I’ve been lamenting the loss of Shiftspace silently and sullenly ever since I upgraded to the beta versions of Firefox 3 last year. I really didn’t want to downgrade and wait, though, since I was experiencing a few unhappy issues with Firefox 2 on Mac OS which happily disappeared with version 3. So, I did without Shiftspace, cool though it may be.
No longer: there is a version of Shiftspace available which works with Firefox 3.0… you can find it here; you will want to click on the “release userscript” in the bottom right-ish corner.
Should I add you’ll need Greasemonkey, first? Well, I guess I have, now.
While searching for this, I happened upon an app called Lily, which is a visual programming environment written in Javascript:
Lily is a browser-based, visual programming environment that lets people create programs graphically, without writing code, by drawing connections between data, images, sounds, text and graphics. Lily’s cross-platform, free, open source and is written in JavaScript. Did we mention it’s fun?
What does it all mean? I don’t know! Isn’t “it’s fun” enough for you?
Hi Phil,
thanks for the continuous support. Unfortunately the link you referred to is an alpha of the upcoming (awesome) ShiftSpace release. It is more functional with FF3 than 0.10 but is unfortunately still not fully functional. FF3 requires us to change the way we attach functions to objects, and there are some fixes to be made with the new release. Otherwise we could have already launched the much awaited ShiftSpace 0.11 (to be called 0.5) in which we basically rewrote the whole thing!
For now the version you referred to works well for leaving notes, but is not as functional with other “spaces”. We hope to get the last bugs fixed within the next days and finally launch. We will make sure to keep you posted with a full list of the new features (FF3 support and much much much more).
take care,
Mushon
Thanks Mushon. Good to know.
As soon as I can commit some time, I'm looking forward to actually digging into the Shiftspace internals.
To be honest, I'm still a little stumped as to why there isn't more buzz about these sorts of things (shiftspace, (the late?) hoodwinkd, et al.). It seems blindingly obvious to me that these tools, or some other implementation of these same ideas, are a huge part of the future of the web. I guess they are just not quite polished enough (yet) for the Scoble's of the web to jump on them and begin evangelizing their merits…
Yet…
Oooo – Lily sounds interesting. /me investigates
Well, if you ask me the metaweb is the most exciting thing online…
I agree with you that they are the future of the web and I can go on and on about why I think they didn't take on yet. With that being said I think ShiftSpace is not ready for prime time yet and has yet to mature as a platform. It is getting there, but it is not an easy task.
We could definitely use another serious coder like yourself or some of your blog's audience. The FF3 thing has set us back a bit but there are really exciting things happening with ShiftSpace and I have great belief in its potential to transform the way we experience the web.
Again, we would love for you to be a part of it.