Factum Vicesimus Quartus » Web Innovation

The future of the internet and OS’s

Wietse Veenstra — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 18:06:19 +0000

Last night Leo Babauta posted a very interesting article on Lifehack.org about his Hard Drive & Software are obsolete. I share this vision in how we will use our computer in the (near?) future. At the moment it’s not yet possible to work completely online but I think this might certainly be a good option for the future. New initiatives and innovative web applications pop up like never before and the quality is getting better every day. The internet connections are becoming increasingly faster and the free online space to save your files is growing like crazy. In the example, Leo points out the website of MediaMax, where you can get 25 GB of free online space!

Another great application I personally use every day is NetVibes. I read my feeds daily from it, store my favorite/important links, it stores my calendar with important things and I have a to-do list. And new features are built in quite often. Users can also provide their own feature requests and the developers really look into this list. Some of the other applications that will possibly play a big role in the onlinization (did I just invent a new word?) are Desktop Two and YouOS, two applications which simulate a desktop-like environment online (the website of YouOS provides a demo). When you want to edit photos online you should give Fauxto a try. A really impressive RIA built in Flex. There is even an online Flex Compiler, which is a fairly simple example but it shows that more and more initiatives to move existing software to the web are being built every day. Of course this is quite the opposite of what Adobe is trying to achieve with Apollo. I’m not really sure which way it will go but I’m certainly going to follow up on the latest developments on both sides.

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The North Netherlands RIA / Web 2.0 scene

Wietse Veenstra — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 11:23:21 +0000

The RIA Web 2.0 scene in the north of the Netherlands has been described in a very nice article by Edgar Jager, who is business development director with Adobe. They linked to my weblog (i’m quite proud of this) and to the blogs of Niels Bruin and my teacher Raymond van Dongelen as an example of the scene. Waldo Smeets of Adobe Netherlands commented on a post of Niels with the question to submit ideas on how Adobe can support education in a better way. I have some ideas on how they can improve or achieve this.

Within our schoolminor called RIA Web 2.0 we are purely focussing on development with Adobe Flex Builder 2.0 and Ruby on Rails. We have a wiki where we try to collect useful information that can help us with our study. Unfortunately this wiki isn’t working properly at the moment. The students don’t visit it because there is not enough useful content. So my idea is for us to collaborate with Adobe on how to make a useful wiki (a web 2.0 wiki built with Flex ofcourse) for both parties. Adobe could post useful links, tutorials, etc for us. The wiki could also serve as a platform where we can post our questions/problems which Adobe can answer or give us hints to where we can find a solution for it. Perhaps there could be a showcase section where we could show our Flex products (like the Adobe Flex Cookbook).

Another suggestion might be to send the Flex API poster to schools who work with Flex as this is a very useful poster and the PDF version is not that handy to read from. Ofcourse it would be great if students could also help Adobe in a way. This could also be done within the wiki or the students weblogs. We could post wishes for a next Flex release and provide self-written tutorials or code-snipplets (this already happens at the moment). As Waldo suggested in his comment, there could be a weekly live connection with Adobe Connect between one of the Flex people at Adobe and our students to discuss problems or give tutorials.

I hope my ideas will help improving the collaboration between Adobe and Flex students.

Related posts:
Niels Bruin: The North Netherlands Web 2.0 / RIA scene is gaining interest
Gerben Robijn: The North Netherlands Web 2.0, RIA scene
Raymond van Dongelen: Supporting the scene

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Web and media predictions for 2007

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 22:32:28 +0000

With 2007 storming towards us the predictions of trends for next year on web and media pop up everywhere. Therefore I tried to list the most interesting articles with predictions for you:

Read/Write Web – 2007 Web Predictions
Ryan Stewarts 10 Prediction for Rich Internet Applications for 2007
Online Spin – Predictions for 2007
Flashpoint – Web 2.0 Summit – Where do we go from here?
Don Dodge on The Next Big Thing – 2007 Predictions for the web and software
InfoWorld – Open source is where the action is in 2007
Read/Write Web – Why Browser War 2.0 Will Heat Up in 2007

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Paint the web with sticky-notes (Fleck)

Wietse Veenstra — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 17:50:40 +0000

Last Friday Fleck got launched at a big Techcrunch party in New-york. Fleck is a all new web-application to annotate webpages. Or according to the Fleck website: Fleck wants to add a new layer of interactivity to the web.

Fleck is a free service which allows people to add a note to a website. At first you can only view your own notes but in a later version it might become possible to share notes with groups. Fleck comes as a plugin for Firefox. Opera supports Fleck without installing a plugin and the plugin for Internet Explorer will be available soon. There is also a Wordpress plugin that allows viewers to annotate your blog posts, which from now is also possible at my weblog:) (click on ‘annotate this page’ below this post for an example). Fleck is not a new idea. In the 90s there have been serveral projects trying to launch the same kind of service but they all died a quick dead. There are also services with the same functionality online now, like Trailfire. Personally I think Fleck is great and I think this will become big.

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To Fleck or not to Fleck?

Wietse Veenstra — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:55:03 +0000

Tomorrow Fleck will be released to the world. It’s the newest project of the people we met in Amsterdam and I’m very eager to see what it is/does. Please wait…

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Adobe JamJar

Wietse Veenstra — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 22:24:58 +0000

I just launched Adobe JamJar for the first time. This is a online workspace where you can plan events, exchange ideas, manage projects, centralize information and share files and images. The workspace is very flexible, you can go around the screen by dragging the mouse, zoom in, search with Google, etc. It’s build on the Flex Builder 2.0 technology. I was very impressed to see how this beta platform works. Worth checking out! Adobe JamJar Note: You need an Adobe ID to login.

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nice one!

Wietse Veenstra — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 17:59:27 +0000

When I opened my email program and checked my mail about 10 minutes ago, I was totally surprised with 1 email I received. It was an email from a little internet movie quiz I sometimes play online. The last months I haven’t been on that website and I kind of forgot about it. The mail told me I hadn’t logged in for more then 3 months now and they took my email address off the mailing list, just to prevent me from getting annoyed with mails I don’t want anymore. Now thats service! Never thought about it this way but it’s a great piece of customer service. Just thought I’d let you know.

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