Saturday, September 7, 2002

Watson's new Amazon.com and Google tools are both Web service-based, and extremely responsive compared with the other tools, most of which use screen-scraping. I can't wait for new stuff to come out of this. Personal Web server-based information management tools like Radio UserLand and ZOË need to start exposing Web service interfaces. You'd the "light" Web-only interface from any browser, and the full experience with a dedicated client. This is a well-trodden path, but most applications have traced it in the other direction: taking a desktop UI and making a "remote access" Web version. Often, the Web version ends up being clunky and slow. Applications which started on the Web are already optimized to be transactional, and cutting out the HTML and formatting overhead, letting the client do some caching, can only make them faster. For example, I'd love to use Brent Simmons' NetNewsWire Lite for its efficient interface. But I read news on at least two computers, and don't want to read the same news twice. This is a great fit with Radio UserLand's (or AmphetaDesk's) remote Web access. NetNewsWire doesn't sync with Radio, or provide any synchronization of its own. And ZOË would be best integrated with my mail client (well, Mutt might be a bit of a stretch...). 11:56:38 PM | reply [] After struggling (and failing) to compile install a few Unix search engines for my email, I gave ZOË another look today. Since I used it last, ZOË has gained several features, including direct mbox import. It's completely un-configurable, simply looking for any files in ~/Library ending in 'mbox'. These criteria were undocumented, but a quick grep through the source code (available via CVS from the SourceForge project) pointed me in the right direction. I moved my real, gigantic, Library directory out of the way, and renamed my mailboxes so they would import properly. It's currently chugging away at 250 MB of my email, performing its indexing and cross-referencing magic on it. Watch out installing ZOË: by default, it is accessible to anyone. Edit the Application preferences to set a password. ZOË is still quite rough around the edges, mainly in the setup (adding and modifying accounts, importing messages), but it's been a long time since I've been so blown away by the elegance of a Web application. What an amazing, truly useful, piece of software to take something as chaotic as years of accumulated email and neatly, logically organize it for you. Weren't computers always supposed to do this stuff? 2:58:07 AM | reply []