O’Reilly Interview with Robb Beal

In the second of O’Reilly’s Innovator Insight interviews, Robb Beal is asked the same questions I was asked in the first interview.

It’s interesting (at least to me) to compare our different answers. Our interviews reflect different personalities and different visions—and I think our apps do too.

NetNewsWire is very textual. It takes a new thing (RSS) and puts it into a familiar interface.

Spring, on the other hand, is very graphical. It takes familiar things and puts them into a new interface. With Spring, the new interface is the thing.

Despite our different visions, Robb and I definitely agree that independent developers benefit when they work together.

Another thing we’d agree on (I think) is that the web browser is not going to go away—and it should not go away, and we don’t want it to go away—but other applications are going to present other ways of doing things on the web.

The web is too big and cool to be stuffed entirely in the browser box. Yet browsers remain hugely important. It’s an AND thing, not an OR thing.