Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.

Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.

There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:

• RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
• Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
• Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
• SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?

Microsoft Releasing Standards-Based Web Design Tool

While it seems the feedback and criticism of IE7 has been predominantly on the negative side, Microsoft is getting set to launch Microsoft Office 2007 at the end of this week, and with it will come several other new web tools.

Apparently, Web Expression will be a tool that will actually be useful for designers, and not just for your average Joe, designed to be a professional-level product. It will eventually replace Frontpage, but will of course be going up against the big guns of Dreamweaver and GoLive.

There has been a lot of reviews and talk on all sides of the browser coin in the last week with the anticipation of Mozilla's version 2 and Microsoft's IE7. Microsoft finally got it together and unleashed their long-awaited improvement after 5 years of living in a cave, while Firefox's version 2 officially launched this week as well. Some interesting articles written on the topic of these browsers can be found at the links below, just to give you a taste of what's being said out there: reviews, recaps, words from the powers that be. Best thing to do, download and tinker away.

The Gnomedex swag was splendorific and one of the most snazzy was the free "Longhorn loves RSS" jackets from our friends at Microsoft. And wouldn't you know it these jackets were made in Vancouver by Boardroom. Go Boardroom, go! If you need cool snowbard and skater stuff and cool stuff like clothing in general check out Boardroom in Vancouver.

Stream of consciousness:

• Maybe someday, saved by Longhorn :-) (my apologies to the Fixx)
• Cool orange shoes sported by Dean Hachamovitch and Amar Gandhi
• Showing the Death Star (the Microsoft campus!) - The power to monopolize an industry is insignificant compared to the power of the RSS and the blog.
• Scoble + camera + enclosure = "freaky"
• 2005 - feeds are everywhere
• 15 million MSN spaces
• browse, search, subscribe - not just a feature
• "We believe in subscribe" very deeply
• Betting big on RSS in Longhorn for developers and users
• RSS enabled everywhere
• Providing RSS platform
• Add extensions to make it better and easier
• Demo of IE 7
• Looks like Firefox and Safari
• Easy subscription just like FF and Safari
• Every app has access to RSS subscription (there are APIs for it!)
• showing calendar and photo apps
• it's not just about audio, video, it's about enclosure tags
• Showing Calendar in office
• Outlook 2003: each event has an RSS item, puts as an enclosure, the iCalendar file
• "synch engine" downloads the iCal stuff from the feed and keeps it in sync
• wrote 200 lines of C# to talk to RSS APIs, if there are any feeds with iCal events (.ics files), add them to Outlook
• Boris: why not double click on current events, why not do it on existing aggregators without writing code?
• Photo blog demo of trip to France
• wrote simple app that shows it as a slideshow with the blog text floating above
• trying to encapsulate RSS complexity so developer can focus on their app
• subscribe to blogs, news, feeds of content and lists of content
• RSS 2.0 extensions for lists
• Amazon demo
• subscribe to wishlists
• is smart enough to understand removal from wishlist (unlike RSS without this extension)
• mark up your data and you can provide interesting views to IE7 and other apps that know about the list extension
• Simple List Extensions - Microsoft spec available under Creative Commons, also at MS site today at noon
• Larry Lessig video
• Support RSS all flavours (0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, Atom)
• IE7 support of Enclosure downloading - platform does downloading not IE7
• Use BITS (background intelligent transfer service) - used to download Windows Updates as well as enclosures
• we think the answer is yes
• if it looks like IE, it will be IE
• if it looks like Outlook, it will be Outlook
• Synch support built in
• Boris - community process for working on spec, email is not a community process !
• Feedback
• Scoble - use Channel 9 Wiki for community process working on the spec
• Bob Wyman - why not use IETF and W3C? instead of just doing it yourself
• Microsoft - working the way Dave Winer works
• Question - can I subscribe to a RSS feed of software updates to my 5 PCs? It's up to the developers
• What works in XP? - RSS discovery, preview, common feed list are in XP as well as Longhorn, Synch may not work
• Marc Canter please summarize extension - using enclosures how? doing viewing source?
• Can't commit to Outlook support YET
• Steve Rubel: is this "extend and embrace" lite? Give me evidence that we are really living under "Jedi rule" :-) ? Need to restore balance to the force :-) Answer: the very fact that we are here and showing works in progress?
• Dave Winer - there's a lock-in step, Microsoft still has to sell the community on the aggregator.
  
  Tags:

  • Dean Hachamovitch
  • Gnomedex
  • Gnomedex 2005
  • IE 7
  • Longhorn
  • microsoft