One Big Library.

Here's something I wrote two years ago:

"sometime by summer 2009, Apple will introduce the MacPad, a keyboardless tablet computer with a wholly reimagined UI based on multi-touch."

By many estimations, this is on track. All the stuff they've added to the 3.0 OS seems to make it possible to do almost everything you can do with a computer with an iPhone. Add a multicore processor, bluetooth, a plugged-in device API, and ZeroConf support (finally!) and this is getting very close to a general computing device.

Which is what I want. Only a little bit bigger.

The challenge here seems to have been to find the right balance between shrinking the mac laptops and growing the ipod/iphone. When I wrote about "MacPad" I presumed they would be shrinking the laptop. But now it seems more like they're growing the ipod/iphone. They've built up the restricted OSX environment on the phone now so that it can handle most any kind of app except for a terminal, a decent IDE, or a decent word processor. An "iPhone Pro" at 8"x5" wouldn't get quite there, but with a shape and features just like the iPhone, but bigger, it'd be just shy of that. A "MacPad" smaller than the Air in a tighter package with hideaway keys and multitouch would be just enough, but might make a crappy phone.

Like plenty of other people, I'm still convinced this is coming soon, but I'm not sure whether it'll be one or the other or both. Can't wait to find out, though.

Has anybody out there thought about advertising an OpenSearch service via ZeroConf-style wide-area DNS Service Discovery (DNS-SD)? A quick look at the DNS-SD SRV Service Types doesn't seem to indicate as such, and a search for "opensearch and dns-sd" or a search for "opensearch and zeroconf" mostly shows hits back to this blog.

I see three reasons for considering this:

• Lets the discovery happen even when users are looking at one of your webapps or subdomains where you can't twiddle the HTML HEAD element (there are still plenty of these)
• Lets a remote service find out more about the institution running your network (modulo "but I'm not on that network now" problem, which plain ol' zeroconf itself could help)
• The more avenues for discovery the better

Er, those being "general reasons for anybody using OpenSearch to consider this". My own reasons extend these with more specifics about library-specific uses like metasearch and link resolvers, some details of which I've written up before.

One main drawback to all this is:

• Browsers and javascript-in-browsers don't do DNS

...or, well, Safari and Konq do, but not IE (not without a plugin, and "First Install This Thingy" doesn't scale) and not Mozilla/Firefox. But then again we could always proxy that with a web service, yadda, yadda. See also mozilla bug 14328 and discussion.

Defining an SRV type would be pretty straightforward - it probably only needs a key pointing to the path of the OpenSearch description document, since that's what that's for.

Back in January I wrote:

"The only iPod-plus-cell-phone combo I could imagine Steve Jobs signing off on would be one whereby the entire iTunes Music Store is available from the device. I.e. you can buy anything from the iTunes catalog right from the device, and listen to it nearly instantly ... and then listen to it on your computer later, too."

/me reaches for wallet...

I said 'bluetooth' when I should've assumed wifi. Either way: does anybody know if it does zeroconf? I've read that the iPhone does not do zeroconf.

My last post was about my recent talk where I try to highlight how iTunes is able to work its instant-sharing magic - by using ZeroConf. Today Walt Mossberg, the most influential tech writer around, chose to highlight this very thing in his must-read Personal Technology column called "You're Using iTunes, But Are You Missing Some of the Fun?"

So to paraphrase Mr. Mossberg:

"You're using the library and the network, but you're missing some of the fun."

Thanks to inkdroid I've been nursing a geek crush on ZeroConf for over a year. Its time might just be now.

(If, after reading the WSJ piece, you want to know more about ways ZeroConf could be used in libraries, just follow the tag. I just hope it grows more coherent as you move forward in time.)

Here are the slides (all one hundred and thirty-freakin'-five of them) from the keynote/"vision" talk I gave yesterday morning in Louisville, KY at NASIG 2007. I was very sorry to miss most of the rest of the conference, but was quite glad to have the chance to present this talk to a very engaged crowd (especially considering it was 8am on a Sunday) and catch up with several friends I hadn't seen in ages after the talk.

The name of this talk is -

A New Approach to Service Discovery and Resource Delivery

...and that's what it's about.

In it I reprised some slides and concepts from previous talks I've given at a NISO meeting last November and code4libcon this past March and a few more slides from an earlier Access talk. But rather than just rehash slides explaining why COinS and unAPI are useful, I tried to place their potential benefits in a critical light, and from that perspective, I tried to state a much higher standard we need to try to reach for, and not settle for less, and one obvious (to me) way to get started.

That path is through the dynamic service links we now see everywhere. In this talk you'll see a series of slides about 2/3 through that start to explain what I think we should work on next - a way to unify interfaces to those peskily incompatible service link boxes that would open up a ton of doors that would remain closed even if COinS and unAPI both really exploded.

So have a look, and, if they don't make sense on their own, rest assured that a healthy number of serials librarians (at least a good 1/3 to 1/2 out of several hundreds at one point or another) seemed to be nodding vigorously in agreement with the proposal early yesterday morning.

I'll do my best to give it a more direct blog writeup in the next week or so, but I'll be offline a lot this week for some old-fashioned Stuff To Do and Places To Go. In the meantime, enjoy the 135 slides. :P