Recent online photo albums startups (like flickr.com, buzznet.com and Ojos (via TechCrunch) seem to go slowly into giving access to all those photos just lying on our hard drives. Ojos seems very interesting, it kind of automatically tag photos based on facial recognition algorithms. You name a person once and all your photos featuring this person will be recognized and tagged with this person’s name. How about weird ideas, huh?
What do you really need when not doing development (or maybe even for that)?
1. A computer (a keyboard, a mouse, a CD/DVD player) with an Internet connection.
2. A browser with an integrated web server.
3. Ahhh … that’s all, folks.
FAQs:
Q: How about … applications?
A: Well, what do you mean? Don’t you have internet?
Q: How about mail?
A: yahoo, gmail, hotmail … whatever you want, Sir.
Q: How about Office applications?
A: I don’t understand your question. You mean wikis? We have. Or do you mean “editing documents, Excel sheets & stuff”? Well, you can have HTML online editing, repositories, private or not etc.
Or you can check stuff like writely.com.
Q: How about updates?
A: You mean for the browser? Oh, it will be automatic, we’ll do it for you when you restart your computer.
Q: And how about media (photos, music, films)?
A: We are still thinking about it. We have two choices for now: 1 - odeo, vlc, bbc or other online content providers will do it for you or 2 - you will have to use your home cd/dvd/divx player you bought for 50$.
Q: OK, for how much?
A: The system being based on some Linux, it will be, like … free I think. If you wish to donate somthing (in the case you like the browser, of course) you can. Maybe 10 bucks so you don’t have to think why is free 
Q: What’s your solution for viruses, trojans, DoS attacks and other beasts?
A: Perhaps we will include some kind of router or protection; it will be rather calm and cosy around you.
Q: Extending the system options?
A: Like browser extensions? You can download a handfull
Q: And how about hardware? What if I want some more harddisk capacity?
A: Come on! Don’t you use search engines? You can rent some 4 Gb for 8 bucks a month! Why spending 150 each year for actually buying a hard drive???
Q: OK. But there must be a catch! In a year my computer will be kind of Matusalem, right? 
A: No way! 10 years seems more decent as a prevision You don’t have to buy those what’s the most powerfull and usefull too RAM memory this month magazines anymore. We will put some RAM for you. If it’s not enough, you can add some more. Perhaps you are an online gamer, right?
Q: I will be back, you know?.
A: OK.
Note
This is an imaginary dialog between a BrowserOS support and a client. BrowserOS doesn’t exist. Yet.
Idea inspired by recent kottke.org and Paul Graham notes.
Updated with some example sites.
Just found an article on Saving Session Across Page Loads Without Cookies, On The Client Side (via ajaxian.com).
This is very usefull. I must see if it works in IE, Firefox (maybe Safari).
If it goes well (enough) this can be used to manage services “injection” in a web page, using ajax+client-side sessions. The service can be called using ajax, keeping its session on the client, which is very cool when the session contains (almost) only user data, as this way the user’s data don’t have to leave the user’s computer
After a couple of weeks of studying Rails I started a small application just to see how we go along. It is the third version of my family’s photo album (previously powered by Delphi Websnap, currently by asp.net and hopingly powered by Rails soon). I use it to grasp a first hands-on impression on new web framework.
… Perhaps the photo albums should be promoted like the “web developers target of the year” along with “todo lists” It seems that Rails have made some waves and everybody wants to write his own photo album or todo lists. Why not me too? …
So it goes rather well. I stumbled on some not Rails related small difficulties, like:
They were all due of my mostly windows developer background. I still get confused when using 7-8 windows/apps (of which 2-3 are command line terminals) while in development. I guess I am used to having an IDE - like Borland’s ones - always open and handy.
The most helpfull I find the Agile Rails book, the Ruby on Rails website, the comp.lang.ruby.rails list and a lot of Rails-related blogs.
What is funny about Rails is that, unlike other web frameworks, the newcomers (like me) are attracted by some concrete real-world applications using it. I currently use all the 37signals applications (the free levels for now), Instiki and have tried Typo.
Updates
Interview on O’Reilly’s network with David Heinemeier Hansson, the Rails creator, about the present and future of Rails.
I really don’t know what to answer to this question. This is why I finally started to blog in english and I think I will add french and romanian posts from time to time. I will keep the development posts in english and use french/romanian when it relates to local issues or for non technical stuff.
Another solution would be to keep separate blogs for each language. But this would be complicated and would arise questions like whether to keep separate blogs for technology, music etc.
David Hainemeyer Hansson says in an article called Can software have opinions?:
…
Because when I adopt software, I’m not just looking for features, I’m looking for approaches too.
…
The closer your opinions on web-application development are to mine (and that of the growing community), the more Rails will feel like the perfect fit.
It is interesting, since I was talking about Rails today with a colleague and I was trying to convince him why it is really a far better aproach than others I have tries (Delphi’s Websnap or asp.net). I tried to show him the beauty of the routing stuff or how easy is to cache actions or partials because of the controller action/view separation etc.
Perhaps I was wrong, perhaps he couldn’t see it because of his opinions on (web) development. Perhaps I am just more ready or “cooked” or experienced or only just more close to the opinions expressed by the Rails people (through their work).
Having said that, and in the spirit of the Agile manifesto, I think that a framework should accept and follow some slightly different opinions of the developer on some issues. It’s like the ActiveRecord Rails implementation. It has some conventions (as the names of the classes/tables) but if they don’t fit your design (read opinion) you can override them.
software and web applications tests