Next-gen browser, or just a pipe dream? (Browsers, Collaboration tools, information sort & search, random rant)

This is pretty exciting stuff... I've often lamented not being easily able to share a "screen" with a friend or a colleague... you can send links to web pages, but I want to do more than that - share whatever's on my screen - web page, app, video, picture, mouse pointer whatever... and if I "send" a web page, I actually want to be able to transfer my session state as well. I may have selected certain options, I may be signed in to my account etc - why can't I just transfer the whole session state and all its content to someone else?

Having used a bunch of different collab tools - from MSN app sharing, Windows Meeting Space, Groove I still haven't found one that's anywhere close to perfect. I remember being thrilled when I first started using Groove - it was the perfect solution to a bunch of things I wanted to do. But it's not perfect. I use OneNote on 3 different PCs and use Groove to sync my notebooks. It worked fine for a bit but every once in a while I notice that a change I made at home wasn't on my work desktop. So I remote into the home machine, pause & restart Groove Sync and then I get multiple copies of sections in a notebook (each one is stored as a file) - which presumably was caused by a sync conflict somewhere. Why wasn't I asked what to do with the conflict? Why didn't I get both on my screen side by side with the conflicting pages highlighted so that I could decide what to do? I just got a section called Jobs, another called Jobs (Shabad Chawla's copy), another called Jobs (Shabad Chawla's copy) (Shabad Chawla's copy), and Jobs (Shabad Chawla's copy) (Shabad Chawla's copy) (Shabad Chawla's copy) and so on. To manually sort these out was a pain but I did it. Until it happened again. Now Groove isn't the killer app I wanted... I don't trust it any more, plain and simple. Something that was supposed to simplify things for me has just complicated them immensely. I can keep track of my changes myself by following a system. I can use paper and type things up later. I now remote into my work machine to get to OneNote if I have an internet connection (thankfully the SonicWALL SSL-VPN still works, and using the ActiveX or Java based remote desktop client from a browser is pretty painless - unless you have a crappy connection) or I use a separate notebook that only exists because I have to manually "Groove" my notes together. That sucks... I know there are other ways of solving this issue, including web-based apps that I can access from my computers, public computers, my phone etc... but that's not the point. Groove should work - and when it gets confused it should ask me what to do - even though I'm losing brain cells, I am reasonably sure I am still able to resolve simple sync conflicts if they're presented in a sensible way (anyone listening?)...

Back to what this post was about :-). Aurora looks like a great concept... some of the interaction looks a bit fiddly, like the flowering "radio menu", some bits seem somewhat unlikely to work overly well on a wide bunch of sites (the presentation object) - wouldn't it be nice if everything was "any valid dataset" :-) and the frame and the "spatial view" cloud both seem weird to navigate - unless I'm just resisting it because it's too new.... I do like unstructured interfaces but I think a more "traditionally" structured cluster layout may work better for my traditionally structured brain. But all you need is a search function that's fast and intelligent - beats sorting systems of any kind, I think. Microsoft's whole "search, don't sort" philosophy with Vista / Office 2007 / WDS / Instant Search really does work for me in specific areas - like Outlook & folders with hundreds / thousands of files / subfolders. But that "specific areas" limitation isn't really because search isn't right for other areas... it's just because it's slow and not 100% reliable. I have come to rely heavily on Instant Search in Outlook (I haven't stopped sorting... I still have a pretty complex folder tree with chronologically named folders and subfolders where I put important emails, but I use search for most emails unless I know that it's one of those that I would have sorted into a specific folder - again probably because search would be slower than going directly to the folder) - and then one day it fell over. It showed no matches for "s". Considering that my name & email address starts with that letter, I found it just a little bit hard to believe that none of the emails in my entire mailbox contain an "s". So I rebuilt the search index in Vista and it took all night but it now works again. Phew. But I don't use search from the start menu. Or Orb menu or round-button menu or whatever it's called. It is just too slow. I still regularly use WinKey+R (at least 40 or 50 times a day) to launch things, because it's much quicker. The only thing I can think of that I actually use the start search for is to get to my printers folder, because it's a little bit quicker than going through the control panel... which brings me back to the eternal central issue - that my poor little computer is wheezing all the time, running my usual session. It's a C2D 2.something with 2Gb of memory - which (the last time I looked) is double the required amount of memory for Vista. And it's painfully slow. Ok so I run a heavy session - I have two screens and my taskbar is lined up vertically on the right side of my left hand screen - so even when I have 10 windows open it only looks half-full. maybe this is why I have so many apps running - or maybe it's because I need them / want them / should be able to run them! I don't run any Virtual Machines on this PC anymore, all I've got right now is... Outlook, Firefox (2 windows, about 15 tabs total), OneNote, a couple of emails I'm typing & reading (so Word), a couple of remote desktops, a VPN client, a couple of folders, media player and then a few bits that live in the tray - Live Mesh, WMDC, the Sidebar, Groove (yup, I still have it) & AntiVirus. So I'm not the average 1-explorer window kind of user but I'm not exactly killing it either. So why is search performance from the start menu completely crap? I'd investigate, but I have to go back to shooting gangsters in the flash-game that someone just sent me embedded in an Excel spreadsheet :-)

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