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08 Aug 2006
MicroContent look at Leopard
Unless you have been hiding, you will have noticed that WWDC of Apple is on and that Steve Jobs gave his keynote on Leopard. As Mac-follower I tracked the keynote on Macrumors and noticed some MicroContent related stuff.
MicroContent layer
Apple is moving (consciously?) to a MicroContent layer. This is already the case for Images, Audio and Video. Keynote for instance has the ability to add pictures, audio or video from the iPhoto, iTunes library or specific folders through a browser windowlet. This windowlet is also available in non-Apple applications such as Sandvox. And Karelia added a third MicroContent Type (bookmarks) to this windowlet in Sandvox. These bookmarks are pulled from Safari. As I use WebnoteHappy to manage my bookmarks, I have to import these into Safari. With Leopard Apple seems to add yet another MicroContent Type to this layer: todo's. Leopard Mail allows the user to create todo's, which then also turn up in iCal. And other applications can also contribute to this todo database and I guess can also read from this database. Thus yet another MicroContent Type for this layer.
Systemwide Creation
There shouldn't be just one application to create a specific MicroContent Type, but multiple. And these multiple applications should be able to contribute to the MicroContent layer, so that all Items are available to any application. This is not yet the case. The best way to fill this layer is by adding Item to folders such as /Pictures, /Movies and /Music. Unfortunately after that one has to import the Items into iTunes and iPhoto for better management of this MicroContent. With Leopard Mail a new way will be introduced. Just select a piece of text in a note (their example), click on the ToDo button and a new todo is created. Then change the due date, iCal category and priority of the new todo. They say that this feature will be available to any app that wants to use it. I think I would like to have this for any other MicroContent Type. Select a date to create a, select a URL to create a bookmark, select an ISBN-number to create a review, etc.
Systemwide Mashing
With the addition of stationary to Leopard Mail, Apple has introduced mashing to this app. When a user creates a new mail item, he can select a stationary to go with it. A stationary can be seen as a mashup format. In the video example on Apple's web-page this format consists of a title field, a text field and three image fields. The user can fill these fields through the image browser and by typing. For each mashup format the user can switch styles in order to change the layout of the mashup. I wonder whether this approach can be extended to other applications as well and thus introduce a system-wide mashup feature. And i expect that these mashups will not be limited to just text and images.
Mail Client confusion
With Leopard Mail Apple will add two other MicroContent Types to the Mail client. They have added ToDo's and Notes. And probably they changed it even more with stationary: any MicroContent Type can be added as stationary. At least when this feature is open for third parties. Notes are just pieces of text that a user can create. By adding these to Mail, Apple says that these Notes can be accessed from anywhere. I assume that these are then sent to your home address, in order to have them go through the POP-server. So that makes them some kind of special mail. ToDo's are however really a different MicroContent Type that has been added to the application. The Items-pane has special columns (priority, due date) that correspond to this MicroContent Type. I am not sure why these ToDo's have been added to this application. The only reason that I can think of, is that Mail is an important source for todo's. And to make things even more complicated, Apple has added RSS to Leopard Mail. One can subscribe to RSS-feeds in the Mail app. So a user gets even more choice for following the news. I no longer know whether I should call this a Mail Application though.
Widgets Galore
And finally the introduction of DashCode allows an end-user to create his own widgets. The widgets can tap MicroContent from rss, photocasts or ipods. And I assume that any other MicroContent Type can be added later by developers. Especially interesting is the clipping widget that takes a web-page as source and extracts a specific MicroContent Item. This allows a user to follow a part of a web-page and thus De-mashing a web-page. I wonder how that works.