Carnival of the Mobilists #66 and #67 and responses

This is a bit late, but Carnival of the Mobilists #66 is at All About Symbian, one of my major Symbian news sources. My post on Contextuality is in that carnival.

Also, Carnival #67 is up at Wap Review and it has an interesting post from David Beers which, in the latter half, bounces off my idea of contextuality, and extends it out into the interrelationship between applications and data.

To be honest, I really wasn't thinking along these lines, for two reasons: 1) I can write applications, but I'm not in a position to write OS's and 2) I've seen too many failures of frameworks that have tried to achieve this.

Regarding reason 2: I love the idea of the user being able to use any tool he owns on his current context. However the Newton and Pink (or Taligent), both showed how difficult this is to do in reality (the Newton got further, but only because it was less ambitious). Apple aren't alone in trying this, MS have given up on their DB-based filesystem, which was trying to do a similar thing. In fact, MS have been talking about the idea for well over a decade. The most successful attempt at this approach that I've personally seen was the Oberon project, which actually allowed any text to be treated as a command. Brilliant stuff, but quite limited in the real world.

I've had so many hopes for this type of capability dashed: OLE, OpenDoc, Novell's software bus, the Newton's data soup, PenPoint's object oriented integration, Symbian's DNL (Dynamic Navigation Links, which do actually work, but are missing the key functionality of "vectorability" -- maybe more on this later), etc. etc.

It's made me very cynical about this. But I still have hope. Maybe one day we'll all get things sorted enough that software will start getting out of the way and actually helping people do stuff.

(Oh yes, regarding reason 1, maybe it's worth thinking about how to create this sort of open environment hosted by an application framework, rather than natively via the OS... Hmm...)