Wiring Progress…
It’s been about a month since I launched the idea for Live Clipboard at the O’Reilly EmTech Conference. Since that time, it’s been fun to observe the energy surrounding the concept - both on the web as well as within Microsoft.
One particularly interesting thing I found in backtracking the conversation is that, among others, Bill Burcham over at lesscode.org had apparently been thinking and writing about similar concepts for some time. His, and others’ evangelism of the concept makes me even more optimistic that we might actually be able to get it to critical mass in some evolved form.
In the past few weeks, the discussion thread that our concept development team started has been extremely active. We’ve received some great input and feedback from many of you and as a result have a draft spec for review. We value your insights and look forward to working with you to evolve this to a 1.0 spec.
We’ve also updated our sample web page, and our technical introduction to Live Clipboard.
Also, last week at Mix06 there were three separate sessions where the Live Clipboard concept was introduced and discussed. At Mix06…
- Two members of the concept dev team, Paresh Suthar and Matt Augustine, conducted a session on Live Clipboard. Mix06 attendees saw the etech demo and more - including the integration of the Live Clipboard and SSE concepts. Paresh and Matt showed how you can set up SSE contact sync between two users using the Live.com gadget and Live Clipboard.
(By the way - a new video overview of SSE with Paresh and George Moromisato, another member of the team, is available
for viewing here.)
- Nikhil Kothari unveiled his Live Clipboard Atlas component and how it could be integrated into a media player gadget. After demoing the necessary coding steps, Nikhil showed how you can copy an audio playlist from a web page in Live Clipboard format, and then paste it into a gadget, which then began playing the songs and displaying album art. Very cool.
- Scott Isaacs, the architect responsible for the AJAX bindings framework used by the Windows Live and MSN sites, showed some amazing Live Clipboard capabilities that he’s adding to that framework. Essentially, as a result of Scott’s work, you just need to add a small bit of XML to any page that uses his framework and the Live Clipboard icon/control is automatically added to any microformat on the page. For example, if you have contact data in hCard format on a page, the Live Clipboard icon for copy/paste will simply render automagically next to the contact info.
For those interested, Mix06 videos/podcasts are here.
Much progress has been made within a few short weeks, and it wouldn’t have happened without your participation. Special thanks to
- Tantek Celik for his encouragement and continuous education on microformats. Tantek’s microformats are ideal for representing structured data in HTML; we use them extensively in our demos. It’s great to see that Tantek (left) and Matt Augustine got a chance to connect at MIX06.
- Colin Viebrook at liveclipboard.org for caring enough to criticize/improve the iconography
- Paul Daniel, who - clearly inspired by our Live Clipboard work with Windows Live Local - decided to get it working in Google Maps marker windows
- To Jon Udell for his always-on-the-mark insights into the significance of all things technical
- All the folks who have contributed comments/encouragement via the discussion thread
Let’s keep the momentum going…
