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October 01, 2004

Dear God Where Does the Time Go?

Been extremely busy finishing up the mega-milestone at work and moving into a cute bungalow in the heart of Capitol Hill.

I've been meaning to talk about the Mozilla Amazon Browser. It's the first working XUL application I've seen, and it loads in the browser just like an HTML page. If you're viewing this page in Mozilla or Firefox, click here to run it right now. No installation, no plugins--it just works. I kept assuming XUL apps were fragile platform-specific things, but apparently they're pretty flexible. Another assumption that's being shattered is that Javascript isn't good for anything. First ActionScript, then OS X Tiger's Dashboard Widgets, and now XUL have dispelled this myth. Couple of mind-blowing concepts here:

(1) It runs in the browser without modification
(2) It's got "real" controls just like a native client app: splitters, menus, color pickers, treeviews
(3) "View Source" works--you can leach XUL just like you used to leach HTML back in the good old days. Shirky explains why this is important

I haven't dug too deeply into all the XUL stuff, but this is pretty compelling. Given the resurgence of Javascript-fortified frontends for webmail, I can imagine this will become ubiquitous in the future. For more info on XUL development, check out Remote Application Development with Mozilla over at the O'Reilly website.

[Update]: Just stumbled across the XUL FileManager. It's a lo-fi version of the Windows Explorer, complete with image preview and text editor applets. No installation is required--the applets run automatically, and it's live--the text editor really modifies the remote file.

Posted by Devon at October 1, 2004 09:03 PM

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