Alan has a great post on “Release Priorities, Idleness, and Innovation”:http://www.drizzle.com/~asteele/2005/10/priorities-idleness-and-innovation.html.

Setting the right bar for features in a release– and resisting the temptation to ensure that everyone’s plate is full– is what creates space for solving the hard problems that really matter.

Really good ideas tend to happen when someone in product development gains an understanding of an huge, urgent and valuable problem that needs to be solved and goes and solves it with a really good idea. (The test of it being a good idea is that the solution seems blindingly obvious in retrospect…)

Imagine the situation in which the release bucket is actually half-empty of features, that there is actually “spare time” in the release. … what would you do?

Naturally, you’d scramble to fill the release bucket with enough work from the 1700 programmer-decade queue to keep those developers busy for the next little while. Wrong. The correct answer is: Do Nothing. A half-empty release bucket is a golden opportunity for innovation….

It turns out that good people won’t just sit at work and surf the Internet all day when their queue isn’t full – any more than they would sit at home and watch TV for 8 hours in a row. Instead, they will either (a) find something important to do; or (b) go find another job…

Idleness, discomfort and – key element – the right culture and management support – can be a source of really good ideas.

I am not suggesting that the formal process of understanding requirements, designing solutions, writing specifications, etc. should be thrown out, nor am I proposing that improvement requests from customers or internal users should be discarded unread. But the bar for putting something in the release plan should be very, very high – and if there isn’t enough stuff that meets that bar, then the idle cycles remaining should not be treated as waste.

“Read more”:http://www.drizzle.com/~asteele/2005/10/priorities-idleness-and-innovation.html

Web 2.0 applications are pushing the envelope on what is possible in the browser, but there are some things that are still simply impossible– robust real time notifications, and reliable persistence for instance.

The browser needs to evolve in a way that maintains its essential strength while enables these important features. Until these things happen, rich apps like browser based IM clients or office suites will lack essential functionality. I believe there should and will be an effort to solve these problems in a cross platform way.

In this message I’d like to consider notifications in particular. There are web email applications that pop up a notification “toast” when you get a new message, and instant messaging applications that display new messages in real time as they arrive.

But there are lots of important limitations. Notifications cease the instant you leave the page. Doing real time notifications in an AJAX applications comes at a high cost in terms of server overhead and complexity.

Many web applications rely upon email as their primary push channel, which results in a very “choppy” user experience as the user goes from the to the browser and back. Mobile notifications are even worse, often relying upon short SMS messages which can’t even include hyperlinks.

Other web applications have custom notifier applications that can be installed– the Gmail notifier, the bloglines notifier, etc– complicating users lives and sacrificing some of the essential goodness of true zero install, cross platform web applications.

The IE and Firefox teams are adding RSS feed handling into the browser, but not in a way that allows a particular web application to customize its notification experience, and they are doing polling only, not enabling real time notifications.

At a startup I worked at called Avogadro, we attempted combine the flexibility and zero install experience of the browser applications with a service and an architecture that enabled a real time push channel to applications. For a variety of business reasons, we were forced to focus primarily on cross-device instant messaging, but the basic platform idea was interesting and much more broadly applicable.

Perhaps now the time for something like this has come. Interesting, I think a notification system can be implemented as a small extension on top of existing browsers rather than an entirely new application. Think of it as an uber-notifier that you only need to install once.

This will have value even if it initially only support polled notifications, as long as it allows rich application defined presentation of notifications.

The trick to making this succeed is not to make the user buy into too many different new things at once– a new browser extension is probably OK, but not a new browser, IM service, or other significant behavior shift.

Laurel Fan now has a “blog”:http://gorgorg.org/index.cgi . I enjoy working with Laurel at Jobster, and she’s been the source of some of my more interesting blog tips. (Now that she has a blog, I’ll have to start finding more of my own material!)

Recent posts from Laurel include a description of a project she and I have been doing “to integrate JRuby with Spring to allow rapid prototyping”:http://gorgorg.org/index.cgi/OhNoWork.rdoc , and a log of her “backpacking trip to the Flapjack Lakes”:http://gorgorg.org/index.cgi/FlapjackLakes.rdoc.

Weird names, cool apps.

Here a a couple new interesting AJAX web apps I ran across– Meebo and Zimbra.

“Meebo”:http://www4.meebo.com/ is an AJAX instant messaging service that allows to use Firefox or IE to conduct real-time IM chats on AOL, Yahoo, GTalk, and MSN. In the 3 weeks since they’ve launched they’ve had hundreds of thousands of logins and millions of messages sent. Creating a scalable AJAX instant messaging backend is especially challenging, so I’m interested in learning more about how the backend scales.

“Zimbra”:http://www.zimbra.com is an open-source Exchange-killer backend combined with a really slick Ajax client. If you haven’t tried it yet, give the “Zimbra demo”:http://www.zimbra.com/demo a try. (Tim Brennan, one of my coworkers at Avogadro, was one of their earliest employees.)

I was floored by the demo. You never miss the fact that you’re not running a native Windows app– in fact it beats Outlook in several areas including search and smart tooltips. You can hover on a date and see appointments for that date, or hover on a web page and see a thumbnail. The backend even supports the ability to plug in custom tooltips.

Web apps are bad at displaying long scrolling lists, but apps like Zimbra and Gmail show that good and fast searching and tagging capabilities more than compensate for this lack. Why scroll and sort a huge inbox when search is faster and easier?

The calendaring app is equally slick.

My only complaint is that page response on the demo server is sometimes a little sluggish, but presumably hosting the service yourself would it make it fast.

To be an Exchange killer, Zimbra still needs to prove in practice that an install can stand up to thousands of users and millions of messages. Then there are other nagging details like Blackberry integration.

Still, if I were Microsoft, I’d be concerned.

Update: I have integrated Urbanspoon and Yelp reviews into the Berry411 results for a number of popular cities and business categories, making their large volume of reviews available immediately.

Restaurants are the most popular mobile search category I see in the Berry 411 logs. To make it easier to capture and share your mobile search favorites, I’ve created some mobile friendly forums, optimized for creating search links.

When you search for Seattle restaurants on Berry 411, a link is displayed to “Berry Seattle Restaurant Picks”:http://www.thebogles.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=3, a search forum using a “mobile optimized forum template”:http://thebogles.com/blog/projects/mobile-optimized-forums-template/ for phpBB2.

Of course you can also browse and post to the forum using a PC.

When creating a post, if you enclose a phrase in single quotes (e.g. ‘Lark’) it will automatically be converted into a “clickable” search link when people read your post.

A number of the Jobster crew have contributed their favorite restaurants, so it represents a small but excellent collection of favorite restaurants. Based on the forum stats, it looks like it’s seeing a decent number of readers.

If you live in Seattle, please give the forum a try and contribute your own favorites. If you live in another city and would like to kick off a forum for your city, please contact me.

Why have I never seen this before?

We saw and loved “Libeled Lady”:http://www.netflix.com/MovieDisplay?movieid=60010593&trkid=189530&dmode=ATAGLANCE&lnkctr=mdptabDetails&#details, a screwball comedy from 1936 starring William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, and Jean Harlow. Super cast, especially Powell and Loy (this was filmed a couple years after The Thin Man), and a wild plot. A surprise announcement at the end has us all set up for a tidy ending, before another surprise announcement throws things back into chaos.

Libeled Lady was nominated in the “1936 Academy awards”:http://www.filmsite.org/aa36.html for Best Picture, which was won by The Great Ziegfeld, also a Powell and Loy production. Two of the other outstanding movies from that year were My Man Godfrey and Mr Deeds Goes to Town.

Amazing to think such a new medium could have such great work so early on– after all talking pictures had been introduced only a decade earlier. I suppose you could say that similarly amazing degree of progress was made in the first decade of the web– but in 70 years, will anyone still be reading the pages we create today?

I read this over on the “Jobster blog”:http://jobster.blogs.com and thought I’d pick it up here– “Moms Corp”:http://www.momcorps.com/index.html links up experienced professional moms with companies needing project based work.

This is a great idea. The best professionals enter the active job market just a few times in their lifetime. Graduating from school is one; returning to the work force after having a child is another. Beginning with project based work gives a company the chance to meet immediate needs with high quality talent, while investing in a relationship that can grow to a full time position.

The Mom Corps helps today’s businesses reduce overhead and increase productivity by providing high-level accounting, legal, marketing, and IT services on a part-time and project basis. At the same time, we provide an opportunity for highly accomplished professionals to find a desired balance between career and family.

Dave Mabe discusses his new book “Blackberry Hacks”:http://dave.runningland.com/2005/10/05/my-new-book-blackberry-hacks/, which is now “available for order on Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596101155/002-4495498-5315207?v=glance&n=283155&n=507846&s=books&v=glance .

The book has a nice blend of “hacks? for a whole range of BlackBerry aficionados from the newest of users to the seasoned veteran. Here is a chapter list:

BlackBerry Hacks Chapters

1. Using your BlackBerry
2. Email
3. Games
4. The Internet and Other Networks
5. Free Programs
6. Shareware Apps
7. BES Administration
8. The Web and MDS
9. Application Development

O’Reilly should have the complete hack list on the “book’s web site”:http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/blackberryhks/ pretty soon. They’ll also include some free sample hacks from the book.

I contributed two articles to the shareware apps and application development sections; I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

I’ve created a phpBB template that is optimized for PDAs and mobile phones, to support the Berry 411 discussion forums.

If you’d like to create your own forums that work well on both PCs and mobile devices, the template is available for “download”:http://thebogles.com/blog/projects/mobile-optimized-forums-template/.

“Joe”:http://bostonsteamer.livejournal.com/ points me at this “JVM languages shoot-out”:http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/sokoban/ comparing the author’s experience with different dynamic languages that run on the JVM.

As of Beta 10, the author had some “fairly painful experiences”:http://opal.cabochon.com/~stevey/sokoban/docs/article-groovy.html with Groovy unimplemented features, bugs, and inadequate documentation.

As of JSR-03, I still find issues with respect to unimpemented features or bugs and the documentation. The release version is not expected until February 2006.

All told, JRuby is looking better by the moment.

Update: Laurel has a JRuby version of the controller up and running; that was easy!