DeepaMehta Kick Off & Research News
Malte wrote on 23. December 2009 – 00:50
Dear DeepaMehta Folks,
this blogpost is for updating the ones who haven’t got jri’s Kick Off Message[de]. I guess there were somewhat between 2 and 100 people who told me: “yes, please notify me, if you write DeepaMehta from scratch”, well, it’s about the time to tell you, v3 development was started by jri at github :)
So there is not much to tell yet, except that you can join our community conversation and weekly chats, you’ll find infos at the DeepaMehta 3 Google Group (if you have a simple Google Account because that’s the current way). You can also start discussing your use cases or conceptual thoughts in the current deepamehta 3 base page or start to discuss the most recent developments in the v3 github wiki.
In particular you might be interested in our Use Case Page to add your wishes and envisioned scenarios, as well as i am lucky if you might point us to interesting work done by others of which you know that it may help us getting onto a “highway”.
The current developments are completely JavaScript and CouchDB driven and therefore running in firefox at least. There are already some hooks, interfaces and a kind of plugin architecture. Check out jri’s repository at github if you want to run the next generation and join us coding. Some cool and very interesting designing challenges lay ahead of us. Just to give you one example and tell you where it scratches me from the back of my head down to the fingers, that’s when I think of time displayed in a DeepaMehta like interface. So we definitely want to fuse our plans with fresh and new ideas straight out of your map :)
The first application will be about delivering “Emails” to “Contacts” with a bit of “Notetaking”. A first “Project” Topic is in the talking, too. A research about time planning tools along available APIs would be very nice to link in here, too. For now I just wanted to contribute my two apples to the current field of our interest, here are some research postings that i found interesting to read.
- Interface Piano in General -
But first ahead, if you don’t know already, checkout “con10uum” [contenuum]. It seems to be designed around one core DeepaMehta vision, the idea of a continuous display of information within a digital work environment. It’s very speciality seems to be a special multitouch interface, decoupled from your display and placed right under your fingers. More infos at http://10gui.com/. In the video you can watch an example of this 10 finger interface.
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Additonal Research Links around a first use cases and interesting developments by other communities, as well as a blogposts about the (for some nearly mystical) announced wavestuff.
- Topic Email -
About aza raskins tool out of mozilla labs named ubiquity which aims to “inter connect the web with language” for 2 goals:
- that the user can describe in his own words what kind of mashups of services / apps he uses on the web to finally aggregate them somehow
- that the information the user wants to communicate are not dis connected
The first point maybe more of interest for the DeepaMehta 3 developments, at least worth a look, if you wanna know how they define what is “connecting the users needs” and then how they do this through plain text language input, which reminds me on QuiKey and the overnext recommendation to browse, an “inky, a sloppy command line for the web with rich visual feedback”. The second point is just about understanding the “Bring-To-Me” Navigation.
But now another report from emonk on using google wave for “collaboration instead of communication, might be interesting for you if you haven’t waved yet. You get emonks point when you ever recognized a “your contact ist currently typing” message in your jabber account and wondered If you should be patient or just interrupt him.
- Topic “lightweight notetaking tools” -
- light weight note-taking tool and firefox users check out the reasearch paper from haystack group and their firefox-addon which is now named “list.it”
- inky; a sloppy command line for the web with rich visual feedback
both papers to find at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/
Well, i don’t know much more than that the next generation of DeepaMehta storage will deliver some kind of informations to you which are wrapped into this tiny little scheme visible at the top of this post. Thank you for reading the news ! We wish all readers some cool days, wherever you are !

