Heads up, Bay Area readers. I'll be attending Yahoo! Hack Day this Friday and Saturday on the Yahoo! campus. If you're gonna be there, say hi. If you want to be there, head on over to Upcoming.org to register. It's not too late.
I'm getting really excited about this. The Yahoo! Dev Network guys are doing a great job. I hope I have a chance to chat with them a little — dev network-er to dev network-er.
I'm going to be working on a fun little project, about which you'll hear soon (if you haven't already). I'm excited about the chance to spend a solid 2 days working on it.
The Future of Webapps was a terrific conference and I'll have more to say about that shortly.
In the meantime, however, I wanted to point out that I'll be in Washington, D.C. next week for the Atlassian User Group meeting.
The meetup is on Tuesday evening, September 19th in Falls Church, Virginia — very near Washington D.C. So if you're in the D.C. area, please stop by. I'd love to chat in person.
This free event is open to anyone interested in Confluence or JIRA or in Agile Programming in general. We'll be discussing the use of JIRA and Confluence in an agile environment, plugins, the Atlassian Developer Network, and product roadmaps.
If you're interested in coming, please RVSP on the AUG Confluence page. See you there.
I'm going to be at the Carson Workshops Future of Web Apps Summit (upcoming). If you're going to be there, keep an eye out for me and say hi. Also, it's not too late to sign up for the conference. I'd highly recommend it. The one in London was terrific. Hear for yourself: you can listen to the London sessions as podcasts.
You may recall me writing about a new release of JotSpot not too long ago. One of the major announcements was their downloadable version. I was confident that enterprise customers wanted this, and I thought it would go a long way toward increasing their penetration.
However, I have since heard from reliable sources that then downloadable JotSpot is not "installable" software in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, it's being distributed as a VMWare image. I confess, I really don't know what to think about that. Is it a good move? A bad one? Neutral?
I've never worked at a company that has used server-images as a production deployment strategy. But on the other hand, none of my companies has really been on cutting edge of IT. Are most enterprises comfortable with this strategy today? At least, more comfortable than the software-as-a-service strategy?
I know that using images is more common now, but is it actually common? Or is it only relatively common, just like there are more companies willing to try software-as-a-service these days, but it's still a small minority.
Shipping as a VMWare image is obviously easier for them, in terms of developer-time invested. But will enterprise customers buy it? It doesn't entirely answer the original problem: It solves the inside-the-firewall issue, which is a big complaint. It solves the run-on-my-hardware issue.
But it doesn't solve the leverage-my-staff's-expertise issue. That is, if I have an IT department who is only able to admin Windows servers and MS SQL, then this probably doesn't help them. Or if I have a staff of very expensive Oracle DBAs, what happens when I throw this one random MySQL server (or whatever DB Jot uses out of the box) at them. Even though it's running on an image, it's still a different database and what happens if you need to change something? I don't know how much of a roadblock that is.
So this is obviously better than not having a downloadable version at all. But is it this a good long term strategy? What do you think?
Did everyone see the new Upcoming.org awesomeness?
In general, I'm very happy:
- More events in the DB – awesome.
- More configurable searching and filtering – awesome
- Flickr photos – awesome.
- Buddy Icons – awesome
- Better homepage – awesome
- New Event Page – distinctly un-awesome
I'm sorry, but the new event page is just not working for me. There's much more information available now, which is great. Unfortunately, the layout just feels totally wrong. I'm still trying to quantify why, so let me think through it here.
1. The visual hierarchy is wrong. The orange headline gets lost. The red header above and the black type below totally overwhelm it. I would bet that if you got one of those freaky eye-tracking systems, you'd see people scan from top-left-corner, to red header block, to black-on-grey content area, to map, totally skipping the headline. That's what my eyes do, anyway.
2. The informational hierarchy is wrong. The things I want on to know about an event, are, in order: What is it? Where is it? When is it? Who's coming? and Where's the link? Unfortunately, the stuck the "Where is it?" answer over in the sidebar instead of with the item title and date. And they stuck the event link all the way at the bottom.
3. The new attendee/watcher list is awful. It's much easier to scan a vertical column for names you recognize. This overly cramped paragraph-style list is impossible. I do like the big "attendee total" numbers. But they feel like they're in the wrong place.
[LATER]
I got tired of trying to describe the problems. Here's a mockup of how I might change things. Start by looking at it in small size first. That helps you see the relative weight of the information without reading the content. See how much better the black headline is? Notice, I actually just moved bits around. I really do like the general style and color treatment.
P.S. Find me on Upcoming.
Boycott IE. It's a cancer on the Web that must be stopped. IE isn't secure and isn't standards-compliant, which makes it unworkable both for end users and Web content creators. Because of their user bases, however, Web developers are hamstrung into developing for IE at the expense of established standards that work well in all other browsers. You can turn the tide by demanding more from Microsoft and by using a better alternative Web browser.
On the other hand, IE7 will at least be better than IE6. And the recent announcement that Microsoft is planning to push IE7 through Windows Update is welcome news. The quicker we can transition off of IE6, whether by convincing people to use a better product or by Critical-Updating them to IE7, the better my life will be.
http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/leopard/wikiserver.html
No clue as to which one they chose, though. But assuming they keep to previous pattern, it will be one of the BSD-licensed, open source ones. But that's a pretty slick UI they put on top of it, I must say.
Wikipedia's new Cite this Article feature is really cool. I can't fathom how much time I wasted writing picky high-school bibliographies. Of course, citing an encyclopedia in your paper really isn't the path to academic laurels, but perhaps other sources will copy the feature. (Books and periodicals really do have features and bugs. I think designers and authors should pay more attention to how books are actually used, in addition to what they contain.)
(via digg)
Details here. See you there!
Well, I'm sure that SocialText and JotSpot would have preferred not to announce the same big news on the same day, but that's just how it worked out. At OSCON yesterday, ST released the details of the open-sourcing of their wiki.
The application itself is now free for download, use and redistribution under a Mozilla-style license. And, like JotSpot (and Atlassian before them), SocialText hard at work on a behind-the-firewall, installable version. They've code-named it Palladium and here is the three-month (supposedly) roadmap that will take them there. Ross writes:
Socialtext also shared its Public Roadmap to help guide the developer community for the next three months. The roadmap includes a source code repository, Debian, Red Hat, SOAP and REST APIs, usability enhancements, and additional DBMS management beyond Postgres, starting with MySQL. The release at the end of this period, code-named Palladium, will mark the open availability of the first enterprise grade, corporate backed, Wiki to enthusiasts and commercial users alike.
It sounds from that last sentence as though they're going to be selling this version as well. I'm guessing that they'll be doing a traditional source-code-for-free, pay-for-support model. (Which is why the phrase "corporate-backed" is in that sentence, I think.) Likewise, it's no accident that SocialText is announcing their professional services in the same blog post. That's the other traditional way to make money off open-source code. However, the fact that the source code will be open makes installed SocialText a more compelling proposition than it would be otherwise.
It happened about a year later than I predicted, but both of the hosted, software-as-a-service, enterprise wiki providers have responded to their corporate customers' demands and are producing a installable software. It's not an easy task. It takes many more resources to build and support installable software on a variety of platforms. (Which explains, in part, SocialText's decision to go open-source. They wisely hope to spread that cost among the community.) But if they can fulfill those promisesas well, the enterprise wiki market will be a very different place when both of these companies get their installed versions out of beta.
Jonathan Nolen 
