Theres no reason why Adobe [ or more likely, a startup ] cant write a superb (web based) animation editor for designers, which spits out HTML5/CSS or SVG + Javascript.
Couple that with basic workflow and 'publish to site' and you have a product with very wide appeal and usefulness.
Why not just launch a startup and build a superb reader that solves the problem and looks nice?
Wouldn't it be better to have the freedom to implement your own version of what the ultimate Reader is, especially in newer tech [ websockets, node.js, realtime updates, drag to rearrange widgets .. whatever ]
Id love someone to make a nice reader [and a nice mail groups] web app, Id enjoy working on these myself. It must be more efficient to build these things outside of Google, as a startup.
An RSS reader with nice UI, realtime update, location sensitivity, smart filters, and unobtrusive social features .. you had me at RSS :]
yeah I really want Lokenote to be realtime, but hit the practicality of shipping.. so its 'hit refresh' initially :[
My intuition is that 'Layers/Layars' are a good abstraction for developers.. but I think maybe simple tag / search might be a better way to filter those things I want to be notified about as I walk around?
AR is cool, but I wonder if this coolness actually gets in the way.
Id like to set some interest filters and then walk around and get push notifications on my mobile home screen.
Eg: set 'tell me about' = 'clothing discounts', 'art deco buildings', '2nd hand record shops' and 'friends with status Im-up-for-a-coffee'.
I think we need to take that step so that the technology kind of disappears into the background - location isn't there yet.
I dont think it needs a HUD VR helmet to work - just look at how crappy and successful the keyboard is.. so, yeah, simple short text notifications as you walk around would really make this meld into the daily routine.
great idea, thanks. its a bit of work, but doable.
yes.. I didn't mean to say location information is time-static.. I want there to be better tools / web UI to supply current location information. So the person in the street can flag something, and other people can make use of that.
By 'read-only' I mean its not easy for people to supply location information thats current. I put into Lokenote app an expiry date tumbler - eg. Street party for a few hours, blocked drain for a few days, building site for a few weeks.
Because of overhead at the moment, youd probably only enter location information that is going to be there for a long time.. but if it were easier to share that, wed see a more dynamic and relevant picture over smaller time scales.
Wikipedia, etc, have made an effort to standardise so that wiki articles can be tagged to a location, but I think theres a whole mass of less formal information thats really useful thats not being captured or used - ants would leave pheremones to signal other ants, we currently leave paper notes on lampposts, there should be a better way.
Geo-data is effectively 'read-only', it seems to me..
There are things local people know about, which still diffuse by word of mouth - and I still see paper notices posted on lamp-posts and at supermarket boards. This is why I did an experiment and built lokenote.com
I havent nailed it with lokenote, but it hints theres something there... Im aware this is a first, imperfect approximation of the kind of tool that will enable people to annotate locations. Sometimes you need to build these experiments to see what works or doesn't.
I dont think the storing/retrieving of geo-data is that hard a problem, you can roll your own nested squares approach, or reuse whats there now, eg. Mongo 2d indexes.
Rather, I think the problem is making a nice way to integrate the location dimension into our tools/web apps more seamlessly. eg. a dating chat app might just favour partners close to your location without being told what postcodes to look in. I see this as a 'too many knobs' type problem ( a bit like those search forms you see that have options for 10 different dimensions to filter on, which are better replaced by a single text search field, with hidden smarts. )
So how to bring location to the people, so its useful, effective, un-intrusive and read-write ? I dont think that question has been answered.
I created Lokenote.com as I saw people posting adverts on lampposts, but I think that was too vague an idea, so maybe my first go at Lokenote was too generic [ pinning a note to the map ].
I did also build it for a guy who delivers packages all day and wants to share notes with other drivers on how to get to teh right entrance at a building or property - so I need to get that guy to use my site and make it useful for his realworld problem.
Reality has this way of being unpredictable... which makes it interesting, right?
I only know networking basics, so not sure about your other use cases, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful something like 'http-proxy' for node is.
I use it to serve up several hosts on the same ip, or split sections of my url namespace into several node.js servers.
Maybe look at NodeJitsu blog as the articles seem readable, and those guys seem to use node heavily for running their hosting platform.
re my last point as I just noticed YUI App Framework -
I like the idea of a framework.. but the Todo List app just seems overweight.
I personally dont want to see a Rails style or heavy iOS/Cocoa style framework for web.
What I like about Javascript is it has enough lisp that I can write surprisingly small amounts of code, and the code reads like the way I think about the problem. Also the async events are magic in terms of decoupling components [ reducing cross dependencies ].
I content that concise frameworks are possible in Javascript [and lisp], whereas they are not possible in C/Java/C++/ObjectiveC.
I use YUI mainly for table/grid widget - I preferred API design in YUI3 but found various table UI bugs when I 'mixed in' sortable and resize columns etc... This meant I had to go back to YUI2. I remember this experience as amorphic 'yui pain'.
Hopefully in current/3.4 the DataGrid is now fixed with official plugins working in unison?
Some thoughts :
YUI really needs one core person with an iron fist and a clear goal driving it forward. It feels like it has the guts of something incredibly useful, but is being pulled in too many directions.
In a large company its tempting to think ' we better keep that for Sandras or Simons team' .. dont do that... think like a startup and throw bad shit away :]
I can live with the verboseness if the Widgets are really nice - and thats a way to get HTML5/js/web-startup developers thinking about Yahoo again.
Some ideas -
Be ambitious upstarts, dont ask permission to kickass.
Give the team autonomy / ie. a virtual startup within Yahoo.
Maybe split off a team or an Open Source startup ?
Demand all Yahoo use latest YUI by religious edict from on high [ Doug ? ]
Consider mobile?
Drop the legacy crud, get rid of any fallbacks, burn the bridges!
One Unified example, or a framework / app-designer as the canonical YUI demo
My point is that Javascript + Node would make the basis for a nice bash replacement.