Blake Ross, one of the forces behind Mozilla Firefox, is now thinking Parakey (via Matt Mullenweg). It is a WebOS that aims to unify desktop and online operations.
Blake hits the right nerve when he says that today all the different services that we use have their own interfaces, and there is a learning curve for each of them. Parakey aims to solve this problem and provide a transparent glue between the desktop and online activities. Even if a WebOS, I understood it more as a single unified gateway for the desktop to the WWW, by asking the users to install a local server for offline access. Richard MacManus includes it with other WebOSs, but unlike other OSs it does not aim to replace the desktop OS.
It will definitely be useful, but it should be really simple to use because its target users will not bother too much about technology. Blake does comment on Matt’s post and say that it will in fact be open source, and it will be great if it will be cross-platform. A disappointing thing, technically, might be birth of a new user interface language - JUL. The basket is already full!
July 21st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
[...] and desktop by bringing Web to the desktop. When I read about it, I found it similar in goals to Parakey, which was recently acquired by [...]