tola - webian

Introducing Krellian, Webian's New Sponsor

tola — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 00:34:08 +0100

Reposted from webian.org

Firstly, thanks for the incredible continued contributions from the Webian community and for all the work you've done on Webian Shell, which has now had more than 95,000 downloads!

Introducing Krellian

This week I left my job as Product Manager of Clinked at Rabbitsoft to start a software consultancy called Krellian.

Through Krellian I will be able to continue to lead the Webian project, and I will also be taking up a new contract with the Mozilla Corporation to work with them on Boot to Gecko (B2G).

Like me and the other members of the Webian community, Mozilla believes that the open web can displace proprietary, single-vendor stacks for application development. The B2G project will include prototype APIs for exposing device and OS capabilities to web content, a privilege model to safely expose these new capabilities, a complete "low-level substrate" for Android-compatible devices and a collection of web apps to prioritise and prove the power of the platform.

Benefits to Webian

The potential benefits for Webian are enormous. Webian Shell was already hitting limitations of what is currently possible with Mozilla Chromeless and this new work on the core Mozilla platform promises to make many more of Webian's goals possible. While B2G initially focuses on the mobile space, Webian can focus on nettop and netbook form factors and perhaps eventually the two projects could even converge.

Sponsorship from Krellian will provide the ongoing resources necessary for running the Webian project and ensure that it remains free and open source.

I'm excited about this new chapter in Webian's story and believe more strongly than ever in the future of the open web.

Announcing Webian Shell 0.1

tola — Fri, 27 May 2011 18:15:39 +0100

(Reposted from the Webian blog) Webian Shell is a full screen web browser for devices that don't need a desktop. As of today you can download a prototype which you can try for yourself.

A Graphical Shell for the Web

If you’re anything like me then you’ll find that most of the stuff you do on your PC these days happens in a web browser and the desktop environment you used to depend on is now just getting in your way. Modern web applications can do just about everything traditional desktop applications can do (like flashy graphics, sound, video and offline storage) so often all you really need is the browser. The idea of the Webian Shell project is to replace your computer’s interface with something much simpler, which treats web applications as first class citizens and does away with all the un-necessary clutter.

See a screencast on YouTube

Rapid Prototyping with Mozilla Chromeless

Shell started as a simple design concept with a few static mockups, but when Mozilla Chromeless came along it was suddenly possible to rapidly develop a working prototype using standard web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. As a member of the wider Mozilla community this was an opportunity I couldn’t resist so I quickly got to work on putting together a prototype using the technologies I already knew from web development. This initial early release really just gives you a minimalist, full screen, tabbed web browser with a clock and a rather empty looking home screen. I hope this is enough to convey the basic idea behind the project and that with the open source community's help we can quickly iterate this prototype to encompass lots of exciting ideas about what living on the web could really be like.

Future Directions

These are some of my ideas for future directions to take the prototype, but I’d love to hear your ideas.

Home screens - instead of a desktop, Shell could have multiple home screens like you see on mobile devices, but containing web widgets and icons for “installed” web apps. See Mozilla’s Open Web Apps project for some inspiration.
Hardware controls - any graphical shell for a hardware device needs the ability to monitor and control hardware for things like sound, network, GPS, battery etc.
Zoomable tiled window manager - zoom out to a view of all currently loaded web pages (like Panorama in Firefox or Expose in OS X), then zoom in to the page you want.
Split Screen - view two pages side-by-side
On-screen keyboard - for touch-screen devices like tablets.

Download the Prototype

You can find out more on the Webian web site or go straight ahead and download and install Webian Shell 0.1 on your Mac, Windows or Linux computer today. I’d really love to hear your feedback! You can propose ideas, report bugs and ask questions on GetSatisfaction, or join the Google Group to take part in the conversation. You can also follow Webian on Twitter or Identi.ca, like it on Facebook and check out the channel on YouTube.

Rise of the Smart TV

tola — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 14:35:33 +0100

Reposted from webian.org

Apart from netbooks, tablets and smartphones another key target device for accessing Webian Home Server will be TVs. With big players having recently announced their entries into the smart TV space, this blog post explores their different approaches and the unique challenges of designing for the TV.

Google TV

Many companies have tried to combine web and TV experiences before, but it's never really caught on. Google believes that their approach will be a success because they aren't trying to re-create the web for the TV or make you choose between the web or TV, instead they want to give you access to the whole of the existing web and all the channels you already receive, as well as allowing you to install apps from the Android marketplace all from one device.

Google TV will allow all of this to be done via a 10ft interface with a remote control including a full QWERTY keyboard and pointing device. The software stack will include the Android operating system, Chrome browser, Flash and a new IP-based protocol to interface with DVR boxes allowing you search TV listings and schedule recordings.

Rather than a releasing a single Google branded device, Google has defined a standard hardware and software platform which will be implemented by multiple device manufacturers. Among the first will be an HDTV and BluRay player from Sony and a set-top box from Logitech which are expected this autumn.

Apple TV

Apple has recently announced the release of the latest generation of Apple TV which takes a very different approach to that of Google. The original version of Apple TV was released in 2006 but didn't prove to be a huge success. In the keynote announcing the new version, Steve Jobs explained that Apple had learnt a lot from the customers who did buy the original set-top device and that this time they think they've cracked it.

Apple's observations were that consumers want premium HD content delivered to their TV, but they don't want a "computer" on their TV or to have to manage storage on their TV or sync content with other devices. Their response is a new generation of Apple TV which is a smaller streaming-only device which streams content from other Apple products (iPod, iPhone, iPad or iMac) over the home network or from Apple's partners over the Internet with a rental model.

The new Apple TV is characteristically proprietary but well designed, with a slick custom UI for a closed list of tightly integrated online services. Apple has chosen a much simpler remote control with just a few buttons and opts for an interaction style much more familiar to TV users.

Boxee

Another smart TV option comes in the form of the Boxee Box from a small startup in the US. You can already download a beta of the Boxee software to your PC but with "Boxee Box", D-Link has manufactured a piece of hardware dedicated to using Boxee on your TV which is available to pre-order now.

The Boxee software has an interesting heritage (having been derived from the open source XBMC project) and has a great UI which is well suited to a 10ft interface. The remote control which comes with the D-Link device has a simple ordinary looking remote on one side, but you can flip it over to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard if you need it.

Boxee is pretty rich on features, it will let you stream films, TV shows, music and photos in a large variety of formats over your home network and adds a social dimension by allowing you to share what media you're viewing with your friends. Boxee will also have a Webkit-based web browser built in and is extensible through the development of apps.

YouView

Whilst big and small tech companies in the US launch their entires into the TV space, big media companies in the UK have been collaborating to create a new platform called YouView. YouView is billed as a replacement for the popular free-to-view TV "FreeView" boxes currently popular on this side of the pond.

YouView (previously codenamed Project Canvas) will provide the familiar digital TV channels but will also provide on-demand catch-up content from all of the major UK channels on your TV. YouView will also let you pause & rewind live TV, it will provide pay-TV options and will allow developers to create apps for the platform.

The BBC's heavy involvement in YouView is controversial with some other media companies who complain that the license fee funded corporation should not be using their resources to develop this platform which they argue damages competition for smaller players. Although the collaboration of so many large media and communications companies makes YouView a compelling choice in the UK, it doesn't follow existing standards common in Europe and the rest of the world.

Currently YouView is publicly little more than a collection of technical documents available on the web, but the first devices are scheduled to be launched in Q1 2011 and are likely to make a big splash in the UK.

Other Players

The products described above seem to have caught the attention of the media and blogosphere recently, but there are of course many other options out there. Other big players in this space include Microsoft's older Zune and Mediaroomplatforms for the XBox 360 games console and set-top boxes respectively and Samsung's own app platform for their high end TVs. There are also many open source projects like MythTV which provide a geekier way to create your own smart DVR.

Conclusions

The four different products described here take quite different approaches to the smart TV problem but also have similarities. I very much support Google's open approach but they could learn a thing or two from Apple's user experience, I'm really not sure a QWERTY keyboard and pointing device is going to catch on in the living room - the TV is not a PC. Boxee provides a compelling alternative but their app platform may struggle faced with competition from Android and others. YouView will be difficult to ignore in the UK but it provides yet another platform to develop apps for.

One thing all four have in common is the idea that the TV is for streaming content from other sources, not as the media centre for the home. The smart TV solutions presented here allow you to stream media from the Internet or from other devices like PCs, tablets and smartphones on the home network to your TV - but there is no central store for your whole media collection which can be accessed 24/7 by all of these devices.

If there was such a centralised media store then creating an app for every smart TV platform, mobile platform and tablet platform in order to access that media would seem impractical. The common denominator among all of these devices (with the exception of Apple TV which currently offers no opportunities for third party development) is the web, specifically HTML5. A single HTML5 web application hosted in the home could allow access to your entire media collection 24/7 from all of these devices.

The challenge for such web applications will be to create a user interface which works well on such a range of form-factors - from a small multi-touch smartphone through to the 10ft interface of a smart TV with a simple remote control. This will require a new breed of applications which can be controlled in a variety of ways and can adapt to a range of different screen sizes. Some examples of these experimental new types of web applications are YouTube Leanback, Google Reader Play and Clicker but it's likely to take a long while for best practices to emerge.

With approximately 1 billion PC users, 2 billion mobile users and 4 billion TV users worldwide - web applications with the potential to support all of these devices would seem very compelling indeed!

This is why the Webian project will strive to create a graphical web interface which provides an enjoyable user experience across all of these form factors.

Webian Project Inception

tola — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 12:41:39 +0100

A quick update on some foundations being laid for the Webian project.

The project scope has been set. Broadly this covers managing photos, music and videos but with some potential future directions and specific exclusions as well. Some very high level requirements have been developed for the first release with a focus on photo management.

The focus for the first release will be on making a really good job of photo management using a slick HTML5 interface. That includes uploading photos, organising them into albums, tagging them, subscribing to photo feeds, browsing and searching.

A simple initial architecture design describes an HTML5 interface served from a Django-based Python web application. The next step is to build some technical prototypes to explore some key technologies and UI prototypes to validate the key high level use cases. This will mark the end of the "inception phase" of the project and next will be the "elaboration phase" when the architecture design will be tested with a working architecture prototype.

Talking of phases, the project plan approximates the Agile Unified Process but with a particularly user-centered flavour. The AUP is kind of an Agile version of the heavyweight Rational Unified Process used in enterprise software development. The AUP is described as being "serial in the large, iterative in the small" and aims to take a lightweight, iterative approach to software development, but with the recognition of distinct phases of the project. I've chosen to experiment with this methodology to try and get the best out of both user-centered design and agile development. If it doesn't work, I'll switch to something else!

If you want to get involved in the Webian project then sign up to the mailing list and introduce yourself!

Introducing Webian - Home Social Media Server

tola — Sun, 30 May 2010 13:54:56 +0100

[Reposted from webian.org]

Hello, World! I'm Ben and I'd like to introduce you to the Webian project.

Desktop to Web

You may have noticed that there's a growing trend of web applications replacing desktop applications, a mass migration from the "desktop" to the "cloud". Web applications are great because you can access them from anywhere, on any web-enabled device and their networked nature means they can be more connected and social than their desktop counterparts.

Innovations in new devices like smartphones, tablets, netbooks and set-top boxes are providing us with exciting new ways of using the web, without needing to use a desktop PC.

A New Kind of Web

All of this innovation is building momentum around a new standard called HTML5 which is going to transform the web as we know it. Web applications of the future will be richer, more graphical, more interactive, will include high quality audio and video and may even work if you don't have an Internet connection. In other words, they'll have all the power of desktop applications but with all the benefits of the web.

Host Your Own Data

At home I have a collection of documents, images, audio and video measuring in the terabytes. No commercial service will currently host this amount of data online for me at a reasonable cost and even if it would, I'm not sure I'd want to use it. I like the idea of having full control over my own data and I can store it pretty cheaply myself. However, I would like to be able to access my data from anywhere on any device, and enjoy the kind of user experience provided by the new breed of HTML5 web applications.

The great thing about the web is that it's so open. You don't have to be a large corporation or pay a license fee to host a web server, anyone can do it themselves using free software and a domestic broadband connection. However, it does currently require quite a lot of technical know-how and there aren't a huge number of useful web applications you can install yourself that the average web user might want to use.

Let's Make the Home Server Awesome

I've been running a Linux-based web server from my home since 2003 to allow me to access all of my data online, but really it's little more than a glorified file server. I'm starting the Webian project to build an open source social media server for your home with a rich HTML5 web interface. I want Webian to make it easy to access all of your media online from a range of devices like phones, tablets, netbooks and your TV.

I can't do this on my own. I need your help to design the best solution to this problem, make a great job of building it and then promote it so that everyone can benefit. If you share my vision, or you're just interested in hosting your own data online, visit webian.org today to learn more about this project and find out how you can participate.

A Graphical Shell for the Web

tola — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 22:08:00 +0100

I'd like to ask for feedback on a draft of a design concept I've been working on since 2006. The idea is "a graphical shell for the web" and it is intended to act as a replacement for a desktop environment for devices dedicated to accessing the web. Target hardware platforms might include netbook and nettop computers, mobile internet devices, set top boxes and internet kiosks.

I would appreciate comments either here on my blog, on the krellian-webtop mailing list or by contacting me personally if you prefer.

Work towards implementing this design concept has already started at krellian.org. In addition I am thinking of creating an interactive mockup of the user interface using SVG because, as Jef Raskin eloquently put, existing UI building tools "enshrine current paradigms and thus unduly limit the scope of what you can do".

Please let me know what you think.