If, as it seems, the iPhone’s software will all come from Apple then all the development fun will happen in the browser, in particular in whatever version of Safari the shiny little device ships with. And it will be fun if Apple give us, as developers, access the right information. I’m talking here about that information coming from the user’s fingers. After all, who wouldn’t want to create the kind of effortlessly intuitive interfaces the Jeff Han showed off in his TED talk?

Will they let us though? There are a few directions Apple could go here.

1. Be scrooges and filter out multiple touches before they get to us, only letting the user interact with web pages one finger at a time, the others controlling scrolling probably. Web Dev Chorus: Booooo!
2. Give us the raw events from all touches but leave it up to us to do the hard lifting of working out which mousedown/mousemove/mouseup events came from the same finger. Web Dev Chorus: Grumble, Grumble, even huger javascript libraries, Grumble
3. Generously preprocess the input data for us and label mouse* Events with unique “device” identifier. Web Dev Chorus: Yaaay!! Go Apple!

The iPhone definitely has javascript (and may have flash), but that’s not enough. Javascript’s current way of getting information from pointing devices like a mouse, what’s called the DOM API, has no way of distinguishing between clicks from multiple sources (nor does Flash for that matter). Neither DOM 3 nor Web Apps 1.0 has added any properties to the event object to deal with multiple pointing devices. At a minimum it would be nice to standardize on a new field of the event object that uniquely identifies the input device for the duration of a mousedown/mousemove/mouseup cycle.

I would imagine Apple will not be that pushed to let javascript know about multi-touch. It will only detract from their own installed apps and introduce potentially low standard interfaces that would nonetheless be associated with their brand. However the problem will certainly come to the fore as other companies follow Apple into the multi-touch field. We might as well think about what we’d like now.

Update: Dave Hyatt from the Safari team replies…

I’ll have much more to say about this in the coming months.

…which makes me cautiously optimistic. It must be pretty exciting to be him right now.

Status:

Looking for a guide …

Status:

Connected to guide: SomeGuide

SomeGuide:

Hi there. I will be helping with your search.

SomeGuide:

Hey, there. How are you today?

SomeGuide:

So you’re looking for the ‘answer to everything’?

You:

i am good

You:

and you?

You:

yes

SomeGuide:

I’m great. Thanks for asking

You:

SomeGuide, I am really curious what might be a good answer for everything

SomeGuide:

You mean in conversation?

SomeGuide:

Or ‘everything’ in an all-encompassing philosophical scope.

You:

yes, philosophical

You:

It sounds like a hard task, but I am looking for that to put into a slideshow for my next presentation

You:

as an opening quote

You:

it will be a technical talk about research opportunities

You:

for the future

SomeGuide:

Hmm, that’s quite a question…

…….

Go read the rest at Matthias’ excuse for a permalink. It has a happy ending!

Having said that, I did keep trying to use it. If it worked properly I would find it pretty useful. But don’t you feel this should and will be baked into the OS?

If you’re wondering why I’m posting twice in the same month (how shocking!), it’s because things are changing around here. You are reading this via the RSS feed so you won’t be aware that I have redesigned the blog’s homepage. My intent was to make this medium more conducive to writing quick posts on more diverse subjects yet still keep it hanging together as a coherent whole. Because let’s face it: something has got to change around here if I’m going to write more and better.

My first goal was to deemphasize the “latest post”, so everything got shrunk a bit until it was only readable by expanding with a click. (It has a nice flowy animation too. You know me, dear reader, I’m all about the javascrizzle.) Still, you can get a taster with a quick glance, and not just for one post but for the whole site, stretching back months at the moment. Please let me know if you disagree, dear reader. I value your opinion greatly.

There’s also a very simple greedy algorithm for sorting posts into streams by category/tag, so that the casual reader (not you, no no) can follow my stream of thought on a subject that interests them. And possibly ignore others. Most blogs don’t do much with the categories except list them in the sidebar. I think it’s time we made use of them. I guess it’s related to this unsubscribing thing that James Corbett is always going on about. Many people don’t want to commit the same way you have. They just want to dip in now and then to see if anything interesting has been going on. Call it grazing if you will. I noticed myself doing this recently for some blogs.

So, I understand that RSS is making the “homepage” increasingly irrelevent. Being an RSS subscriber yourself, you care little for homepages. In fact this change might even effect you negatively if I start spewing out any old rubbish that only looks good on the homepage because you can’t quite read it. NO, don’t unsubscribe!! I need you loyal reader. Without you I’m just sitting here sadly typing to myself. I haven’t forgotten you. I’m also thinking about the RSS angle. And, hopefully, RSS aggregators will pick up on the idea and start doing something useful with tags too.

Until then, let the others fly by, grazing me as they pass. You and I have a special, enduring relationship, dearest subscriber.

Yours always,

Eureka Man

PS: If you want to use the theme for your own wordpress blog (I loved that last post by the way, you put things so much more eloquently than I ever could), just leave a comment and I’ll work out how to package it up nicely.

We’re just one of several money-making projects that will progress from idea to deployment in the course of this weekend at DHX. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be popular. And it’s got to make us more cash than any other competitor in the next month. And we need you! How would you like to take a chance this Saturday and Sunday? Imagine that you could work like hell for two days, and then never again have to work on something you didn’t enjoy. Ever. It’s a gamble. But then, that’s exactly what our project idea is about!

I’m talking to you, Irish web 2.0 community. We need someone to focus on the backend of this thing, someone who’s comfortable working out data storage schemes, working out how to parse emails and things, working with APIs. You can work in any framework that the competition rules allow. There’s no problem with you working remotely. We’ll be on California time but that might work out for the best. We can take shifts at sleeping.

Cue big lottery finger. IT COULD BE YOU! Send me an email: eurekaman at gmail.

Update: We flaked out. Sleeping under a desk is not good for morale. Release will be delayed a couple of weeks. Full marks to Matthias, though, for his MacGyver-style office camping creativity.

So Canter’s answer to this was to set up broker servers which would act as a translating intermediary between client apps and web APIs (and he says his company is going to do this for certain API flavours). But then all API trafic gets routed through a centralized server. Anybody can see that’s not so smart. When I want to talk to a new API, I don’t want to talk through Canter’s server. I want Canter’s server to tell me how to talk to the new API. Then I can go off and do just that, all decentralized and pretty-like.

Now, web APIs very often talk fluent XML. So it seems possible that the hypothetical translation server could serve me an XSL transform that would tell me all I needed to talk directly to any API it supports. The idea is that these API normalizing transforms get written once, and reused in as many client apps as possible. They can be provided by the developer of the API, one of the client app developers, or anyone really. Client developers can simply target the normalized API and know that, without any effort on their part, their app will be able to talk to services which don’t even exist when they . Check out my MS Paint skillz:

Comments? Would you like this? Think it’s unnecessary? Think it wouldn’t work? Is it out there already? If not, maybe I’ll start a standard-defining session at BarCamp or Mashpit.

Yes, that’s an actual slide, taken out of context, from one of the company’s presentations. It was web 2.0 very much from a business person’s perspective (not surprising given that it was an EI event). “What exactly is this web 2.0 thing?” “What features and technologies do we need to adopt to get some of this web 2.0 money?” or “How can I tell that a company is web 2.0 so I can decide whether to invest?” Web 2.0 used as a noun or an adjective.

Here’s my take. From a developer’s perspective web 2.0 should be a verb, if anything. Ask “How can I web 2.0 my business?” Say “Our product is web 2.0ing”. It means you’re pushing things forward, doing things right this time, right by the web, right for the people. And you’re not quite sure what the final desination of your web 2.0ing will be (Hint: there is no final destination). You’re just trying to be valuable to somebody. Web 2.0 is not any one group of technologies or features. It is whatever makes sense and makes value for the people you affect. Web 2.0 is a vague, yet meaningful term that describes a movement, a journey. The reason there is no clear definition is that we’re not sure where we’re headed yet.

The most interesting things will happen without knowing exactly how they’re going to make money. Web 2.0ing should convey a sense of relinquishing control. Relinquishing control of people’s data, sure. Relinquishing control of taxonomy maybe. But most importantly, relinquishing control of your business plan. Admit that it’s difficult to predict who will use your software and how they will use it. Release it and be ready to adapt.

What is my problem? I don’t really have one. I’m not bashing Enterprise Ireland or the companies who presented at the event. They put on an interesting and valuable show. I have masses to learn about the business side of things and I’ll take every opportunity i can get. In one sense Web 2.0 is about the money. It’s a resurgence of venture capital interest in web companies. It’s not a case of they’re wrong, I’m right, or even that we disagree. I’m not trying to own the term, only give a different perspective (one that may be equally, if not more bullshitty, sorry). However slight a distinction it is though, it makes a difference to the audience at your conference and the ensuing discussion. Thursday’s event did contrast to the unconferences I’ve been at where the feeling really was “let’s push things forward”. I’d like to recreate that here in Ireland.

So we’ve had the Web 2.0 conference. How about a Web 2.0ing conference? I caught a whiff of it during Adam Green’s roundtable. There are hackers out there interested in pushing things forward. I want a regular get-together focusing on them (us). If you’re in teh Valley this summer look me up. And if another TechCamp happens in September I won’t miss it this time.

A few updates:

• Mike says yes, I can play!
• and OPod makes level #2 of Hotlinks! My life is complete

This is very important for the web as a platform.