I'd like to announce the beta version of a iPhone-based "Mobile California (2008) Proposition Guide" at http://rspace.stanford.edu.

While still rough around the edges and slightly buggy, I hope you take a few minutes while standing on line on Election Day, and rock the vote!

Miss the usability of Gmail search while you're on the go?

5-7 different email accounts got you down?

Enter wup! the web-powered version of William Morgan's sup. Unlike Apple's iPhone client, it lets you search through all your email. Unlike Gmail, it works across your other IMAP mail accounts too!

Built in an afternoon, wup is a ~75 line Merb-based microapp which gives you just what you need to get the job done: search and basic navigation.

An updated version of GoogR is now available:

Install GoogR.air, an Apollo-based Google Reader, remixed.

Thanks again to Jon Hicks for the CSS design!

Chris Messina vlogged some thoughts on Mozilla yesterday, and I thought I'd respond in turn.

Chris briefly mentions his view of the browser as, perhaps, the best place to innovate for the future of the web, but, alas, I think that this is no longer true.

It's not that the browser /wouldn't/ be a great place, it would be, but as Raymond Chen and Chris Wilson point out, backwards compatibility is king, and at this point, JS libraries such as JQuery have partly tamed the cross-browser AJAX beast.

(My out-there hypothesis: GOOG is already working on a platform to address the issues that Chris and I have raised, and will announce it at the end of May in San Jose. If they don't, you'll disappoint me GOOG!)

At Web2Open this week, Chris Messina showed me a new Google Reader Theme authored by the fabulous Jon Hicks.

Jon published the CSS (re-)style sheet, and I whipped up an Apollo-based variant, which makes use of Jon's work and an app icon from Mayosoft Studios:

Install /GoogR/, a Google Reader app: GoogR.air (228 KB)

2007 seems like it might be the year that webapp UX tries hard to get that much better.

Ruby, and Rails along with it, made it bigger last year, and JavaScript libraries, from the developer-friendly JQuery to the well-documented YUI, grew up.

This year, after wondering why people flocked to the web, the desktop took a hint from HTML -- the last two-letters at least -- as MSFT finally got XAML, version one, out the door, and Adobe brought us MXML, with Flex and then Apollo.

jin'sync, so far, has been a short experiment in helping you keep in sync, Google Calendar to OS X iCal (a JRuby / GData hack), 30boxes and Gmail on the dock (a XULRunner and now Apollo hack), and just a few days ago, a script I wrote which lets you backup your Facebook photos.

Apollo Beta was released some hours ago, and I ported some jin'sync apps to run on AIR before I went to bed:

Download http://www.jinsync.com/files/gmail.air -- Gmail.app, now on Apollo!

Also try http://www.jinsync.com/files/30b.air

(Need to adobe/go/getapollo first?)

~L

I finally got around to making Gmail.app:

It has basic menu support -- File / New Message at the moment, needs some visual redesign, but it's good to go.

Download for OS X: Gmail_0.1.0.zip (64KB)

(As before, install XULRunner first.)

Do you use this? Share the love!

Hate searching through five browser windows and fifteen tabs to get to the webapps you need to Get Things Done?

No more!

Check out (jin'sync) office.dmg (version 0.1.0, 104kb). (Install XULRunner first.)

This turns Meebo.com, 30 boxes, and Zoho Writer -- applications you might use every day -- into full-fledged OS X applications.

Hi all,

It looks like at least a couple of you have played around with my little alpha. Cool!

SpanningSync seems to have gone public with a beta, and I found out about GCalDaemon, which seems like a more robust way of keeping your Google Calendar and your ical files in sync.

GCalDaemon doesn't explicitly support Apple iCal, but it's probably doable. Some motivated hacker could probably take a few lines from jin'sync (the AppleScript and Google WebAuth) and wrap GCalDaemon to make a truly nice solution.

That said, jin'sync is moving on!