Parakey: Firefox "creator" starts new project

"The Firefox Kid: Blake Ross helped make Firefox one of the biggest open-source success stories ever. Just wait until you see what he's up to now".

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

The article is a good read on what ideas are being put together for Parakey. Sounds to me they are moving in the right direction of making computer easier to use. However, easy to use has been so widely abused that I don't know what to expect until I see it. Interestingly, they're working on yet another language: JUL or Just another User-interface Language.

Meanwhile, I want to create my own language to make programming easier. Unlike JUL or XUL or other user interface oriented languages, I want to focus on easy to program, debug, maintain and test. I hear that Ruby has somewhat of that kind of framework but Ruby is a server side web programming language.

Copyright, 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.