Parakey makes me excited, but nervous
It would seem that Blake Ross, lead coder for Mozilla Firefox, is up to something.
His new project, called Parakey, will be focused on making the Web transparent from your desktop OS. Here’s the article I’ve seen. After reading over it, my only concern about the implications are that there are some of us users who actually like the way things are now… Believe me, I understand the need to make this last, intuitive leap for non-gearheads! However, I’m kind of set in my ways.
I’m quite interested in seeing how he can pull this off; especially the for-profit angle. Free Software has long been faced with the catch-22 of fighting for liberty while their budgets consist of using computers (and wattage and bandwidth) provided by universities, parents, and day jobs. This doesn’t begin to count up the man-hour cost of these peoples’ attention, who could arguably be making serious monies in other technical pursuits.
Now, if I can just envision the method by which he’s thinking of putting all those disparate logins, protocols, and account data securely under the hood of Parakey I can offer my services for the noble cause.
Interesting… Given that there are numerous articles out just today about how people work with the data on their PCs, the write up for Parakey has me thinking that it will have the most impact on non-coders. Sure, giving file management over to a database engine (a la iTunes or Picasa) is certainly a step in the right direction, but I’m still getting used to organizing my stuff with this paradigm. Honestly, I can say that I’m much more comfortable with the iTunes interface than Picasa’s. Having numerous ‘fields’ associated with a media file to aid sortation feels like it gives some of the control back to me.
Yes, I understand that I have controls issues; let’s see you work the job I just left for 10 years without developing control issues! Not gonna happen…
Regardless, I’m beginning to believe that this is the direction of UI in the future. Lots of ubiquitous ‘trusting of the machine’ to know where on the filesystem your stuff lives.
Which is why I want to write code for this project; then I’ll be able to invest more trust into it.
Now why do I want one of these after downloading Firefox 2.0?
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