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BackPack

I blogged a few days ago about Backpack – and I’ve now been using it for about a week.

I’m still pretty impressed by the look, feel and general behaviour of the application; Backpack really reminds me of Lotus Organiser from about ten years ago. Except it’s extensible, in the web, always available and sharable.

One new feature that’s had some attention in the blogosphere (Scoble et al) is the Writeboards. Think of it as an always on Word or Powerpoint document that’s many-to-one sharable. And Editable. With track changes and edits.

This is a way cool feature.

I’m still looking at the security of all this. I implicitly (foolishly?) trust people like Google for my mail; I also accept that my corporate data is backed up somewhere and belongs to my employer. It’s just a little larger leap of faith for me to trust a new player in this space. What will they do with my data? Should I ever store anything more confidential than a to-do list online?

Web UI

The capabilities of browser based applications have exploded in recent years. (This is especially important for ZENworks – as we move the management console to the new ZENworks Control Center.)

There is a breaking set of new ‘Web 2.0’ applications that use AJAX to deliver a really rich UI; Google Maps is probably the most well known; but I also love these:

– Protopage
– BACKBASE

I remember some of the contortions that had to turned just a few years ago to get anything even looking like this in a browser.

I saw some of the Hula calendar work when I was last in Cambridge – it all looked very slick.

TechCrunch is a great resource for tracking some of these new concepts.

I predict that these UIs will become prevalent on the most sticky sites; I also hope that a lot of the ‘cool’ and ‘sexy’ comes across into the more mundane enterprise IT world.

New music

I finally spent some time (and parted with the hard earned) and got some new music:

Camera Obscura – Biggest Bluest Hifi
Camera Obscura – Underachievers Please Try Harder

I first heard this band on the John Peel 65th Birthday Party – it’s a lot like early Belle and Sebastian; mellow lyrics and guitar. Best served with a nice bottle of red.

Decemberists – Picaresque

This band is on tour this fall – nearest gig to SLC is in Boise, ID. Huh? Go figure. SLC truly is a live music backwater – my proof points are here and here.

Final hit was a couple of CDs from DJ Tiësto – a hot tip from Mark Schouls.

DJ Tiësto – In My Memory
DJ Tiësto – Parade of the Athletes

Nice – a couple of hours of European electronic music. Good for the drive into work.