Nilesh D Kapadia

I've been thinking about personal computers in general and its usage by non-technical people. Things are far from ideal, with Microsoft not getting any closer to making computing accessible to regular people, yet still remaining the dominant computing platform. But in observing the recent occurrences and in thinking about the future of personal computing, I think we are poised for a change. With the recent announcement of Google Chrome OS, I have some (long, rambling) thoughts on the subject which include why a web OS is the likely next step in personal computing and some predictions on it:

Many web applications these days work more like desktop apps and/or are applications that you use throughout your day. Using the applications through your regular browser presents a problem: to get to the application you have to switch to your web browser, find the window that you have webapp open in (or open a new window or tab if you're launching it for the first time), and possibly switch to the tab it is in. The steps it takes to get to an already open webapp vary depending on the current state of your browser and what windows and tabs you have open.

Instead, it would be much nicer if the webapp had its own entry in your operating system's taskbar or dock (or possibly in the tray if you are on Windows). With the help of Mozilla's Prism you can achieve just that. If you are using Mac OS X, you also have the option of using Fluid which uses the same rendering engine as Safari (Webkit).

For those who haven't heard of Mozilla's Ubiquity it is an experimental plugin for Firefox that provides a command line interface for executing commands to control the browser.

Being a big fan of command-line commands, I've decided to jump on the Ubiquity bandwagon and create a command for bookmarking a page with Google Bookmarks (which I am a fan of). This is based on the bookmarklet provided by Google and I got some hints from Ryan Sonnek's delicious Ubiquity command.

Click here to go to subscription page for this command

I came across the following video ("The JavaScript Programming Language") that is a lecture by Douglas Crockford (who is a "JavaScript Architect" at Yahoo!) in which he discusses JavaScript. It is split into four 30-minute parts (totaling 2 hours):

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

It's useful to download the slides because the video doesn't always show them when he is referring to them.

It is a good introduction to JavaScript, explaining how parts of the language works as well as offering advice on how to use (or not use) various features of it. He also talks some about the history of the language.

Update: Looks like Google bookmarks no longer searches the content of the pages you bookmark. I'm going to have to either switch to Yahoo Bookmarks or resurrect the app I had written for this

For quite a while now I've been using Google Bookmarks along with the GMarks add-on for Firefox. This combination gives me basically everything I want as a bookmarking solution:

• Online storage of my bookmarks
• Ability to search the content of the pages that I have bookmarked
• Browser integration

I bookmark pages a lot. Bookmarks are like my selective history or my selection of pages I want to be able search in the future. Although I use tags, its more important that I be able to find the bookmarks by searching for the content that is in the pages bookmarked. I find this incredibly useful.

The only feature of GMarks I really use is the replacement of Firefox's bookmark dialog box with a dialog for submitting to Google Bookmarks. There are features for browsing bookmarks, but I just use Google's web interface for that.

Before Google released this, I was using an app that I had written that does this along with social features. But I don't really need social features (I was the only one using it anyway), and Google does a better job of handling search than my solution. I still want to finish writing that application (the core functionality I was going for works, but needs a lot of polishing off and some bug fixes), but currently have other personal projects I'm trying to find time to finish before I work on anything else.

After initially looking at OpenID I wanted to start using it, but I didn't want to be tied to one provider. So initially I was planning on running my own identity server. But after watching a very informative talk on it (by Simon Willison) I learned that the ability to use delegation allows you to easily use your own domain name for your identity URL, while delegating to another provider. This is a much easier option than running your own identity server.