evernote

The world of advanced Web applications: what are they?

This blog is dedicated to an ongoing discussion of Web 2.0/3.0 and the Semantic Web. The slant is on the technology itself, how it works and what’s going on inside advanced Web applications. We’ve looked at a couple different Web 2.0, in particular, Evernote and GlideOS. We’ve tried to characterize the capabilities of Web apps.

The impact of the new Web.

This posting addresses a non-technical question: What has been the impact of this technology our society?

Technological advancement can be very roughly broken into two groups: incremental and radical. Which of these is Web 2.0/3.0? Is it a radical advance?

Consider what highly responsive, multimedia web applications have done for us. They have enabled the development of:

* Wikis: These are web applications that allow us to collaboratively develop sophisticated, easily searchable information bases. These can range from dictionaries for specialized disciplines to vast databases containing DNA information. Data can be vetted by experts and/or challenged by random users.

Everybody knows about Wikipedia, but like blog and bulletin board software, wiki software can be easily installed and configured for deployment on almost any web server, whether it is publicly accessible, or used privately within a corporation or by a professional organization.

* Social networking sites: These are web applications that allow us to actively participate in a myriad of communities based on professional and personal interests. We find work, develop contacts, share music and photographs and video, and develop lifelong collaborations with people we would never have met otherwise.

They are also used by people who are in daily physical contact, but who find they can deepen their relationships by posting personal information on public sites like MySpace and Facebook. The interesting thing about these sites is that new and successful ones keep emerging,

* Tagged content vendor sites: Volunteers and paid individuals can contribute multimedia content and collaboratively tag it, using both freeform and highly sophisticated tagging protocols, such as the sophisticated MPEG-7 standard. (We will look at MPEG-7 in a future posting of this blog.) These include images and sound and video, and many taggers are highly trained professionals who can carefully categorize content according its detailed meaning. This technology makes a vast sea of otherwise-unknown assets available to us. It also makes these assets searchable, thus transforming a completely intractable task into something we easily perform.

In particular, this has radically enhanced the creative power of both professional and hobbyist animators by giving them complex scenery and character components to work with. Check out thoughtequity.com for an example of a content vendor. Take a look at daz3d.com for animation content.

* Mashups: These are portal or second tier web applications that take content from other web sources, such as Google Maps, investment information, medical advice, and scientific data. Often mashups take data from several or hundreds of other sites and create complex, highly valuable multimedia assets.

Take a look at woozor.com. It combines Google map and weather data.

* Distance learning: Universities, corporations, professional organizations, and lone instructors can develop and sell effective, multimedia educational packages that bring education to anyone who has Internet access. This allows us to retrain ourselves for new occupations, stay current in our professional skills, and find employment that is satisfying, steady, and high paying.

I teach on my university’s distance learning site, and we use video, sound, desktop video capture, slide presentations, and software demonstrations - and they can all be edited into a unified product. There are online universities now, where you can get a college degree. Take a look at jonesuniversity,com.

* Hybrid applications that support things like email, calendar, collaboration, RSS feeds, etc.

A good example of a hybrid application is zenbe.com, which provides a combined web-based email, list making, and calendar application, and in that sense is similar to many other email providers. But Zenbe also provides a collaborative tool called Zenbe Pages, which can be used by collaborators to organize their activities. A Zenbe page can have notes, calendars, lists, RSS feeds (not new ones, but existing RSS feeds) on them. Zenbe also provides quick access to Twitter, Google Talk, and Facebook.

By the way, it’s important to point out that the categories I list above are not as clear-cut as one might think. Many modern web apps contain elements from more than one of these categories.

The software building blocks.

From a programming perspective, what specific Web 2.0/3.0 software has allowed all of this to come about? We’ve discussed much of this already in previous postings of this blog. It includes XML and the exploding class of XML languages, namespaces, IDE’s (Integrated Development Environments), large code bases (such as the vast library of ready-made Java components), web service software development tools, and AJAX web page optimization technology. It also includes web development frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and newer ones, engineered toward high responsiveness, like Flex and Silverlight.

Also included are powerful media formats, codecs, players, and editors, which allow web users to do more than upload and search media; we can edit it and reform video, images, and sound, without leaving the simple world of our browsers. And of course, modern mega media apps enable us to build media assets. The list of contributing software tools goes on, but we’ll stop here.

It scales!

And there is something subtle, but important that gives advanced web technology extraordinary power: it scales. We manage shared resources that are truly gigantic in size, and are spread across countless machines around the world. We leverage global user bases, cheap server technology, and wide open Internet bandwidth to give media stores belonging to Web apps astonishing growth rates.

The bottom line.

Yep. Web 2.0/3.0, as a whole, is a truly radical advancement. It has fundamentally and globally changed society in a big way.

There are Web apps and then there are Web apps.

In our continuing series on Web 2.0/3.0 and the Semantic Web, we have looked at one simple, yet impressive Web application, called Evernote. There are significant advantages of Web apps; in particular, the application is available wherever you can get onto the Web, you don’t have to run and maintain complex desktop software, and your data sits on a (hopefully) secure and backed-up data server.

Web Apps.

We noted that some Web apps, including Evernote, are both Web-based and desktop-based. Seemingly, this might be a disadvantage, because now, the user does have to install and maintain the desktop version of the app. But, in exchange, you have two copies of your data, at different physical locations. You also can use the app when you are not on the Internet. And, as far as Evernote goes, the desktop app is very far from difficult to manage.

Let’s look at this a little closer. Not all Web apps are the same. One problem is that too many vendors feel compelled to brag about the Web capabilities of their projects, and so we have to be suspicious - especially when it comes to older applications that have been retrofitted with Web capabilities.

Let’s look at a few applications. Please keep in mind that the first two applications are not advertised as “Web apps”. I am describing them only as a way of categorizing the Web capabilities of applications in general.

Minimal capabilities: exporting to the Web.

Our first example is an application that runs on Macs and is very impressive. It’s called Curio, and is made by a company called Zengobi. It gives you a workspace to which you can append text notes, lists, images, video, and sound clips. It also supports diagrammatic mind-maps. It’s great for a wide class of brainstorming techniques from simple note-taking to sophisticated workflow planning. It’s all-in-one nature makes it a little imposing and chaotic at first, but it is actually quick to master - and then its freeform nature proves itself to be very powerful. It is also very elegant.

Curio’s Web capabilities are extremely limited, however. All you can do is output a Curio file as a fixed HTML page. It cannot be updated over the Web. For convenience, it can export a file directly to your “Mac” Web account, if you own one.

Modest, often tacked-on Web capabilities.

Another example application is Filemaker. (I am referring to their products called Filemaker Pro and Filemaker Pro Advanced, since they are what I have used in my classes as the University of Colorado.) I teach database management systems, and I can say lots of good things about Filemaker. It is a very quick and simply way to get a full-fledged, scalable, visually-pleasing desktop database up and running. I like it.

But its Web capabilities are typical of applications that have added Web capabilities long after the fact. What you can do with Filemaker is “publish” a database on the Web, and allow Web-based updating and searching. It in effect turns the machine hosting the database into a simple server. But most of Filemaker’s capabilities are not available via the Web interface. And, the database only exists on its original site. All data remains there.

Native, full Web capabilities.

So, what’s a true Web app? I’d say it is an application whose native interface is Web-based, and where all or virtually all of its capabilities are available via a browser. Evernote is a good example.

There is a fuzzy line between “websites” and “Web applications”, as we have previously discussed. And in fact, some people consider virtually all powerful websites to be Web apps. This includes Amazon, Blogger, and Wikipedia, as well as countless lesser-known websites.

And, with respect to the deliberately narrow criteria we’re using here, these applications are indeed Web apps.

So, what characteristics do we see in applications that are powerful, and have native, complete Web interfaces? They are likely to store data persistently in a serverized database management system like MySQL, and present the user with web forms to fill in, and return to the user dynamic Web pages populated from the database. A website that we might be willing to label “Web 2.0″ would be one that is highly responsive and manages large amounts of data.

We might call it Web 3.0 if it also manages large volumes of continuous data (like audio and video), and presents to the user a highly multimedia web interface. But these terms are vague, and drawing lines between them is to a certain degree misleading and a distraction.

Perhaps something that might be a truly Web 3.0 characteristic is that the application, rather than just delivering up video and audio, uses a combination of multiple forms of media, in concert, to interact with the user. We looked at SMIL, an XML language that allows the user to build presentations that coordinate multiple forms of media, such as images, sound, and video. The SMIL programmer can arrange media on the screen, and specify how the various pieces of media will be displayed over time.

Glide: the Web-based desktop.

But let’s look at one very, very aggressive attempt at a true Web 3.0 application. It’s called Glide, and you can get yourself a free account. This application does not support any sort of desktop-based version, and so you do have to be online to use it. It also needs a very fast Internet connection, because of the wide variety and high volume of data it allows you to manipulate.

What’s Glide? It is advertised as “the complete mobile desktop solution”, and it provides a complete, virtual, web-based computer. With it, you can edit photos, draw diagrams, store media files, send and receive email, manage a calendar, manage video, write documents, even build a website - in other words, do almost everything a non-programmer might want to do with a computer.

Its interface consists of three main windows. One is a virtual desktop, with various applications ready to use; another is a portal where the user can access the Web and develop websites; the third is a virtual hard drive, where media and files created by the various applications can be stored and accessed.

Is this the way of the future? It completely frees a user from having to buy, install, and maintain complex, expensive applications, although you still need a computer with a browser to run it. One drawback is that none of its apps, as near as I could tell, can compete with the dominant desktop applications. It is not Photoshop, it is not Dreamweaver, and it is not MS Office Outlook. But its apps are not trivial: they do the job just fine. And the entire interface is simple and visually pleasing.

There is also a way to sync your files on your desktop with the files on the Glide servers, and their documents and spreadsheets are apparently compatible (to some degree) with Microsoft’s Word and Excel. But they apparently are not planning on creating any sort of hybrid web/desktop based product. Glide’s goal is to move us all toward the Web and away from our desktops.

The Glide servers seemed fast enough to me, by the way. That’s the big question. Can it be as responsive as a desktop computer? Well, it’s as fast as my Vista machine… But slower than my iMac.

Give it a try.

A look at a Web 2.0 App

It’s called Evernote and I am a very heavy user. It guides my every workday.

In earlier blog entries in this series on the Semantic Web and Web 2.0/3.0, we’ve said that the primary goal of Web 2.0 developers is to build web apps that perform like desktop apps. Let’s check this definition against Evernote.

It’s a note taking program, but not your traditional desktop note program. Two paradigms of note-taking have traditionally been very popular: build-a-notebook and file-it-away. The first gives you a virtual notebook, with a cover, a title, and a table of contents. Typically the contents are broken into sections, and the sections into pages. Each page might be straight text or indented outlines. The second approach gives the user a set of conceptual folders (and perhaps subfolders), with each one stuffed with notes that might be text or indented outlines. Both approaches might support “sticky” notes, audio notes, video notes, and/or image notes.

The web application concept is making heavy inroads, though. Two of the build-a-notebook programs I use allow the user to export them as webpages so they can be manipulated remotely. This of course means that the machine hosting the notes must be exposed to the Internet as a web server. More practically, it means that the notes can be shared only within a local area network or a closed intranet of some sort.

But Evernote goes a big step further. It is a true web app, with your notes stored on their server. The monthly fee is very modest, and is based on an upload allowance - a very generous one, unless your notes are packed with big chunk of media. My notes consist almost entirely of text and web pages that I find obf interest. I have their cheapest paid subscription (there is also a free one), and I only use a small fraction of my allowance. As of this moment (and yes, I am writing this on Evernote) I have 1,106 notes.

The model that Evernote uses is a variation of the file-it-away paradigm. There is a desktop client (available for Macs and Microsoft Windows machines) that presents the user with a column of conceptual folders, a listing of all notes in a given folder, and a viewing space for some specific note in the folder currently of interest. There is a sync protocol that keeps all notes up to date on the Evernote server. The web interface to the server isn’t as elegant as the desktop application, and I don’t use it much. You can also keep your notes locally on multiple machines. There is even an iPhone/iPod Touch version of the desktop app; I use it on my iPod Touch. There is also a mobile phone app, but I have not tried it. All of these applications are available to you for the one monthly fee.

I’ve done some experiments, and the syncing protocol works quite well. It creates a special folder in your Evernote desktop app if it finds a conflict it cannot resolve. As a result, I have never lost a single note or been forced to use an older version of any note. I have had, however, to dig things out of conflict folders.

So, why is it a Web 2.0 app? This is where I have to admit that the definition of Web 2.0 is, let’s say, very flexible. Yes, Evernote is fast, and the syncing never slows me down; I can create a note, click the sync button on Evernote on my iMac, and by the time I’ve rolled my chair over to my Vista machine, the new note is there. Web pages can upload far more slowly than straight text, admittedly. One more thing: Evernote allows you to put tags on your notes. And of course, you can search by those tags. Oh, and there is a very convenient web page clipper that I have used on Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox; it will tuck a web page away with a couple of clicks.

But in truth, it’s a Web 2.0 app, not because it is a web app whose performance approaches that of a destkop app, but largely because it is such a great blend of a desktop and web application. Rather than building a web-only app as an alternative to a desktop app, and then engineer the thing to be as fast as possible for uploading, downloading, and searching notes, they’ve given us the rapid access rate of a desktop, along with the mobility of a web app, and all the pieces seem to work together just right. It’s a very smart, very modern app.

I keep a heavy fraction of my notes on it, including my to-do lists, and whether I am in my home office, my university office, a university computer lab, Barnes and Noble, or wherever, my notes are always available.

Try it.