An OS Or a Browser?

Forbes.com has recently published a short story about PI Corporation, being run in a stealth mode by Paul Maritz. Some of you may remember Paul, as his divorce with Microsoft in August 2000 was unexpected by many. It is hard to tell if PI was in his mind back in 2000, but he admits they have been working on the product for several years now. So what exactly is PI and why is it so interesting? PI seems to be the concept that could not have been grasped by Redmond for a reason unknown to me... Unknown, because it seems so obvious. But may be this is just the problem, as obvious things often cannot be noticed by incumbents and create opportunities for small startups. PI aims to break the old PC paradigm. It is not the first one trying to do this. Think Google. Do they care what PC are you running? No, because everything runs on their servers and they need a PC to display and take input from. So PI promises a browser based software suite, with Net storage and other services. They want to break the PC paradigm. Old, isolated, has to be replaced by new, shared and connected.

Let us have a look at a PI Node, the basic building block of the PI suite. According to the PI website, a PI node consists of PI and 3rd party software to perform the following functions:

1. Host the PI applications via an HTTP interface
2. Provide Storage and retrieval services for information that's part of a user's Personal Information set
3. Interact with other PI Nodes to post and retrieve information
4. Authenticate owner and guest users, provide cryptographic services for secure information transfers.

As you can see PI aims to free the users from their PCs. All the applications and data are on the Web. Your browser is your "Windows" or "Mac OS". Network is your connectivity and storage. The concept itself is not entirely novel, as Google and many others go the same way. But Google has to tidy up its offering. There are already far too many services on the Google site than most even know they exist. Gmail is probably the most commonly used, and it should be turned into the application center, a launch pad for all the others Google Spreadsheets, Picasa Web Galleries, Google Reader, and others... But the goal is the same. As Paul puts it "The strength of the PC is also its weakness, people don't want a single dedicated computer. They don't want their whole lives bound up in one piece of hardware. People want to get access wherever they are, from whatever device they're using."

There is no doubt network and browser based applications will ultimately make operating systems obsolete. Mid term the role of an operating system will be to provide connectivity to local devices, such as keyboards, displays, mice, cameras, handling the hardware drivers and low level bus connectivity. But long term? Probably every device will have its own IPv6 address and TCP/IP will be the common interconnect bus among them. Once that happens a browser will become the only application run locally.

Picasa Web Albums

I am on vacation now and just in time Google has released the Picasa Web Albums. Picasa has been the application of choice for managing the personal library of digital photos. Web Albums is just another great sharing concept from Google. Sergey and Larry and the team really do understand what the Internet is about. Simplicity is first. If you already have Picasa, uploading your pictures to a web gallery is a matter of pressing a single button. The pictures are by default optimized for Web viewing (resolution / file size). Sharing is second. Sharing pictures uploaded to the Web Gallery is a snap. As with the Google Spreadsheets, it is a matter of entering email addresses of people you would like to send a link to your picture galleries to.

During just a few days away from home I have shared many pictures with my family and fiends using the service. It is not perfect yet, missing a few functionalities, but the ease of use just blows me away. Looking forward I would love to have the service working directly with digital cameras. As I wrote in Wireless Home, I have yet to buy a WiFi camera. But would do that immediately if there was one working as a direct Picasa Web Albums client. Imagine taking a picture and pressing a Share With Picasa button and having the picture land immediately in your web gallery for others to view...

Now let us guess the name of the first camera manufacturer to implement this feature. Kodak? They were the first with a WiFi snapper, so why would not they want to maintain the lead?

IE7: The Return Of The King

Browser wars are heating up again. You thought you were happy with your IE6 or FireFox. I thought I was happy with my Opera. And then the Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 has just arrived... I thought I was happy with my Opera, but through my curiosity I got attracted to try IE7 and was blinded by its beauty. Love at first sight. Of course the first thing you notice are tabs. I was not that great fan of tabbed browsing until I started using Opera, several months ago. Tabs in the Opera are just perfect. So it was somehow obvious to me they will be at least the same in IE7. But no... I don't know, how many million dollars Microsoft has spent on the design of tabs (or trying to replicate FireFox), but the end result is far from perfect. There are so many obvious areas to improve, it is just hard to imagine they have missed them (probably the IE7 team has been obsessed by FireFox to much).

First is the persistence of the session. With Opera you can open many tabs and close the entire browser without being asked a single question. And next time you open it up, all the tabs are there, exactly the way you opened them during previous session. Even after system reboot. With IE7, you have to explicitly tick the checkbox "open the tabs next time" when closing the browser, and if you happen to click the second checkbox "do not ask me this question again", the first checkbox unchecks itself. Grrrrrrrrrrr!!!!! And the tabs are not saved until you close the browser, so any crash you may experience in the middle brings you back just the homepage....

Second is the mouse moves required to open a favorite page. First click on a new tab (usually the right part of the screen) then move the mouse across the entire screen to the left, where the favorites pane opens and pick your link. In Opera the favorite’s pane is just below where the mouse stops after opening a new tab.

Then there is no concept of a local recycle bin. Sometimes it happens you close the wrong tab. In Opera the closed page can be retrieved from the bin, in IE7 it is just gone.

Of course there are many improvements. Security can be seen everywhere. Sites with invalid certificates will have the address bar painted in red, the security warnings are very clear and visible. This looks like number one priority for Microsoft, and seems to be very well done. The second item worth mentioning (actually the one that just blew me away) is Clear Type. Technology that used to be in Windows for years, but somehow not many applications have been using it. Strange, as the clarity of pages rendered by IE7 on my IBM T41 laptop just blew me away (I have to stress the impact...). Along with native IE7 pages, all applications using IE rendering have been upgraded to Clear Type. Notably HTML emails in Outlook. They look incredibly, almost like printed on paper. I can really feel the eye strain is very much reduced.

So far Clear Type seems to be the most important factor for me to keep IE7 as a default browser on my system. It is not perfect. But is much better than IE6. Of course I miss the Opera tabs, and I envy FireFox users the new Google Browser Sync, just hoping they will release an IE7 version (the access to user's favorites should be enough incentive for Google to help Microsoft here ;).

Paperless Home

Some five years ago the so called "paperless office" buzz was aloud. We were about to stop using paper, going for electronic forms and electronic storage. Six years later the consumption of paper (at least in my office) is significant. Many printers swallow several boxes of paper weekly. Customers want printed reports, invoices and agreements. Often we print documents, because they are simply easier to read on paper than on LCDs. But there is one important difference - all the paper documents start their lives inside computers. So before they are printed, they already are in the electronic representation. This (electronic storage) is very convenient. Easy to backup, easy to replicate, forward, send over email, archive on CD...

Similar things started happening at home. The first important shift (in my case) was Citibank. They used to send me a statement once a month. That is one account statement and a separate credit card statement. I used to pick the letters from my mailbox, and file the statements somewhere on the shelves. The pile was growing and I really did not need all the papers. A couple of years ago they offered electronic delivery of account statements (in the form of a PDF document downloaded from their web banking application). How nice is that. No more papers... just two files a month. Unfortunately not all the institutions are as trendy as Citi. They keep on sending me papers. And I hate to store them. So not that long ago I decided to scan all those papers and keep them only in the electronic form.

For scanning I have been using my old faithful Canon FB630U flatbed scanner. The nice thing about this scanner is, it is powered by USB bus, so no extra power supply brick is necessary (BTW how many bricks do you have under your desk?). So whenever I had a lazy afternoon, I scanned some papers from the past and this way my shelves have room for flowers (or gadgets) now and all the documents are on my laptop's hard drive. It is not only more space on the shelves. Having all the documents with me all the time has many advantages. Every now and then somebody asks me for some crazy things. My tax ID (issued on paper), or a copy of my high school diploma, or my SQL training certificate. I have them all with me. On the hard drive. They are always just a "print" away...

After all the official documents have made their way to my laptop, I turned to my notebook. The paper one. I take lots of notes during meetings and conferences. I was trying to type them directly using this or that note taking application, but so far just a paper notebook with a standard pen has not been beaten. The question was, how to transfer the hand written notes to the computer, so that I could store them or send to other recipients. And here the latest gadget from PLANon - the RC800 came to the rescue. RC800 is a color scanner in a form of a pen. Just slide it down a page and it stores everything. Then connect over a USB cable and it offloads the scans (charging its battery at the same time). The thing really does work. So now all my handwritten notes go down to my computer in a PDF (or JPEG) format. With the Planon it is so easy to even scan the phone bills and used bus tickets (ok... I'm not going to go that far ;)