A Fool’s Wisdom

No, not talking butter.

Parakey: a service, a product, a platform to bring life to the web by Firefox wonderboys? A “Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do”? IEEE Spectrum article

Although Blake Ross‘ absoluteness of some of his assertions have bothered me from time to time, he is someone that I respect and admire deeply, along with his partner in improving our computing life, Joe Hewitt. Both have incredible vision, are articulate, and are making it happen.

I have enjoyed the hints, and waited to find out explicitly what they have been working on for the last couple of years, and although they have not sent the email that they have launched, Matt wrote about the IEEE Spectrum article lamely titled “The Firefox Kid” about their secret Parakey.

I am a little startled to find such a digestible article in IEEE Spectrum which I subscribed for years to at one time. David Kushner seems to be a great journalist. Though I did not feel like reading the regurgitated story of Blake and Firefox again, so skip page 2

The article includes tasty content like:

• “The mess of the Web, in other words, leaves you trapped in one big tangle of actions, service providers, and applications.”
• “Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too.” (Oh baby)
• User interface language JUL (undoubtedly with lessons learned from Boxely)

I wonder if Parakey will succeed in making content creation and presentation easy on the web for you and me and sophisticated designers and developers? The experience and tools more than JULs or technology may decide that. I am optimistic and looking forward to more catalysts to the rebirth of the computer desktop and web applications.

2006-11-21 Update: one question I had that was unanswered was why announce now? Blake answered this question in his post So about that project…, “decided to move forward with a piece in Spectrum to attract engineering talent (we’re hiring)”. A person of my own mind and stomach, he goes on to say that it will be released when it is ready, but before they get too hungry.