Celso Martinho

Today, a particularly stressful day at work, a came across several E-Mail and IM threads about Google Gears with my friends and colleagues. I finally had the time to look into it more seriously and I feel I should point out that I don't share the global excitement everyone seems to suffer from.

Google Gears anticipates what browsers should have already and clones what Zimbra envisioned months ago, I fail to understand the wow effect, really. I had that wow when Zimbra demoed the concept over at eTech 2007. Sure, it's Opensource, and works with almost all platform combinations, and I'm not saying it isn't neat either, but stop the presses please, what about these questions ?

- What will it happen when Firefox 3 supports off line storage natively ? What's the point on disseminating something that I hope, will be deprecated within the next browser's major releases ? Or will it use the Gear's API ?

- Why should anyone download and install software on their computers to get these features ? Not the masses, that's for sure. It's hard enough to get your users to upgrade to decent browser, trust me.

- Since Google is such a big sponsor of Firefox. Why aren't they heading their energy on getting offline storage onto FF early and making sure IE, Opera and Safari adopt the same APIs for a change ?

Seems like a "we'll think about that later" situation to me. Maybe I'm just edgy today, or missing something here.

Anyone's dream I know. Are you from the past ? Check PlotKit and forget server side pie charts. PlotKit is a Javascript library for drawing graphics on your browser using the great SVG standard or HTML Canvas (for compatibility with stupid browsers). Very nice stuff.

A quick mention to this event, powered by ANSOL in association with SAPO.

Coliseu, ontem. Apinhado. Muito bom! Download já, se ainda não fizeram!

This is worth a note. After almost two years of development we're finally gone public with our SAPO Messenger for Mac and are going high-profile on it. It's been one of the must fun projects on the company, much to be learned from it (a making-of story is a must on this one, I'm convincing João, Pedro and the rest of the crowd to make one). The project is also Opensourced, also one of the biggest commitments and investments we've made with the community so far. So enjoy, we did.

This PDF details Wikipedia's design and architecture, by Domas Mituzas. Interesting reading if you're into web development, performance and scalability.