Missing Pieces
Jason Kottke asks a question that is sure to elicit a fair amount of response (especially from those who believe that the omission of tabs in Safari was a positive step)1:
Why the distinction between regular web browsing and web browsing using specialized interfaces for structured data? Using Watson to find movie times is great, but it means having a separate application running...and for ticket purchases, it dumps me back into a web browser anyway. Apple's Sherlock app offers functionality similar to Watson. Why not merge Sherlock and Safari into one application? Wither Sherfari?
Jason -- in the spirit of the not-so-LazyWeb -- has also provided some sample mockups of his vision of this Shangra-Sherfari-La. Apple may very well listen -- Google did.
I believe this is the right direction. True, no one wants a two ton browser to feel like a two ton browser, but that can be avoided. That said, there is only one supplementary browsing application that has won me over enough to make me leave my browser momentarily for certain tasks -- NetNewsWire. But even then, I use NetNewsWire complimentary to my browsing in a traditional web browser. When people provide their full post in their feed, I don't always read it in NetNewsWire --most of the time I use it as a jumping off point to get me to the post on their weblog. Other content, such as Anil Dash's Links is perfect for NetNewsWire: I get the content, read a brief commentary and then am directly taken to the site he's linked to.
To me, NetNewsWire is a filter that helps me choose what I want to read.
Kung-Log is another app that I would use more frequently if, well, it wasn't another app.
During the keynote, when Jobs was introducing Safari, I, in all honesty expected him to say "And this is Bookmarks! And this is the microcontent browser! And one more thing, this is how you post to your weblog." The union of all these tools just makes sense.
1I must admit that I do not tab-browse regularly; I use tabs when the content calls for it, but in general, I am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants close/open window sort of girl. However, I do see the immense value of tabs and understand why some people (Ben, for one) just won't switch to Safari without them. If I was on a dial-up connection, I couldn't live without the feature.
3 Comments
Apple did go half the way to offering the solution proposed above and at Kottke -- it's just a solution from the bottom up rather than the top down.
The WebCore framework is (hopefully) designed to allow, say, NetNewsWire to included rendering in their/his application to achieve just want you want.
Apple is putting onus of development on the third party which, in my opinion, is a great strategic move because they are a lot more third party developers than Apple developers.
I'm using Radio as my news aggregator on the PC, and being able to quickly open up tabbed windows for all the stories I want to read in more detail has been wonderful using NetCaptor (as a shell over Internet Explorer). The alternative of a dozen or more IE items in the task bar I used for years; tabbed is better.
Now that Sherlock 3 is so much nicer than the old Sherlock, what do you think of it?
Note that there are RSS reader channels for Sherlock now.
I was seriously considering writing a Movable Type / Blogger channel for Sherlock...
You mention Kung-Log as "another application"... so you blog using only the web interface? I personally love blogging clients.
Looking for easier ways to manage past posts is the only reason I would make yet another blogging client. For example, there should be a way to edit the post from 3 months ago whose content you remember, but whose title you do not. Or a way to reference a blog entry's ID number in the database without having to parse through HREFs in the web interface of MT.