Alan Lewis

Mozilla Weave -- Towards a User-Centric Internet

I recently got an invite to the Mozilla Weave alpha, and after playing around with it for a while I can say that this product has a chance to be a very big disruptive force on the Internet.

The features provided by Weave are modest right now. It offers bookmark, history, and tab syncing, and of these features only bookmark syncing seemed to be working correctly. Other features set to be released in future versions, such as cookie, password, and, most exciting of all, extension syncing, have the potential to make Weave much more useful.

So why am I so excited about Weave, especially considering that production-quality extensions like Foxmarks already offer the same features as the current version of Weave? I'm excited because Weave has the potential to shift the balance of power away from the large Internet services and back to the user. Like many users, I gave up using browser bookmarks many years ago because I was using more than one computer on a regular basis. I started using del.icio.us, and then switched to Google Bookmarks. While I gained some useful features by using these services, I was at the same time handing my data over to a third party, relying on their good will and the strength of their security systems to keep my data private. Weave is different -- because user data is encrypted, when the data is uploaded to a Weave server, the data can still only be accessed by the user who first encrypted it. So even if Mozilla wanted to access the data (or if there were a security breach and someone stole it), user data remains safe. More importantly, even if the data were to be subpoenaed, it would remain unreadable by a third party. Of course this puts the onus of security on the client, but since Weave is open source, you don't simply have to trust the creator's word that the client-side encryption is secure.

You don't just have to be a security spook to be excited about Weave, though. I'm very interested in the possibilities for third-party applications that could be built using Weave. The hard part of building a web application is scaling it. What if you could build a web app that used Weave to store and sync all the user data instead of building out your own backend servers to do the same thing? Right now the best alternative out there to building your own backend infrastructure is to use services like Amazon S3. But again, this centralizes too much data with very few service providers. Building apps that leverage Weave would keep user data close to the user, where it belongs.

There are significant challenges that face Weave if it is to be a success. The project creators have spent much of the last year building a scalable infrastructure, and the alpha users are eagerly awaiting completion of the basic feature set that was promised when the project was first announced. The emphasis on security necessarily impacts the user experience. Not only will users have to get used to "signing in" to their browser, but they will also have to understand what is the difference between a "password" (authenticate the user with Mozilla) and a "pass phrase" (encrypt/decrypt user data). With enough testing and design iterations, Weave could be made acceptable to mainstream users, but it will take time and effort to do so.

Adobe - Go All In on Open Source!

Earlier this week I was on a panel at the Adobe Sales Conference, an internal event attended by 1,000+ Adobe sales and marketing people. The panel was to discuss "marketing to developers", and the discussion was, I heard after its conclusion, helpful to those who attended.

During the panel I was asked by the moderator, "what advice do you have for Adobe?" My reply was that Adobe should stop sitting on the fence regarding open source. I followed up my answer with an acknowledgement that I didn't think that those in the audience were necessarily the ones who had the ability to make that decision, but that they could perhaps influence those within Adobe who do have that responsibility.

I was glad to see the announcement that Adobe is open sourcing part of LifeCycle as BlazeDS and even more importantly is publishing the specification for the Flash binary data format, AMF. These are important steps, and along with the recent moves to open source Flex and standardize the PDF format, they show an increased acceptance of open source within Adobe.

But it's not enough. To gain the trust of the open source community, Adobe needs to open source the Flash Player and publish specifications for the SWF format. Only then will it have a chance of winning over this key constituency as the battle against Microsoft heats up. Sun waited much too long to open source Java (with a real open source license, that is). If it had done so in 2001 instead of 2006 it may blunted the rise of PHP as the web environment of choice.

So, Adobe, buddy, good work. You're almost there.

Note: These opinions are mine and not necessarily those of my employer.

eBay Desktop Public Beta Now Available

The project formerly known as "San Dimas" is now available in public beta: eBay Desktop launches in public beta today. Anyone can download eBay Desktop for free.

eBay Desktop is, well, eBay on your desktop. You can use eBay Desktop instead of the website to search, browse, bid, watch items, read and write messages -- most everything that you use the eBay website for to buy stuff. eBay Desktop also goes beyond the web experience through features like desktop alerts (for when items are ending or when you get outbid) and favorite search feeds, which let you spot when items are listed that match one of your searches.

We've made a number of improvements since the private beta (besides changing the name, of course). The number one piece of feedback from users was "make it more about me." We took this to heart and have completely revamped the home screen to put more information about your eBay activity up front. We've made significant performance and memory-usage improvements, and more will be coming soon. The alerts feature now works even when the application window is closed -- eBay Desktop will optionally keep running in the background so that you can get notified when you are outbid.

Remember when it used to be possible to browse on eBay? Well we wanted to leverage the power of the desktop to make browsing on eBay workable again. On the home screen you can drill-down into the categories, all without refreshing.

My favorite new feature is search feeds. eBay has offered favorite searches for a long time, but unless you enjoy getting emails containing your favorite searches, they have been of limited use. Now in eBay Desktop you can access your existing favorite searches or create new ones, and view those lists of items as "feeds" just like you would in an RSS reader. In this view you can see if an item is new, and you can delete items that you aren't interested in.

Download eBay Desktop, and let me know what you think. Feel free to contact me directly (see link in the sidebar) and the application has a built in feature request and bug report widget.

Trying out Windows LiveWriter

I'm writing this post with the new Windows LiveWriter -- a WYSIWYG blogging tool. So far, I'm impressed. As much as I like Typepad, I've never liked the default post editor that much. On more than one occasion, I've lost a brilliantly written post because of a browser glitch. Eventually I got fed up and started writing all my long posts off-line. Word sucks for blogging, so I resorted to using Typepad, which is great for text editing, but mediocre for blogging.

Here's a trippy pic of this post being written within LiveWriter:

Kudos go to the Microsoft team that developed this great tool! (I hear its a really small team of 4 people, which is probably why it is so good).

The GIMP is Not So Bad

In working on the Firefox Toobar for eBay project, I found a need to do some simple image processing tasks -- I needed to take some bitmapped graphics that we have sitting around in the toolbar for IE product, convert them from bitmap to PNG format, and make the background on each image transparent. I had been using a Photoshop evaluation to do this, but since my eval has run out I needed something else. I'm not a graphic artist, and its only on occasion that I need to work with graphics, so I didn't feel I could justify the cost of Photoshop. So, I figured I'd try out the GIMP, the open source alternative to Photoshop. I tried it a few years ago and found it baffling  to use. This time, however, my experience was much more positive. I was able to figure out how to use the tools I needed, and figured out how to do what I needed to do in about 15 minutes -- about the same amount of time it took when I was trying this same task with Photoshop. I can't comment on whether it is good enough to replace Photoshop for professional artists, but for occasional image hackers like me, I bet that it will work just fine.

Google Talk Impressions

Google Talk has just been released, and I'm giving it a try. I primarily use AIM, because it is almost a must at eBay, and because my wife is a long-time AOL/AIM user. I've always hated how cluttered AIM is, and I can't tell you how many times I've had to go searching through menu after menu to find the sound-related preferences.

My initial impressions of Google Talk are favorable. I like the uncluttered UI, and the basic features are intuitive to me. I like the UI for searching for "friends" (Google Talk's name for buddies), and I imagine it could be quite useful when there are hundreds of friends in your list. I also like the snap-to UI for IM windows.

Initial reaction by the media is that Google Talk is underwhelming. I disagree -- we don't need another IM client that packs in hundreds of features that just add clutter and confusion. Producing a simple, easy to use IM client is, to me, quite impressive. I'll reserve final judgment until I've used it more heavily, but right now I'd say that Google has another winner.

Adobe/Macromedia Merger a Bad Idea

The big tech story this week is that Adobe is buying Macromedia. I have used software from both companies a great deal, so I'm curious how the product integration will pan out. The consensus on Slashdot and other sites is that the main motivation behind this is so that Adobe can get control of Flash. For the other Adobe and Macromedia products, the combined roadmap is less clear. There are siginificant product overlaps between the two companies, such as between Illustrator & Freehand and GoLive & Dreamweaver. It would not make sense to keep all products from both companies in development, and anti-trust regulators may be force Adobe to sell off some product lines in order for the merger to go through (Adobe was has already been forced to sell Freehand once before, when they bought Aldus).

I think that purchasing Macromedia is going to cause a severe financial hit for Adobe. For users that think their products are not likely to survive the transition, this announcement will cause them to hold-off on making further investments in until they see if their favored products survive. And for users of the relatively "safe" products, like Photoshop and Acrobat, they may hold off on purchasing upgrades until Adobe comes out with an integrated product line -- I know that I would rather have a Creative Suite that combined Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver. Either Adobe has mis-judged the community reaction to this, or else they are purchasing Macromedia primarily so that another company such as Microsoft doesn't get their hands on Flash.

The products that I use most from both companies (Adobe Framemaker and Macromedia RoboHelp) have hardly been mentioned in the press coverage, and I'm sure they didn't figure into Adobe's decision making process. I'm worried that this merger will cause Adobe to pay even less attention to Frame than they already do, and even worse, they might try something stupid like integrating Frame and RoboHelp. This merger creates an interesting situation for Quadralay, whose WebWorks product competes directly with RoboHelp, but relies on Framemaker for content authoring.

PS: Here is some interesting reading on the history of Flash.

Mi Picasa, Su Picasa

While watching the Eagles and Falcons freeze themselves silly this afternoon, I also tried the new version of the picture management software from Google, Picasa 2. I’ve used Adobe Photoshop Album since it was first released two years ago, and it does a good job of cataloging our family digital pictures (of which we now have about 12,000). However, Album has enough quirks and annoyances to make me want to look elsewhere to see if there is something better.

Picasa makes a great first impression. It starts up very quickly and when you first run it Picasa searches your entire hard drive for images. You can configure the application to automatically scan certain folders you choose for new images, which makes getting new images into Picasa pain-free (this can be one of the big hassles with Album). Overall, it is one of the best looking Windows applications I’ve ever seen. The transitions from one mode to another are silky-smooth, and the look and feel of the application as a whole is attractive without being so over-the-top that it impedes usability

Picasa provides simple editing tools that allow you to adjust the color and contrast, fix red-eye, and crop images. It also includes some great effects, such as ones to turn an image sepia or black and white. It provides the ability to add labels to pictures, which allows you to find all images with a given label either by clicking on the label or by typing in the label in the search box at the top of the screen. I was hoping for much more flexibility in the labels feature; in particular I was disappointed that there seemed to be no way for me to group labels hierarchically. And although Picasa allows you to group sets of pictures into collections, such as “Work Pictures” and “Family Pictures”, any labels that you add are visible across all collections. In Photoshop Album I use about 60 labels to help organize our photos, and if I were to try to do the same thing in Picasa it would quickly become unmanageable. These shortcomings make Picasa best suited for managing hundreds, but not thousands, of pictures.

While I think Picasa is a great application, I won’t be giving up Photoshop Album quite yet, at least not on the family desktop computer where our family pictures are stored. I will keep Picasa around on my laptop, where its ability to scour my system for images is sure to come in handy every so often. I encourage you all to download and try Picasa for yourself. It’s free, so if nothing else the price is right.