Mozilla Lab Concept Series, Aurora, and Flow
Shortly after I started playing around with Flow and put my ideas on paper (or at least digitally), someone pointed me to Adaptive Path’s Aurora Project. The brainstorm that lead to me writing about Flow preceded the publishing of the first Aurora video. I believe that I had created the first prototype before the video was published as well. It was really inspiring to me because I envisioned in Flow many of the concepts demonstrated in that video. What’s very interesting to me is this quote from their site:
This is not a demonstration of a real product. What you see in the video is a visualization of our ideas created by animators. Technologically, much of Aurora would be difficult or impossible to implement today. However, we expect everything you see to be possible in some form in the future.
Their desktop browser concept is definitely feasible, I think the Flow prototype shows this. It wouldn’t be difficult to replace the graphs with The concept of synchronization across devices is enabled through Live Fx. WPF has a very rich visualization story and almost any data that can be pulled from a web page (for example a table of precipitation data) can be bound and transformed through different visualizations.
I don’t think that “Flow” would ever serve as a primary browser. Or I should say it’s not one of my goals to make Flow a new web browser but rather an Information Browser. In order to make a good browser, Flow would need the capacity of rendering HTML to WPF natively. Hopefully, Microsoft will one day release a native WPF browser control. Or I will attract the attention of an HTML rendering wizard. Until then, web browsing in Flow will be limited by the capabilities of the BrowserControl.