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Integrated platform as I see it

Mayank proposed a question "Is Integrated Platform Web 3.0?", on his post he described integrated platform and how cool it is, here is part of it

I mean if I am using an application like latest news on my igoogle homepage, I shall be able to pull it out and place it on my desktop. I would surely like those apps that I use daily to be on my desktop working when I boot up my machine. Also, if I do some work on my computer and want it to be accessible from anywhere else, then I generally use email to save it over the wev. Now, what would be cool is that if I save that file on my desktop, then it automatically gets synched with a database on web and thus becomes accesible from anywhere. Thus, difference between storing one's file on desktop and storing it on web is blurred.

Mayank - Is Integrated Platform Web 3.0?

He also mentioned an approach towards it which is prism from Mozilla Labs, which is a great approach, it could convert your web apps like Facebook for example to a separate application with it's own shortcut on the desktop and no browser bordering it.

That's cute this really is the future of the web but I was thinking, why don't operating systems themselves integrate web apps in there systems just like desktop apps? why don't they show them just as desktop apps, just as you explore your hard disk to click on anything.exe or anything.app (for Apple users) we should explore the web just like our hard disks and click on anything.php (or maybe a new extension is created for this issue ".web" for example) and this application open just like any desktop application free of browser borders and has it's own icon, this truly maybe web 3.0

It's weird yesterday, we was impressed that web apps are replacing desktop apps in their functionalities, today we want web apps to really replace desktop apps in there place and get out of browsers borders.

Maybe Apple or Microsoft need to apply this quickly before OS's themselves become web apps.

October 28, 2007, 2:16 AM TrackBack 0

For our profession good

Have you ever think about this, people who make web sites have been there for many years and still no body know about our profession, who are we? what our titles? our skills and education? what do we value?

For the sake of our profession which is web design as most of you already know, please take this survey, about yourself, your work, your title, your skills, your salary etc...

May 5, 2007, 3:31 AM TrackBack 0

Microsoft.com standardized

On December 14 Microsoft unleashed there new standards compliant home page, by visiting it you realize instantly how faster it loads and how nicer it looks than the old one, it still have 5 errors on the W3C validator but it's way better. and the new scripted navigation is great.

I'm surprised how Microsoft waited that long this step is a lot late, especially after Douglas Bowman show them how faster and bandwidth saving would it be to redesign there site in a complete CSS layout, Maybe they didn't accept to do this step unless there browser give more support to the standards.

December 17, 2006, 9:28 PM TrackBack 0

SimpleBits re-brand

SimpleBits got a new brand, a new logo and site design, I will miss the old logo so much especially that it's on Web Standards Solutions book right on my desk, but the reasons Dan mentioned in his re-brand post do worth it.

December 5, 2006, 10:46 PM TrackBack 0

Happy cog redesigns Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com logo Has any body know that Jefrrey Zeldman's happy cog has redesigned Dictionary.com, that's an old news I know according to the project page it's lunched on 21 August but I don't know how I didn't noticed, It's more than just a redesign it's a whole new experience that is easier and more comfortable and ofcourse it's standards compliant, check it.

Thanks Jeffrey for making the web a better place starting from leading the web standards move to redesigning widely used web sites.

October 5, 2006, 1:44 AM TrackBack 0

Global web stats

This global web stats based on an analysis of 1,104,685 distinct visits across 1,261 websites, showing the percentage of visits through IE 6.0 is 66% and from IE 7.0 1% a total of 67% a lot less than before while FF getting 22%, it looks like Microsoft plan to win the browsers war through IE 7 is not working as planned.

The stats also shows the percentages of visiting countries and screen resolutions.

July 11, 2006, 8:37 AM TrackBack 0

Google calender

With collaboration of Doglas Bowman Google has designed it's new Calendar app, it's still beta but it's really great, go give it a try.

April 13, 2006, 6:53 PM TrackBack 0

Web OS

On November 26, 2005 I posted a post named Browsers replacing desktops here is part of it

I heard long time ago from some technologist that browsers are going to replace computer desktops and I keep thinking when will that happened. Now after this new state of mind called Web 2.0 I think it is happening now and happening very quickly.

I wrote about netvibes, meebo and some web apps that bring us closer to the time were browsers totally replaces desktops.

Now we are even closer as there is two serious tries of developing a full web based operating system were you can access all your data and apps all through one interface just like your Windows or Mac OS interface, ofcourse they are both still beta but I think they are a strong core of a real web based OS

First there is Goowy from it's interface you can check email, write email, manage your calendar and much more.

Second there is eyeOS an open source free OS you could access it through the web or it could be installed on a server of a company or a school for example, I see eyeOS better than Goowy as eyeOS provide an API so that any developer can develop new apps for the platform and because it depends more on the windows style that you can open more than one window in the same time and you can minimize windows, but the bad thing about it that every time you click a link the whole page has to refresh, its true that they succeeded to make a light weight page but it was still going to be great to use AJAX to call and hide windows.

imagine opening any computer in the world to find your same interface, apps, data how powerful will it be as more people are switching to broadband doing the daily actions on a Web OS will be more logical but for heavy apps like photoshop, dreamweaver etc.. I think we will still need a desktop based OS for them.

I bet Google will buy one of those projects soon.

March 12, 2006, 7:03 AM TrackBack 0

"2005" What a year

It was really a big year of the web, from my point of view we as web standards geeks and advocates have come closer to 2 of our objectives, number one objective is promoting web standards and I see more and more designers, developers & organizations started to understand the value of meeting the standards, and one of the most obvious signs of that is the growth of FireFox market share, and one of the biggest moves to web standards this year is that Microsoft finally started to listen and will release IE7 that will support web standards way better than IE6, if we will thank one person for promoting standards this year she will be definitely Molly E. Holzschlag for her efforts in leading the WaSP, her efforts with Microsoft, and a lot more that it needs a separate post alone. Thanks Molly

The second objective in my opinion is the transition of desktop apps to web apps, which has been done and named Web 2.0, thanks to all the technologies that make it possible starting from Ruby on Rails to AJAX and the fresh minds that implemented those technologies in an usable apps to fill some of the web community needs like project management, bookmarking, maps and a lot of extremely useful ideas, and if we have to thank one company for making it possible and implement it in a perfect way, it'll be 37 Signals for there great framework Ruby on Rails, and there great apps Basecamp & Backpack, I also learned a lot from their great blog Signal vs. Noise.

To follow Andy Clark and Molly's lead I would like to tell my Pick Of The Pack for 2005.

Pick of the blogs 2005

The blog I want to pick is not technically a blog I mean it was only a 24 days blog and I think you all knew it now, yes it is 24 Ways I learned a lot on those 24 days, thanks to Drew McLellan, for coming up with this great idea to collect fresh techniques from the minds of well know designers, developers & authors in one place, I learned a lot of new things, specially from those articles

Thanks Drew McLellan and thanks for all the writers of those great articles.

Pick of the design 2005

Well it's not an easy pick I've been thinking about this for a long time will it be Stopdesign the magnificent design that I always adored, or Coudal Partners the incredibly simple elegant design, or maybe ribic.org that rocked the reboot zone with it's new stylish layout and perfect balance of colors, all those designs are really great and impressive but the design that I will pick this year is Vivabit, great layout, great logo, great colors every thing is perfect and above all that and what is really impressive is that it's liquid layout, with all this kind of complexity in the layout it's totally liquid.

Pick of the books Speeches 2005

Please allow me to replace the pick of the books with the pick of the speeches as I haven't got the opportunity to read most of the books this year, but I had the opportunity to listen and see slides of most of the conferences done this year. I enjoyed WE05 starting with the impressive keynote of Molly State of the Web, 2005 passing by Tantek's, Veen's, Meyer's, Goto's, Doug's and a lot of other great speeches, I also enjoyed d.construct and I was tracking it minute by minute ~~for the whole 2 days~~, there were all great speeches and I learned great new things from all of them but Andy budd's presentation What is web 2.0? was great as it comes in a time were there was a lot of misunderstanding about what is web 2.0, but despite I liked Andy's presentation very much, I'm willing to pick another speech it's a speech from WE05 by one man I highly respect and who inspires me a lot, he is Tantek Çelik for his speech Microformats: Evolving the Web to explain why I picked this specific speech and how this speech opened my mind to things I never had imagined before, it doesn't need another post, it needs another bunch of posts, Thanks Tantek.

Special Achievement Award 2005

As for the special achievement award, I would like to give it to 37 Signals for their achievements regarding web 2.0 by creating Ruby on Rails framework and a lot of great web 2.0 apps, I would like to give it also to Jesse James Garrett for Ajax, but I will give it to a company that helps turning web users from readers to writers, from observers to contributers I will give it to Google for there efforts on Blogger the platform that let blogging easy and free for any one, and they also deserve the award for their brilliant decision in letting Douglas Bowman handle the design process.

I hope and I'm sure year ~~2007~~ 2006 will be a bigger year for the web, it's really an exciting time to be a web designer. Thanks all for making the web a better place and wish you all good luck.

December 29, 2005, 4:02 AM Comments 2 TrackBack 0

The power of the web

I always thought about how powerful is this World Wide Web, How quickly and accurately can a person reach information on the web, I got a UK friend who was traveling to Tanzania, and he was depressed that his job force him to go there, in a minute I cheer him up by some flickr photos about Tanzania, some information through Wikipedia & ofcourse it's satellite pictures through Google maps ofcourse he started from this point and started zooming in every place seeking cool places to visit.

One of the technologies that let you benefit from this power too is RSS, if you got Safari try opening this news menu click on "View All RSS Articles" and you view all news articles from 8 of the most well known news agencies in one window, now you can fill this "Search Articles" input area with any word you want, and boom it will filter all the articles and leave the articles that contains this word only. I know this is not a new technology and some of my readers might know that but a lot of my readers also don't know about that, and even who knows may still don't realize how powerful it is.

The web is powerful also in connecting people together in various ways, me and Rida Al Barazi have been using Basecamp for managing FRESH PX which we will release soon by the way. and I can't tell you how this app help us and how it is easy and pleasure to use.

Even Google search engine is a powerful tool if you know how to use it well, and Technorati as well, were you can search most of the web blogs around the world through it.

Those are all signs of the power of the web but what I wanted to focus on today is Wikipedia, for those of you who don't know Wikipedia, it's a free encyclopedia that any one can edit, imagine that this encyclopedia can be fed by any person in the world who has something to add to it, how powerful is this encyclopedia and how big it is and even how updated it is. The new thing that I wanted to mention today that it is also reliable, it is even as accurate as the encyclopedia Britannica, Read this BBC news.

This World Wide Web is gonna let every ones life easier and will help everybody to achieve their goals, but unfortunately not every body in my local community know enough about the web so I hope this post encourage them to start, checking it out.

December 16, 2005, 3:15 AM Comments 2 TrackBack 0

Web 2.0 buzzword

A lot of miss understanding around what web 2.0 means, Web 2.0 as I understand it is not a technology like AJAX or Ruby on Rails, web 2.0 is a new platform new way of thinking of the web from different perspectives, Thinking of the web from more personal & social perspectives, increasing the connectivity between individuals around the web.

A blog for example is a personal web site based on a CMS that make it easy for none advanced users to share their thoughts and ideas over the web and get comments on them like this blog.

Folks like Six Apart make it easy by introducing a cheap, customizable & easy to use CMS like Movable type & even easier to use CMS which is TypePad, Blogging get even easier by Blogger were you could build a perfect blog by an easy 3 steps process it's free and easy to use enabling any one to start blogging.

By this new thinking of the web even business become a lot easier by Basecamp for example which is a great platform for managing projects make it alot easier for teams to work together over the web.

Web 2.0 even enter the fun field through Flickr were you could share your photos and see others photos in a perfectly integrated system.

So connecting individual people with each others is what web 2.0 all about.

October 22, 2005, 6:14 PM

Dial-up starting to disappear

Apple new iMac is released today the main 2 new features are Front Row that doesn't impress me much and the built in iSight that I think is a cool feature.

That is off topic ok what I want to say is have you noticed that this new iMac doesn't have a built in modem, Apple has created a USB modem for 49$ instead, I see this is the beginning of the end for dial-up, more manufacturers will start dropping the Dial-up support from there products in the near future.

Ofcourse that is not the end of it, dial-up will remain supported for a while but for a company like Apple to drop its support, it's a serious sign of how small the percentage of users who still use Dial-up connections.

October 13, 2005, 2:16 AM

Web 2.0 Revolution

People used to use the web as a source of information they used to read about news on CNN.com, about graphics issues on Adobe or Macromedia or about Apple news on Apple. But every thing is rapidly changing now, people want to write as well as they read they want to share their opinions and thoughts for the world to read it and comment it.

Content on the web now is dramatically increasing making it really difficult to track all the web sites that provide the kind of information you need, the solution is Web 2.0 which is forcing itself on the web.

Web 2.0 is a new way of thinking of the web that put the content at the first priority in which web content is broken up to "microcontent" units that can be redistributed by technologies like RSS, to make it easy on a reader to get all the content he want in one place.

Aggregators & remixing tools:

RSS is a really powerful technology, you could view an RSS feed of a web site which is a list of the recent news published on a specific web site in a light weight XML format, each entry published called a feed, you could specify the date range to see feeds published in this range of time you could sort feeds by Date, title, source, you could search through feeds on a specific word which will filter the feeds to let the feeds that contains this word only. The best part is that you could merge more than one web site feeds in the same window and run the same functions on them. Imagine the power of this it's incredible.

Technorati is a tool for keeping track of what's new on what they call the blogsphere which is the world of blogs, you can search all technorati claimed blogs which are 16.9 million right now about a specific word like katrina for example and you will see all blog posts that contains the world katrina.

This revolution is not regarding text content only but regarding photos as well, flickr is a great tool for sharing photos that has a lot of new fantastic functionalities, check my photos on flickr.

Del.icio.us is a tool for organizing and sharing bookmarks, check my del.ico.us bookmarks.

What is A List Apart (ALA)?

It is an online magazine, which is moderated by Jeffrey Zeldman it contains a lot of articles about Web design and related issues like content management and even business related subjects.

If you want more information see there about page

August 23, 2005, 8:18 AM

Microsoft finally listens

After a lot of terrible reputation towards web standards and un-friendly applications like Internet Explorer, Microsoft finally listens, WaSP officially announced collaboration with Microsoft to promote web standards.

A lot of people still don't believe it but it's true Microsoft has already increased web standards support in ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005 and it sounds like Internet Explorer 7 will be web standards friendly too.

What are you talking about ?

A lot of Web designers & developers are still not aware of web standards and doesn't have a clue of what I'm talking about.

I will try to explain shortly what is this all about. Every document (page) on the web is one of two modes even it is Quirk mode or it is standard mode if it contains a doctype It is in standard mode this document should be rendered (viewed) the same on all platforms and browsers in a specific way according to the doctype in this site for example it is XHTML 1.0 strict alot of browsers supports standards properly but Internet Explorer was the worst browser that renders standards mode documents alot of CSS hacks must be applied to let it render properly.

WaSP (the Web Standards Project) is a group of Skilled Designers, Developers & experts in the field of Web standards and accessibility there aim is to fight for the standards and convince more designers and developers to begin building there web sites with standards & more software developers to support web standards and finally they have convinced Microsoft to support standards.

July 6, 2005, 3:00 AM

Adobe and Macromedia, Media future

Maybe it is old news but it's effect on media industry will be huge in the next few years.

On April 18 2005 two of the media industry leaders have joined up, Adobe announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

Along the years there was always a competition between the two companies products like Adobe Illustrator vs. Macromedia FreeHand & Adobe GoLive vs. Macromedia Dreamweaver I think Adobe has won the competition in graphics applications but Macromedia has won it in web applications.

Experts opinions about this move and it's effect on the media future varies. Some of them predicting that due to the end of the competition between the two companies this move effect on the media future will be bad for the next few years, And others including me predicting that this move has a very good effect on the future of media and that the unity of the biggest two media industry leaders will result in a new generation of products combining passion, creativity, and technology.

Instead of Adobe Creative suite 2 and Macromedia Studios MX 2004 it might be united in one product I don't know maybe it is called Adobe Creative suite MX 2005.

Resources:

June 28, 2005, 6:00 AM Comments 1

Inc.com out of Dan's hand.

Inc.com magazine web site has been redsigned by Dan Cedelhorm on july 2003, Dan Cedelhorm is one of the web standards industry leaders, He is the the author of "Web standards solutions" book which is one of the most important books about building web standards compliant web sites. After I noticed some errors on Inc.com markup wich make it not valid I asked Dan

"Why do inc.com not valid XHTML while it could be easily validated by turning things small caps and that stuff. Is there a point of that or is it out of your hand now. he replies:

"It's been out of my hands for almost 2 years now :-) I haven't been involved in a long time -- to be honest, I'm happy to see it not far off from where it was way back when. Thanks for the note."

June 8, 2005, 9:09 PM

Fun, Friendly & Easy to use web