget can find it, only it is also displaying the weather report for "Novo Cruzeiro, BRA," where it is a delightful 88 degrees. The Lexington link now points to US weather. So it appears that setting the language tells the system to point to that country, which has a curious sort of logic.
• So what happens if I choose Spanish as my language? The weather gadget again clears, but when I enter Lexington, Mass. this time the system again thinks Medford is the closest weather station. Clicking the town name takes me to a weather map for Spain of course. I am speaking Spanish after all.

Finally you can satisfy your general counsel

Tired of those pesky notices from the legal department? The Warning Label Generator will solve all your regulatory issues (via Google Blogoscoped). I love these tools, even though they are hardly Web 2.0. I built the same kind of tool years ago.

DIY Googlemap

Wayfaring.com is genuinely useful and similar to a project I want to work on myself. Map apps are instantly and universally compelling. DIY map apps will be huge.

Book Note: Ajax in Action

Ajax is so bleeding edge that I am reading a book on it from the future. I thought the rule in publishing was that you could use the next year for the copyright if it was printed in late November, but this book arrived November 2 with a copyright of 2006. After yesterday's Microsoft Live demonstration, it is clear that all forces are converging on client side programming with Javascript and DHTML. There have been many blog posts accusing Microsoft of being a follower rather than a leader in this area, but the irony is that Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest functionality that is the heart of Ajax. Adam Bosworth has an interesting post on this history.

The idea of simulating a desktop app in a browser using DHTML and Javascript goes back further than the XMLHttpRequest. I designed just such a product called GifWorks in 1998. The goal was to create Photoshop in a web browser. It wasn't completely client-side though. The interface runs in the browser, but the image processing is done on a server.

I'm not sure what I will do first with Ajax, but the most likely candidate is some type of mashup with Google maps.

Time to start Ruby programming

I've been reading Ruby books for a week now and I'm getting antsy to do some coding. My way of learning a language is to pick a real target and then push my way through all the obstacles. That forces me to do the hard tasks, but keeps me from wasting time on features I'll never need. I know I've been saying that I want to use Ruby to run the CMS for this blog, but I want to hold off on that until I add enough features. For example, I still need to add calls to ping servers and tagging to this blog. It will be easier to just do that in FoxPro first, and not worry about the programming language at the same time. Besides, from everything I've seen, Ruby on Rails will be the best way to build a CMS with Ruby, so I'll wait until later to start that project. I'll pick an easier target for my first Ruby project.

I've had an idea for Amazon web service programming for a while that might make a good candidate. I'd like to build a "pick the best book on a subject" app. I'm not sure exactly what that means, but the general idea would be to enter a search term and have the app rank available books based on a set of criteria I develop. That will let me explore the Amazon database from the inside.

My first step will be to build a development environment. I could start by doing Ruby programming on my own computer, but that won't let you look over my shoulder easily. I could do the Ruby project on the server where this blog is hosted, but that brings up the security issue. Programming on the web in a new language always leaves open the possibility of security holes. I'd rather do my quick and dirty development in a separate location and then move them to a new server for production use. I also like the idea of a distributed environment for web development. It allows for better scaling and gives me more control later for rearranging the architecture. So my first task will be to build ruby.darwinianweb.com at a new host.

When I first started looking at Ruby I saw that there were some hosting sites that provided Ruby and Ruby on Rails installations at extremely low rates. They billed themselves as Ruby playgrounds, which is a great idea. I've been a programming language junkie for over 25 years, and the idea of playing with a new language is always a thrill. It looks like these hosts are aimed directly at that market.

Why I'd rather roll my own CMS

Just when I was feeling silly about building my own blogging CMS I found two posts that reminded me why I like to keep my data in my own system. David Weinberger recently completed the "upgrade from hell" with MoveableType and Scoble is throwing a hissy fit over Wordpress' RSS feed. This is why I don't feel comfortable with other people managing my data. I'd rather do the work upfront than get caught later in somebody else's database.

This brings up a key problem with web-based apps. When a desktop app fails or a major bug shows up, I can at least find some product or write some code to get to the data and transfer it to some other tool. What happens when my data is in a database on some server somewhere? Of course, you have to rely on remote hosting for lots of things. I don't want the hassles of running my own webserver at my house, but I keep a complete working mirror of any site I build, including all the supporting scripts on one of my machines at home. Once my blogging system is moved to Ruby/MySQL I'll certainly host it remotely, but it will still be running my code.

The average user has to rely on other people's code, and it will take years before that trust is solid. Yes, I know that people use remote blogging systems every day, but that is still the leading edge of users. Before we all move to web versions of Office tools, a lot of thought has to be given to recovery. I'm going to assume that any reputable host will keep back-ups, even though that has been proven false also. If users discover that upgrades and new "features" cause them to lose data, there could be a backlash that sets Web 2.0 back a few years. When Word fails, people may curse, but they don't give up on Windows. If a web version of Word fails, they may decide to take their data back where they feel more control.

We need to start the feature race over again

There have been lots of predictions of online versions of desktop apps. What has been missing is a valid justification for people to move from Microsoft Office to an online set of apps. One unrecognized benefit will be the restarting of the feature race all over again. I just set up a new copy of Quicken so I could help my mother with her checkbook and the level of complexity is overwhelming. I just wanted to do simple checkbook balancing but the software acts as if I want to set up my own online brokerage house. I had the same experience the other day when I started building the system to manage this blog. I'm coding it myself with FoxPro at first and then I'll move it to MySQL and probably Ruby. All I wanted to start with was a simple flat file database of my posts, but FoxPro, Access and all the other supposedly end-user databases were so feature rich that I was faced with studying manuals just to create a form to add and edit records. A new generation of web based apps will have to start at the beginning of the feature curve and maybe some of them will stay simple enough to be used by non-power users. I don't mind programming and I like lots of features when I need them, but the current packaged software model requires publishers to constantly add features until they can do everything every competitor does. Hopefully the web model for apps will allow for different levels of complexity.