Tim Bray
Biomedical Visualization
Continental DriftPleased with the runaway success of XML, but dangerously bored, Bray found a new search problem to attack. “The moment you step off your desktop and into a shared information space, a search engine, catalog or directory, you’re back typing queries and getting list results 1-12 of 8,000,” says Bray. “There is this yawning gulf between the visual access to personal information, like my Mac desktop, and the old-fashioned command-line interface that’s all we have for shared information.”
Antarctica’s product, Visual Net, attempts to close that gap by providing a browser-based graphical user interface for shared data. And in a soggy market for new software, Bray’s solution and his company are very much going concerns. “We’re getting lots of deployments now in supply chains, where clients map inventory spaces,” he says.
Desktop Divide
While Bray was busy changing the face of the network, he was making equally radical changes on his desktop. “I’ve used UNIX since 1979 — that’s not a misprint — but as a businessman I’ve always had to carry a laptop,” Bray remembers. “And because I came to hate X Window, and because UNIX never got traction on the desktop, I was one of those guys using Windows on my laptop and UNIX in the backroom.”
“XML is used for banking transactions, for interchanging prices in condo developments and for exporting data from iTunes.”
Itching to switch, Bray jumped last year to Mac OS X, lured by a distinctly unchallenging start-up experience. “I’m impatient,” Bray says convincingly. “When I open up my Windows laptop, whether I’m booting it or resuming it, I’m waiting a long time before it’s ready to do work. On my PowerBook, with Mac OS X, by the time my fingers are on the keyboard it’s not only ready to work, it’s synced up to the network. For that reason, I had to have one.”
Mac OS X also enabled Bray’s desktop rapprochement with Unix: “The fact that it’s a full-featured UNIX system is just icing on the cake.”
Looking Forward
While he continues to work with the Web consortium to keep the online world on spec, most days, Bray says, he brings his undivided attention, and his newly integrated desktop, to his day job. “I’m really fully committed to Antarctica,” says Bray. “Inside of five years, we’ll all be using visual interfaces to shared information. And another crack at a chance to change the world seems like a pretty big thing to me.”