We’ll Rendezvous at the…Oh, you already know
Let's talk a little bit about my favorite new technology. No, not Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi, and definatly not the difference between streaming and downloading. I wanna talk about Rendezvous. If you know me, you've heard me ranting about this stuff.
Rendezvous is basically Apple's brand name for an open source standard called Zero Conf. Just as Firewire is IEEE 1394, and Airport is IEEE 802.11. Without getting technical, the basis for it is this: Let's let computers and devices find each other on a local network.
Imagine this: A new printer arrives at work. Frank comes in and sets it all up. Once the printer is ready to go, he puts it on the network to be available to all of the workgroup. This printer uses Rendezvous and will basically advertise itself to all of the users. Now, instead of Frank having to go connect to the printer with all of the computers one at a time, the printer just SHOWS up in each user's printer list. No more work for Frank, he goes off to play Quake.
Why make everyone bookmark the local intranet, or have to tell them over, and over, and over again what the internal address is when you can have Apache running Rendezvous. Your user opens up their browser and since its set up to show all the webservers it sees with Rendezvous, the link is in there waiting for them. Eric Seidel did this, as well as integrated Rendezvous into Limewire so that file sharers on a large network can see each other right away without the need of the internet. We'll see if his patch makes it into the next version of Limewire.
Why host your mp3s and your roommates' mp3s on a centralized server when you can each have all of your music on your computer with your mp3 application running Rendezvous. Imagine opening up your mp3 program and your roomate's laptop shows up as a library. You just pick one of his songs and play it. No connecting to shares, no mounting file systems… just simplicity and uninterruption of your work.
Imagine a conversation comes up while entertaining guests at your home and you tell them about your trip to Australia. They ask to see the pictures, so instead of bringing them upstairs to your office to stand over a computer, you turn on your PVR or other device that uses Rendezvous to see your photo library on your computer. Phillips and TIVO will be releasing this soon.
As you can see, this is not just making our lives easier, its connecting our devices together. Sure there are other ways of doing it. But is it as easy as turning on the device? Gone are the days of the hacker, hacking up his house so that all of his devices are connected and seeing each other. This simple technology will go much further and I think its incredibly important. Its open sourced and multi platformed. It has been implemented in all of the major programming languages and is fundamentaly built into Apple's Mac Os X 10.2. I would bet there are some great projects being worked on right now and I can't wait to get my hands on them.