Bill Burcham’s memeRocket

About a year ago in Smalltalk Browser Goes Jurassic I lamented the fact that the Smalltalk browser UI was caught in a techno-aesthetic time warp and cheered the possibility that it might escape to the future and in doing so completely skip a whole generation of UI effort-waste and bad taste (e.g. Eclipse Rich Client Platform) and move directly to Web-technology UI currency. I ended with this:

How long will it be before a complete IDE is delivered as a web application? To varying degrees, Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA are stuck on the same island that Smalltalk was. They’re all trying to be graphically rich and run on many platforms. They’re all expending lots of resources maintaining UI toolkits (think of Eclipse’s Rich Client Platform). And the resultant UI technology, while often innovative and sometimes pleasing, suffers a “credibility gap” when compared with platform-specific technology on the Mac or Windows. When will the IDE’s throw their weight behind the DHTML+AJAX crowd and embrace the “third platform”?

Well there is renewed hope - but it looks like Ruby and Rails may arrive before Squeak does. Gyre is an honest-to-goodness Ruby on Rails IDE delivered through the browser complete with source-level interactive debugging, project navigation, and an interesting syntax-aware text editor.

Seems like the next step is to get the Gyre folks working with the Firebug folks. Can you imagine it?

I’m trying to optimize my google reader experience, and fly through feeds as effeciently as possible. For me, this means keeping my hands on the keyboard, and off the mouse. Reader uses the j/k keys to go up and down, just like the classic game nethack, and the Unix editor vi. I’m amazed that twenty years on, we’re still using this interface. I suspect that when the time comes, I’ll be lowered into my grave by an operator using the j and k keys.

Anyway, google uses the “v” key to view an article in full. This comes up either in a new window or a new tab, depending on the firefox configuration. Sadly, if you want the article in a new window (and I do, seeing as I paid good money for a large amount of real estate), firefox’s popup blocker blocks it.

So, the technology progression was — Netscape invented the pop-up window, the various web standards bodies standardized it, the advertising people abused it, so pop-up blockers were invented to prevent it from working in most cases. I wonder at the aggregate amount of engineering it took to come full circle. In 1936, J.M. Keynes suggested that it would be economically useful to pay otherwise unemployed workers to simply dig up bottles filled with cash, which other workers had earlier buried for them. Seems like we’ve got a high-tech equivalent going on now.

The Unix tools philosophy is so well known and oft-repeated that it has become mantra to many. As with so many habitual, memorized responses, like blessing someone after a sneeze, we rarely think deeply about the words said, and what they really mean. We don’t notice that while we praise this approach, we almost never use it for anything serious.

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