Do me a favor and take a minute to play with this. It's a demo application for a framework called Echo2. This framework "removes the developer from having to think in terms of 'page-based' applications and enables him/her to develop applications using the conventional object-oriented and event-driven paradigm for user interface development."

Basically, it allows a person to create very nice website/applications without having to deal with the usual technologies of the internet. Which is nice, because the sort of people who are capable of designing and implementing complex, elegant applications are all snobs who believe HTML is a pain and javascript is ugly.

When you're done playing with that, tinker with google spreadsheets.

I'm sort of curious as to whether or not people think that these sorts of "internet applications" are good things. There's already a lot being written about this sort of thing, so I doubt we'll have anything new to add, but I'm curious nonetheless.

For my part, I remain curmudgeonly and unconvinced. I like for my applications, my configurations, and my data to live on my hardware. My life would be easier if I could change my mind; I use about five different computers in three different operating systems every week, which means learning a ton of different applications to do the same jobs. Each application on each computer requires its own configurations, and my data becomes spread out, which is a hassle. It seems like I am exactly the sort of person who should jump at these ideas. Nonetheless, I continue to configure Thunderbird to check my GMail account on every operating system on every computer, because the GMail interface simple doesn't do it for me.

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