Fargo and Google

Couple of quick notes :

1) I'm too dependent on Google. Unlike the case of Facebook, I can't just cancel my account. Google is too deeply entwined with my life. But I am taking steps to disengage if not 100% at least a significant chunk.

2) I'm playing around a bit more with Dave Winer's Fargo outliner. And it is shaping up to be excellent, both as an outliner and expression of Winer's philosophy. (No surprises.)

So, to combine the two, I'm documenting my Google-leaving thoughts in a public outline. Check it out.

Update : I've also been wondering about having a linkblog, somewhere I can quickly throw links rather than G+ (which is inside the Google Walled River). Maybe Fargo will help there too.

Google's Dart

So Google's Javascript replacement language, Dart goes public.

Looks awfully like Java with a smattering of CoffeeScript. I like the empty compact constructor and the one-liner functions. But I'm not sure what those colon ones are doing.

Presumably some jQuery-like action with the document.query().

Looks a little bit messy, but then Javascript has got kind of messy. Shame they didn't try to go for the CoffeeScript cleanness.

In a sense, it may be rather similar to writing Processing if they produced a decent IDE.

On the whole, I think I can live with it.

Some interesting evaluation at Lambda the Ultimate.

Nice Quora question about code at early Google.

What I take away from these stories is that pushing out ugly prototypes of your products will not prevent you from building a world-class engineering organization in the future.

The end of Google Wave?

Interesting testament to Google Wave

Jocelyn Paine is one of the more interesting thinkers about evolving spreadsheets. Here's some recent stuff about components in Google Sheet.

Wow! Manuel Simoni is on fire! with BuckyBase development :

- Import into Google Spreadsheet

- Google Gadgets Visualization

- RDF triples (ah well ... if it makes him happy)

- and is this a TreeGrid???

This is seriously exciting.

Google's whole Gadget thing is becoming increasingly impressive. Look at the dynamic widgets which can hook up to and pull data out of online spreadsheets. You can also embed Gadgets in online spreadsheets etc.

Making your Gadget collaborative is pretty straightforward too.

Goosh (Google Shell) ... not from Google, but damned cool.

GAE pricing looks reasonable from my perspective.

Or have I not thought through the scenarios? Glad I'm not trying to run some kind of video store of course.

I've now been playing with GAE for a couple of weeks, and it's still looking pretty good. I've now got an Orkut developer account so I can make Orkut widgets tethered to a GAE based service.

Meanwhile looks like GvR has been doing some cool stuff within Google with internal development tools, and has just released it to the outside world, thanks to GAE giving us access to BigTable etc.