We've talked about allowing objects to come out of the application in which they have been embedded, and how that removes the lines between applications, operating systems, content, program, etc. and also between user and developer. And the University of Minnesota has been doing some neet work with software robots. I think this is pretty much where it's all headed. Pleasant dreams, John!

(Sorry, Willie Dixon.)

I haven't been working on our Brie user-interface framework for a while now. We took it to a certain early level in Jasmine Croquet, in which we pretty solidly worked out user interface conventions, internal infrastructure, and the basic direct-manipulation philosophy.

Although not terribly novel (we stole liberally from David Smith, David Unger/Randall Smith, David Place/Pat O'Keefe, and, running out of Davids, Stallman/Sussman), Brie was still fairly advanced and abstract research, and we had more immediate work to do: Dormouse and the Croquet SDK release, and several projects using them. Brie had been sustained with financial support from NICT which has come to a pause. A great friend and entire world's best salesman and demo-jock for Croquet went to Duke. So nothing got done on Brie following C5 '06.

Brie has not yet been integrated with the current Croquet SDK. It still needs a lot of work in both the graphics and the API between private and replicated Croquet. It might be most efficient to let some dust settle here: Josh is working on new Croquet graphics, Andreas is working on 2D interfaces, and David Smith is working on the task/interactor model.

But the main thing is that I'm starting another project that I'm very excited about (more about this later), so I know that I won't have time to work on Brie for a while. Fortunately, I do think that, say, phase III or so of the new project will be a driver for pulling Brie out of the closet again.

The choice of which school would turn out to accept cartoon character Alex Doonesbury was decided by on-line poll. Heh. Those other schools never had a chance.

13,6-1,'86 IHTFP

It is being reported that the guys at Smallthought have gotten some funding for their DabbleDB product. That's cool.

I like the core capability: multiple-view, spreadsheet-like shared-Web access to arbitrary user-created databases. That is, server-side Web2.0 plus Group Forming Network math, as applied to databases. Built on Smalltalk.

I also think this is a nice example of building a small and simple downmarket application, and then using modest revenues to build features to head upmarket on top of your core capability. (Christensen, Moore, etc.) The eventual target presumably being Oracle's PeopleSoft.

I'm surprised that they they took as much money as they did this early. I think this is good, but not a change-the-world killer app. Lots of folks can do this. (Laszlo (where John works) and Curl (where John and I used to work) should approach stuff this way rather than chasing the enterprise from the start.) Maybe Web-Winter is thawing?
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Sorry that I haven't been writing. To busy coding. News soon. But a cute thing happend today that I have to share...

I was starting a demo of some Internet-accessible collaborative spaces, and someone else was there! Frank Wattenberg, a colleague at the US Military Academy was in the same space. I had to use the in-world communications facilities to ask him if he wouldn't mind leaving for a little while.

I guess it was only a matter of time. Time and a lot of effort to get to the point where accidents like this can happen.

Hmmm. Frank's been trying to find the time for some instruction on how do WAN Croquet. I think he's figured it out!

A number of folks here have independently started to plan conferences in which Croquet would be used for presentation and interaction during the conference, and would continue after the physical conference ended. I think there's a good reason that people want to do this.

Face-to-face meetings and conferences are very high-bandwidth encounters, but do not persist well.

Sharing ideas by publishing (e.g., papers in a professional journal) has excellent persistence, but is extremely low bandwidth.

Croquet is multi-bandwidth.
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Key invitation-only conference on the future of collaborative virtual worlds.

Metaverse Roadmap site

CNET story

A Microsoft blogger, with pictures

Good blog

A key thread in all this seems to be a desire for an open-source framework that works. It looks like the only concerns voiced about Croquet for this was a mistaken impression about the licensing. (See the comments in the “Good blog”, above.)

BTW, We're still trying to set up cool demos over the now-released Croquet Software Developers Kit. The demo at Metaverse was actually the demo we produced at the University of Wisconsin for C5 '05 in Kyoto, which was built over the Jasmine proof-of-concept. The current release is so much better, but lacking in some of the visible bells and whisles. We're working on it...

My two youngest kids asked me to reinstall Disney Aladdin for the umpteenth time on Windows, and to please make it work this time. I sat down, and they knowingly left the room and turned the TV up. Presumably to drown out the funky language they would soon be hearing from Dad. But instead, I installed a Croquet application I've been working on.

It happens to have a dead-simple navigation mechanism that I stole from Orion Elenzil. Even my four year old can drive around in Croquet.

So he's merrilly driving around over these hills. It took him about 15 seconds to discover that he could open portals by clicking on them, and that if he hit it right, he could drive through the portal into another space. He likes to drive.

Meanwhile, I connected from another computer, and drove up next to him.

“Hey, Dad!” he said, “Are you in my game?”

And we were off, playing follow-the-leader and hide-and-seek.

As lots of Croqueteers already know, we have FINALLY released version 1.0 (Beta) of the Croquet Software Developer's Kit. (The Web site is new, too.) This is the first released version of the Croquet innards that does all the stuff that Croquet is supposed to do: shared simulations in spatial environments in order to achieve a collaborative build/use environment with social presence.

Being open source with a very liberal license, we expect a lot of stuff to be built in, around, and on the SDK. In particular, there's still room for folks to define an APPLICATION that Joe-Random-User can just pick up and USE. There are plenty of working demos in this new release: they'll be particularly meaningful to developers who play with them and the code a bit. More to come...

My wife recently made this video about our fight to stop a high-voltage power line proposed in our neighborhood. It was a lot of work.

She put copies onto DVDs with nice printed labels for distribution. I would have thought that seeing the physical product would give us a sense of completion and having accomplished something. It was nice, but it didn't quite close the effort.

Then we uploaded the bits to Google Video and waited for review before it was accessible. And waited. And waited. And then one day we just checked to see if it was up. Bingo! We watched it over and over again. I was struck by how much greater the sense of accomplishment in seeing the video up on Google, available for world-wide viewing.

This is the new distribution. This is the Age of Imagination.