Paul Osburn

Longhorn Loves RSS

MSFT had a big announcement today at the Gnomedex conference in Seattle. Their announcement is that for a while now, they've had an RSS team at MSFT (they've been referring to themselves as part of the IE 7 team for secrecy). They've built an RSS platform for the Windows OS and have hooked up the latest build of IE7 to it. Similiar to Mac's Safari browser (very similiar!), IE 7 has an RSS feed view. RSS feeds are automatically detected by IE and you click a button to display them in the browser.

The bigger news is that you can easily subscribe to feeds that get added to 'The Common Feed list.' There is a standard API that developers can then use to query this list from any application. The platform takes care of managing the list. Anyone can use this common list on the user's box (i.e. they have a demo that shows RSS Bandit using the list).

But, it looks like the RSS platform enables much more. The RSS platform:

1. Builds a baseline set of experiences for RSS so users can tap into it. They want RSS to be usable by everyone (i.e. my mom), and not just the top 5% of Internet users.
2. The RSS platform will make it easy for developers to use RSS for everything. Their motto is 'RSS for everything, all the time.'
3. They are adding a set of extensions to RSS which allows content publishers to define lists, and consumers to read these lists. The publisher can tag lists, marking interesting data in lists, etc. Their also publishing the specification to these new extensions as a Creative Commons license. They want the extensions to be used 'widely and broadly.'

The big idea here is that they want to use feeds for everything. So, instead of just being able to subscribe to RSS feeds for blogs and for podcasts, I can now subscribe to someone's Contacts RSS Feed (i.e. that Outlook will make available), or a Calendar Feed, etc. One of the demos showed Outlook consuming a calendar from someone else that was a published RSS feed.

There is a video on Channel 9 that has some interesting demos. From the video, it sounds like they're planning on having something ready for people to play with by the PDC.

Microsoft clearly thinks that RSS is something that everyone will be using in the future, whether the user knows it or not. What's nice is that, for developers, we can make use of all of these different feeds without having to rewrite the common RSS plumbing for consuming, publishing feeds, etc.

I've read on other blgos that MSFT plans to make this available for XP as well.

Paul

Ajax: Breaking New Ground with Existing Technology

Leave it to the people at Google to figure out how to use existing technology, provided by Microsoft, to create a brand new user experience on the web! Experiences people thought weren't really possible on the web are now popping up in several new applications. Several weeks ago I posted about Google's new Map service, and last year some of us at Vertigo started using Google Suggest. Go to Google Maps, zoom in on a map, then grab the map with your cursor and move it around. The map moves instantly with no waiting for the entire page to reload.

The developers at Google are using what people are calling 'Ajax.' Jesse James Garrett at Adaptive Path consulting in San Francisco explains it this way in his blog:

“Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.“

Basically Ajax is about using Javascript and the XmlHttpRequest object to do processing on the server after the page loads on the client. You can read about the process in this article. The Ta-da Lists application, which commits user data to the server in the background to provide a really fast list managing interface, also uses this technique as does Flickr. Here is a simple diagram of the concept.

The possibilities with this are potentially amazing. “The real challenge here is not figuring out how to make the code work but thinking of interesting ways in which it can be utilized.“

It's about being smarter with what we already have available to us.

Konfabulation

If you're not familiar with Konfabulator, it's a Mac application that allows you to host custom widgets. The widgets are written in Javascript and XML. Over the last year or two, Konfabulator has amassed quite a collection of widgets (over 800) written by the public. In June, when Mac released the details of Tiger (the next version of their OS) and their implementation for custom widgets, Apple and the author of Konfabulator made the news with some handy accusations, bickering, and the like. So, what did the author of Konfabulator do? He ported his application to Windows! Now you can run the custom widgets on Windows and be consumed with so many custom widgets that you forget about everything else you're thinking about. 

The screenshot below is the collection of widgets (plus a few more) that come with the default Windows install. The app is fun to use and writing your own widget seems pretty easy. The tricky part is coming up with the nice graphics!

Check the app out if you get a chance. On the Mac it runs for a while and then after the demo license expires, it keeps running.  :-)   The only downside is that you get a small window on your screen that never goes away reminding you to purchase the app. I'm assuming that the Windows version behaves in a similiar way. If you want to purchase it, I think the price is $24.95.