For the last few years I’ve led an annual trip of O’Reilly editors, writers, and FOOs down to IBM Almaden. We get to see cool projects in varying stages of maturity from “I’m building simulations the same order of magnitude as a mouse brain” through to enterprise search applications that look like they’re ready for product release. The most exciting are the ones where clever people tackle something new, where you can see the promise and know there brains chasing a good idea.
Koala was one such promising project (so promising we featured it at ETech) and now it’s been released as CoScripter for Firefox. It lets you script browser actions and send them to other people. Tessa Lau, the researcher we met, said it had already seen action within her group as secretaries learned and passed on workplace skills (filling out leave sheet, travel requests, expense reports, etc.) through CoScripter.
CoScripter, like the Firefox uploader from Wesabe (in whom O’Reilly has invested) makes real use of the stream of activity data that a browser has access to, unlike the windmill-tilting Attention Trust. We see the web browser playing home to other complex helper applications that look over your shoulder to make your life easier.
See this post at Mozilla Labs or visit the project’s home page for more information.