While Picnik gradually converts the functionality of desktop image processing software into online tools (in the hope, presumably, of being bought up by one of the big players), Flash has found other, more piecemeal uses in augmenting the image and font functionality of your average browser.
In previous posts (part 1, part 2) I established the possibility that there were advantages to making Javascript more functional, to bring it in line with CSS and XSL. I didn’t say what these were, particularly, but I then provided a few bits and pieces on top of jQuery to make Javascript just that: functional and quasi-XSL in its behaviour.
Steve Yegge on *Emacs, pointing also to the possible future direction of the *browser:
“IDEs are draining users away, but it’s not the classic fat-client IDEs that are ultimately going to kill Emacs. It’s the browsers. They have all the power of a fat-client platform and all the flexibility of a dynamic system. I said earlier that Firefox wants to be Emacs. It should be obvious that Emacs also wants to be Firefox…
If it’s really the case that browsers, virtual machines and IDEs will one day converge, then the first steps would be to run Java, Ruby and other languages in a browser using Javascript. (Hat tip to Nick for the timely links.)
[Edit: run Python using Javascript too.]
I'm typing this from Google Chrome. Since it was released almost two weeks ago I've wanted to blog about it, but have been mostly hampered by no easy access to Vista or XP.