Wednesday, January 8, 2014; 11:19:57 AM Eastern
Local Storage made desktop JS
- Until late last year (2013, Happy New Year) when I needed to write a little utility script that would do a housekeeping task on the net for me, I would write it in Frontier.
- But then something changed. I realized I could write them in JavaScript to run in the browser on a local machine or even one of my server machines. It really doesn't matter where they run. I didn't think too much about it when I was writing them, but just realized that what made it possible was the HTML 5 idea, localStorage. Without it, a bit of code running on the desktop would need a server to remember its state. Now the local machine has that ability, and why not, disk space is super cheap, at least relative to what it used to cost.
- The most useful utilities so far have acted as a bridge between RSS and Twitter. It's how my linkblogging tool connects with it now. And it is still relying on a server for the final step.
- My old friend Jeff Sandquist, who used to be the lead developer guy at Microsoft, is now doing that at Twitter. I keep telling Jeff I have no interest in doing anything on top of Twitter, but then I keep doing things on top of Twitter. Oy! Yes, they could make it better. I shouldn't need a proxy to talk to their server. My desktop JS should be able to talk directly to their server.
- Where do I think this will go? Well, there's no question you could write a full RSS aggregator to run on the desktop in the browser, even on a tablet or a phone. Decentralization is now much much easier than it ever has been, and it's coming at a good time, with all the michegas from the NSA.
- #description "Without local storage, a bit of code running on the desktop would need a server to remember its state."
- #flMapHeader "true"
- #mapLatitude "37.7764095"
- #mapLongitude "-122.4177325"
- #mapType "roadmap"
- #mapZoom "14"
- #titleColor "DarkOliveGreen"
- #subheadColor "DarkOliveGreen"