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.

As of this morning, Joyomiâ„¢ is available for everyone who’d like a free account.

You’ve heard of a “to do” list, well Joyomiâ„¢ manages your “to get” list. Joyomiâ„¢ highlights overdue stuff and helps you get it back. If you’ve lent a book to a friend, create a Book Omi and you’ll remember to ask for the book back next month. Same idea for CDs and DVDs — money too. There’s a whole set of starter Omis. If you don’t find one that fits your purpose you can create a generic one .

Joyomiâ„¢  doesn’t just track your stuff — it tracks your online conversations too. Use the Joyomiâ„¢ Bookmarklet to create Omi’s for important emails, blog comments and forum posts as well. With Joyomiâ„¢ you don’t have to remember to visit a bunch of sites — all the conversations are consolidated in one clean dashboard.

Once you’ve created an Omi it’s easy to share it with a friend. Nothing like those gentle reminders!

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?