Hula
Hula – Open Source Groupware for the Corporate Soul.
There’s lots more out there on all aspects of this than I care to even think about, but some of the things that Nat has written about it in his weblog sound pretty cool. Personally, I have only one wish for this product: for it to become something that I can use in the workplace for task/appointment management. Currently, we’re in a 20% Windows/80% Mac world, but all the appointment management is done through Outlook and ACT!. The number of times I’ve heard the people who use it cursing ACT! is way too high, and it has the obvious problem that the rest of the office can’t use it.
I need to learn to accept that not everything is going to validate, and I need to learn that hacks and workarounds are a way of life. I need to accept that Javascript really is here to stay, and do more to learn how to make good Javascript applications, because really, they can make the entire user experience way better. Software isn’t about perfection, it’s about doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, and making things better for the user.
I wonder what I could start with… a project to learn some of the more advanced Javascript technology, while still keeping the interface usable for non-Javascript enabled browsers, allowing for linking, and so on. Google’s interfaces don’t work so well for this: Gmail, Orkut, and Google Maps all fail miserably without Javascript. I don’t like that.
Ponder ponder…