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Google Chrome from a business and “techie” view

If Google will really deliver what it promises with its new Chrome browser plans (Google blog) (personally, I have no doubts about this), the line between web applications and standalone applications will further blur and hereby enable a better, seamless user experience and probably a whole new class of powerful applications.

Some thoughts:

  • From a technical point of view, Google’s Chrome will be the WebOS others have been dreaming about for a long time already. It basically offers memory management, process management, markup renderers, a GUI and a VM with a JIT compiler (V8).
  • It will finally unify the ideas behind the WebOS, “The network is the computer”, cloud computing, SaaS, RIA and virtualization.
  • Actually, it’s astonishing it took so long for someone to come up with something like this. The concepts as such are not new at all, but the combination of all these different concepts is what makes the thing cool. It’s typical for a good idea that, once you’ve heard of it, you almost can’t imagine living without it anymore, as it seems all so natural.
  • Detachable tabs on top: Not a new idea either. For example, I remember that the Fluxbox window manager actually offered the same feature back in 2001/2002 (or even earlier) already. I remember it as I used it myself too (and I liked it a lot, despite of its “suboptimal” scalability), as illustrated in these animations:
    Fluxbox Window Grouping Feature (2002) 1/2 (small animated GIF screenshot)
    Fluxbox Window Grouping Feature (2002) 2/2 (large animated GIF screenshot)  

    I guess there were other window managers and GUIs that had the same features even before fluxbox had them.

  • With this move, Google will be gradually taking control and power away from traditional Desktop OS manufacturers such as Microsoft and Apple. Being open source, Chrome and its components like V8 will be the “Linux of the web” and thus a big threat particularly to Microsoft that still generates most of its revenue with Windows and standalone applications like Office.
  • The ongoing process, that (desktop) operating systems are becoming commodities more and more, will further be accelerated. Will there be an “unsacred” alliance between Apple and Microsoft to fight these tendencies or will they shift their businesses further into the “web” application (SaaS), content (music, videos, TV, e-books, multimedia etc.) and lifestyle (design, hardware, ethics) spaces?
  • Of course that’s in the best interest of Google (as their business is data/content and webapps/SaaS). I wouldn’t call this move an evil move, but it’s definitely not a friendly move in the eyes of the competition.
  • From a “techie” point of view, this move will enable many interesting applications in the future. As the framework will be open source, the dev community will potentially be as vital and dynamic as in other high-profile OSS projects (like Mozilla, Linux)
  • What about the Mozilla, Safari, IE, Opera camps? They will have to adapt themselves to the concept and try to top it. IE (and perhaps also Safari) might try to take the “embrace and extend” route.
  • With the birth of the WebOS, there will probably be a need of an open, standardized webapp GUI toolkit and webapp GUI guidelines soon (and there’s a big potential for conflicts here). Who will provide these? What will be the roles of the current big players? Also, standardized, open specs for user authentication and user data exchange will be required – here, there’s already some progress with OpenID, OAuth etc.
  • I like that Google communicates its plans using an easy-to-follow cartoon and that they give credit to individual internal and external contributors and players (though I assume there were much more people involved in the process than those mentioned)
  • The thing that disappoints me a bit is that when talking about V8, they only talk about targeting JavaScript. I’d prefer a more generic approach providing a VM and JIT for various languages (similarly to a CLI VM – why not re-use/extend Mono, for example?). Maybe that’s what V8 actually provides and they just don’t emphasize it at this point in order to not confuse or upset end-users, devs, big players etc..
  • Taking a look at the big picture, it seems that there’s a very pragmatic driver behind this whole development: It’s the laziness of us end-users (just as a fact, not meant in a negative sense – being “lazy” is usually quite rational). Or in other words: The information takes the line of the least resistance. And so far, that line for the “Network OS” happens to be the web, i.e. basically HTTP, despite of its known shortcomings.

[UPDATE 20080902: Corrected a typo. And here’s a statement regarding the Google Chrome news by John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla Corp.]

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Setting up Procmail and Postfix with maildir for mobile usage

When I’m on the road, I can check my private and business e-mail using my very handy Nokia e61i smartphone (which I like a lot, apart from its rather unstable web browser). However, as I’ve never been far away from a computer for a long time so far, I’ve only used to check mail that was delivered to my inbox, and not to any of its about 200 subfolders (I once tried to subscribe to all folders – the mail client of the e61i simply crashed ;). Now, I figured I’d need to do something about this in order to not miss any of the mails that are automatically moved to a subfolder by the server-side procmail mail filter.

The solution: Simply create a new procmail rule that copies (that’s what the c stands for) any incoming message to a special folder (I named it “mobile”; note that my postfix uses the maildir format to store messages):

:0 c
.mobile/

Preferably, this rule should be placed after the spam filtering rules (you don’t want to pay for spam on your mobile, do you? ;) and before the normal procmail mail filter rules (which move every incoming mail to the appropriate subfolder). You can also use a dedicated rules file for every group of similar rules. For example, I include the files spam.rc, mobile.rc, lists.rc (with their according rules) in the main .procmailrc config file.

Now every mail that wasn’t filtered by the spam filter gets copied to the “mobile” subfolder of your inbox prior to getting moved to the appropriate subfolder (by the rules in lists.rc).

On my e61i, I hence only need to subscribe to the “mobile” subfolder in order to catch all incoming messages. As you can’t unsubscribe from the inbox subfolder itself, you should set the maximum number of caught new inbox mails to 1 (which is the minimum) in order to avoid fetching things twice. You can further configure that only headers are fetched to minimize the amount of data[1] that is automatically downloaded with every mail check (also: switch off polling if you don’t need it).

Note that another advantage of this solution is that you won’t tamper with any of the original messages (that are either in your inbox or in any of its subfolders). Some might call this a disadvantage though.

That’s it, have fun! :)

[1] I pay 0.10 CHF per 20 KB, i.e. 5 CHF (5 USD) per MB (which is incredibly expensive as I currently don’t have any flat rate data plan -> please don’t send me a mail bomb just for fun, else I’ll have to write a more sophisticated procmail rule that only copies messages < 100 KB to the mobile folder)

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Ready, steady, go!

Refreshing. Innovative. New. Creative. The sky is the limit. Startup fever. Brian Haven:

This new job is ambiguous. I don’t have a job title. The company doesn’t have a name. At the moment, there are only three of us. We don’t know what this will become, we only have a general direction. My office will be at my house… in Austin… and in cyberspace on IM, Twitter, Facebook… To many, this recipe might spell fear. To me, it’s comfortable. I thrive in the unknown–no rules, no baggage, no momentum to pull us into mediocrity. We get to build this from scratch in a thoughtful and disciplined manner. It’s my opportunity to bring my engagement ideas to life and the perfect time to leverage my background to apply a design thinking approach to the way we, and our clients, do business.

I had the joy to experience the reviving entrepreneurial spirit at yesterday’s public beta launch party at the Wuala office in Zurich. And I experience it daily when working for my own company – Printscreen GmbH. A great feeling indeed, and inspiring others, too.

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Global version of Xero expected by early 2009!

Wow, that’s what I call modern corporate communications and a quick reaction to feedback (see my earlier blog post)! Nice to see that Xero sets a new standard in this area, too.

Rod Drury, CEO and co-founder of Xero, just announced on the Xero company blog that there will be an international edition of the Xero online accounting system soon:

As you’d imagine, designing and building a proper yet fun-to-use accounting system that scales globally is no small task. Our approach has been to evolve Xero with the feedback of customers and partners in our initial markets, while building up our internal systems to scale internationally.

The plan is to have a global version ready by early 2009.

And there’s no doubt Xero will celebrate a huge success in Switzerland and all over the world!

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Xero: The ideal online accounting solution for startups/SMBs?

When going through Jakob Nielsen’s list of the 10 Best Application UIs of 2008 [1], I’ve noticed there’s also an online(!) accounting(!) system for SMBs among the winners:

Xero – The world’s easiest accounting system.

This is a big surprise, as I’ve already tested quite many accounting systems for SMBs/SMEs, both standalone and web applications, but none of them was particularly easy to use. The point isn’t that I couldn’t use a complex accounting system [2], the point is that I don’t want to if it isn’t necessary. In other words, every hour I can save on accounting and invoicing, I can spend on business development and software development. Which obviously makes sense.

Considering this, the price of 49 NZD (34 USD) per month for Xero is a fair deal. The only thing that isn’t customer-friendly at all, is that they decided to go with an opt-out free trial model (i.e. if you don’t cancel the trial within 30 days, you’ll be charged). Definitely worth a try, though.

[UPDATE 20080813: Note that Xero is not available for purchase in Switzerland yet (hopefully soon). You can still try the demo though.]

[UPDATE 20080814: I’ve quickly tested Xero. Conclusion so far: I like it a lot! It delivers, what most startup companies need in regard to accounting and it makes things as easy as possible. In fact, I’ve never seen a more intuitive accounting system before! It will definitely set the new benchmark in its class. Let’s hope there will be a Swiss edition soon. Kudos to the makers of Xero in NZ: You rock!]

[UPDATE 20080815: Xero’s plans are to have a global version of Xero ready by early 2009, see my follow-up blog post]

[1] Also noteworthy: CMSBox, a very user-friendly CMS made in Switzerland.

[2] Among others, two of my majors at the University of Zurich were Management Accounting and Managerial Accounting.

[3] Of course, you could also outsource all your accounting duties, but particularly for a new startup with a minimal headcount, the outsourcing efforts generally outweigh the benefits.

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Gentoo: Emerge errors after a Python upgrade?

If you encounter seemingly “strange” Python errors when emerging apps after a Python upgrade, execute:

# python-updater -v

This will rebuild packages that are broken due to the Python upgrade (Note: You can also manually emerge the packages python-updater lists)

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Gentoo: Troubles with Trac and mod_python-3.3.1?

If Trac doesn’t run anymore after an ’emerge -uD world’ (i.e. there’s a “500 Internal Server Error”) and Apache complains about “ImportError: No module named trac.web.modpython_frontend”, here’s the solution:

Gentoo Bug 230211 – www-apache/mod_python-3.3.1 – connobject.c:142: error: request for member ‘next’ in something not a structure or union

(IOW: Emerge mod_python-3.3.1-r1 from your local portage overlay and restart Apache)