Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

When I made this jyte claim a couple weeks ago (May 15, 2007) I believed it based solely on my personal experience of using web apps every day:

A backlash is brewing against traditional thin-client web applications. Folks are tired of the beachball. Vendors of Web-based applications like Gmail, in which users spend a significant portion of their day, will respond by incorporating client-side persistence, offline operation and synchronization. In particular Gmail will add these features in 2007.

Well then a couple days ago (May 30, 2007), Google announced Google Gears , their toolkit for offline web apps (connection detection, offline operation, offline storage) and updated Reader with an offline mode. This thing is similar in purpose to Joyent’s Slingshot which went into Beta on the Mac on April 17, 2007.

It sure seems like the stage is set. Technology answers need. Only thing standing in the way might be competing priorities or strategic conflicts. Have to think about that a little bit.

In a recent post I lamented a couple usability problems with the Google Reader subscription process. I cited two problem areas. First, when you subscribe to a new feed, you’re forced to choose the target aggregator (Google Homepage vs. Google Reader) every single time. Second, there is no streamlined way to tag the newly added feed. Well both problems are pretty much history now. Here’s the scoop…

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Earlier this month I introduced Gordita — a little bookmarklet generator. The generated bookmarklet lets you del.icio.us tag not only the current web page, but more specifically the current item when you’re in Google Reader. Commenter Justin Hamilton asked for an enhancement: rather than invoke the del.icio.us tagging interface directly, he wanted the bookmarklet to tickle Pukka so that he could target the entry to a specific del.icio.us account (he has more than one).

Well ask and ye shall receive. Drag^[1] (the following hyperlink…) Pukkadita to your bookmark toolbar and then click it from any page. Like the vanilla Pukka bookmarklet, this one uses the current page title, location (URL) and selection (if any) to initialize the fields of a new del.icio.us entry via Pukka. Like Gordita, though, this one is aware of Google Reader’s unique DOM structure so if you’re on the Google Reader page you get a reference to the current item (not the page itself).

Pukka enhancing del.icio.us tagging on your Mac, tweaked by Pukkadita to integrate seamlessly with Google Reader. Little tools working together to keep you focused. I like that!

[1] If you’re reading this in Google Reader, the Pukkadita bookmarklet (hyperlink) above has been neutered. It won’t work. To get a working one, navigate to the article on memerocket.com and drag your Pukkadita from there.