Desktop mashups

This week I’ve been dipping into and watching a lot of Google TechTalks with the engEdu tag on Google video. I guess like visiting the library shelves and *browsing* (something I really ought to make time for!) as opposed to just hitting the catalogue for a specific title, this tends to throw up interesting things that you wouldn’t otherwise come across. One such was a TechTalk by Mark Birbeck of formsPlayer.com who presented Desktop Mashups: Combining Web Applications to Make Desktop Productivity Tools.

Now this is really interesting because he describes Sidewinder which is essentially a next-generation browser that has support for XHTML + other XML markups (MathML, SVG, etc) and XForms, the W3C recommendation for Web UI (nice tutorial intro from Mark here) but with a twist! The twist is that with a little JavaScript, you can turn virtually any web page into a desktop *widget* (or *gadget*) that can be docked to the desktop à la *google gadgets*. Furthermore you can combine streams of XML to provide all kinds of useful mash-ups. An example given in the talk put Gmail into a Sidewinder window, docked it to the side of the desktop with auto-hide, and intercepted open window events from GMail (created by following a link in an email, for example) so that the opened pages appeared in another dockable Sidewinder window. This effectively makes Gmail into a desktop app rather than a browser app. Other use cases were also given, but it’s this one that I like the best. For example, it should be possible to have my twitter*tweeter* on the desktop rather than in a browser sidebar or, worse, an AIM client. Mark promised support for more sophisticated mash-ups like a form of lifecasting.

I need to read (or view) more about Xforms and give Sidewinder a try.