Ajax Girl

1videoConference is a free web conferencing tool in alpha stage that’s burning up the charts on Sourceforge. Like the previously profiled DimDim, it’s software you download and install on your server. It’s designed to be folded into your domain just like your other web pages. Site administrators can then invite users to participate in a video, voice, text chat and screen sharing web conference. The product is far from perfect today, but if these sorts of services can be implemented well in open source they could really change the high priced game of web conferencing. 1videoConference is the 12th most active project on Sourceforge this week and I think it’s one worth watching.

The product was developed by Hardik Sanghvi of Ahmedabad, India and Jason Cox of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sanghvi is part owner of Indian VOIP and BPO outsourcing firm Adiance. Cox was the creator of MyWhatSpace, a program we profiled here in July that was later acquired by MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan’s new company Live Universe. (There’s some news for you, MyWhatSpace was acquired by Live Universe.)

There’s a demonstration video of 1videoConference here. It’s a Windows only program that currently requires all users to download an installer to upgrade .NET, make sure Flash is up to date and install a certificate into IE. I haven’t tried the installer yet because I tested it when those upgrades had to be made manually. Cox says that future iterations of Windows will elliminate the need for the upgrade.

Latency and sound quality are all right so far, video image quality is acceptable. Screen sharing hardly works yet, the conference admin can only get a very low quality view of participants’ screens and participants cannot view the admin’s screen. Thus it’s alpha, a proof of concept or something you’d only want to use in certain circumstances. Sanghvi is already using 1videoConference on his site MedInIndia, a service that connects doctors in India with international medical tourists. Up to 6 people can participate at once by default, but the code can be changed to increase that number.

1videoConference’s promise of integration of web conferencing into any website is an intriguing one. If video capture for recording can be folded into any page ala VideoEgg, the next logical place for the imagination to go would be to integrated video conferencing. Real time collaboration amongst distributed parties is something that many people are working on; see also our review of two related products, Conceptshare and Thinkature, earlier this week. 1videoConference is also planning on offering a paid hosted version and providing support once the product is commercialized.

The team has a long list of features in the works including recording of sessions and automatic upload of the recordings to the web. You can read more about their plans on the 1videoConference site. The primary value here for now, though, is that they have built a free web conferencing platform that’s gaining traction in the open source community. Hopefully it will fill out into a solid product. That’s something that many people would love to get their hands on and it’s only a matter of time until some one makes something finished that fits the bill.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47724717/

If you are thinking of buying an Xbox 360 in the next few days, don’t. We’ve gotten information that Amazon may be putting the $300 Xbox 360 bundle on sale for $100 in the next week or so as a promotional move for the holiday season. We don’t know if this will be limited to the Xbox or will include other items, or exactly how many will be put on sale - but it came from a rock solid source. More as this develops, including coverage at Crunchgear.

On an unrelated note, if you live in Seattle you can win a Zune on CrunchGear.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47701271/

The Alexa traffic widget has been updated as noted by Kian Ann.

It is nicely tabbed, allows you to easily add up to 5 comparisons, but the best feature is the slider for “smoothing”. I will always have the smooth meter on the far right now, as it makes the graph a lot easier to grok. If you are un-smooth you see items facts such as the weekend, swinging the graph all over the place.

It is nice that they added a subtle feature like this to give people a better view on the data. Now, I with that they:

• Let you get even smoother
• Show the darn traffic search by default guys. Come on. Noone is at alexa.com for search

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/alexa-traffic-widget-cleanup

Social search site Wink released a new feature called People Search this weekend and I think it’s going to be a big move for the company. Wink People Search searches over the user profiles of MySpace, LinkedIn and Beebo. It’s not a mashup of the sites’ own search functions, it’s an original indexing of more than 100 million profiles over these three social networking sites.

Wink says it will be adding new social networks to People Search every two weeks, which ones will be voted on by registered Wink users. As niche social networks proliferate, an aggregated people search is so smart. Someone from the Open ID community should buy a big ad on the results page of Wink People Search.

The anonymous nature of many social networking sites makes it difficult, though not impossible, to use them to discover old friends. Wink says that the primary use for People Search will be finding people with similar interests across social networks. Results can be filtered by network, gender, age and single/taken status. Will young people want to search across networks by interest? I’m not sure. Will marketers and researchers? I imagine they will. How will these sites feel about Wink’s ads run against search results of their users’ profiles? That could be some concern, but short aggregated excerpts with links back are generally considered fair game to run ads against, I believe.

Without knowing how it will be used, People Search strikes me as just plain cool. It’s now integrated with the basic Wink bookmarking and sharing functions; Wink augments Google search by allowing you to search inside other users’ bookmark collections. Our previous coverage of Wink is here. The company raised $6.2 million in funding from Cambrian Ventures, Greylock Partners and angels last year. They tell us they’ve got a good, slow burn rate and that’s great - it allows them time to come up with and implement solid features like People Search. This sort of value proposition is likely to drive a significant number of people to Wink and thus increase the users of it’s basic social search. Social search probably isn’t desirable enough to stand on its own so it’s smart of Wink to start building things like People Search around it.

Update: Some people apparently find it distasteful to be able to search multiple social networks simultaneously. That makes no sense to me. If the need to go to multiple sites to search is the only obstacle between you and danger, you’re not very safe. I think this will have zero impact on nefarious activities and will make the biggest impact on research and perhaps evaluation of different social networks to see which are strongest in your areas of interest.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47609985/

Tony Garnock-Jones released an Ajax jukebox written with Prototype on the frontend and Erlang on the backend.

• You point the jukebox at one or more root URLs, which it then spiders, collecting URLs for MP3 and OGG files, which it puts into a simple flat-file database. Just expose, say, your iTunes folder via Apache, point the Jukebox at it, and you’re away.
• It relies on mpg123 and ogg123’s support for playing HTTP-streamed MP3 and OGG files, respectively, rather than retrieving or playing the media itself.
• The user interface is completely written in HTML+Javascript, using prototype for its event
  binding and XMLHttpRequest support.
• The server side of the application communicates with the user interface solely via JSON-RPC.
• Erlang made a great platform for the server side of the application. Its support for clean, simple concurrency let me design the program in a very natural way.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/erlang-ajax-jukebox

Chris Oliver, now at Sun via SeeBeyond, has posted about a new declarative Java scripting framework that Sun will be open sourcing shortly.

My project is called F3 which stands for “Form follows function”, and its purpose was to explore making GUI programming easier in general.

F3 is actually a declarative Java scripting language with static typing for good IDE support and compile-time error reporting (unlike JavaScript…), type-inference, declarative syntax, and automatic data-binding with full support for 2d graphics and standard Swing components as well as declarative animation. You can also import java classes, create new Java objects, call their methods, and implement Java interfaces.

We have IDE plugins for both Netbeans and Eclipse Both plugins support as-you-type validation, code-completion, syntax highlighting, and hyperlink navigation (with control-mouse-over).

F3 attempts to demonstrate that we’re not exploiting the full capabilities of the Java platform for GUI development and that together with supporting tools like F3, the Java platform is highly competitive with or superior to competing GUI development platforms such as Macromedia Flash/Flex/Open Laszlo, Adobe Apollo, Microsoft WPF/XAML, Mozilla XUL, AJAX/DHMTL.

Example

would produce:

And then a demo of a flash port that took a couple of days:

I think that we all feel that GUI work could be easier than Swing currently is. I wonder if a new language that is a hybrid of Java and JavaScript makes sense, or if they could use the latest ECMAScript?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/f3-suns-new-declarative-java-scripting-language

DormItem is a newly launched online classified ads service that searches not one college, but listings from colleges in the surrounding geographic area of wherever you attend. It’s a nicely designed site that includes integration of the Rapleaf reputation service (our coverage of Rapleaf),an autocompleting search and tag functions and an option to print any listing as a flier.

DormItem was developed by Dan Scudder and Zack Coburn, two college students in the North Eastern US. Coburn previously built the Madhens ad network. We profiled Madhens here, Coburn tried unsuccesfully to put that project up for sale on eBay but tells us he later sold it off site for $5k. “Not a bad summer job,” he said. Working in Rails on college students’ schedules DormItem took the two about a month and a half to build. I like it because of it’s smart simplicity and good target market.

Colleges have a real interest in offering their students a safe, college specific way to buy and sell items. The Rapleaf reputation system is intended to help with this and DormItem is a good implementation of it. Rapleaf is like a plug and play eBay reputation system but with more information involved than simple good/bad ratings and one line comments.

The DormItem team intends to offer the software for licensing to colleges. Starting at $2k per year for small colleges, DormItem will customize the site, including displaying RSS feeds of events and notices from colleges on their DormItem pages. They rightly assert that students never see events and notices on college web pages, but put them on the local Craigslist/eBay and they are much more likely to be seen. Creator Dan Scudder is a participant in a business incubator at Babson College, which he says gives him the contacts to make college licensing a realistic prospect.

Scudder says that if the licensing route doesn’t work they will just put ads on the site. While I like the very simple look and feel to the site, I can’t help but think that pulling in a visual design student from one of the two schools these guys attend could be a big help. I think the functional design is great though, even if the aesthetic is ok at best.

DormItem faces competition not just from eBay and Craigslist, but also college specific classified networks like CollegeMedium and Chegg. Those services look like a nightmare to use, but DormItem’s very simple interface and contemporary features appeal to me much more.

One of the key strengths of DormItem is the database of regional schools, it will tell you if an item you are looking for is also available at another college in your area. In this it faces competition from Edgeio, which has a good handling of geographic proximity (Disclosure: and is a TechCrunch sponsor). I think Edgeio may be too involved for many college students looking for quick, simple transactions though.

At launch today DormItem is available for Boston area colleges, Babson, schools in NYC and Atlanta. This project could do well, I think it will appeal to a lot of students and possibly colleges as well.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/47590747/

For some Friday fun, Jason Harwig likes to write a particle engine in the programming languages that he learns and uses.

His latest is in JavaScript and is configurable for you to explode all around you

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-particle-engine

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas on flow stemmed from his attempt to discover a path to happiness. He wanted to figure out “how to live life as a work of art, rather than as a chaotic response to external events.”

“Flow” & Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses what it feels like to be in flow:

• Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training.
• Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
• Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going.
• Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored.
• Sense of serenity – no worries about self, feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of ego – afterwards feeling of transcending ego in ways not thought possible.
• Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing.
• Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward.

So how do you get there? Wikipedia’s entry on the subject says the following conditions help:

• Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernable).
• A high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).
• Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
• Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).
• A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.
• The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

Group environment matters too. A couple of flow friendly space attributes:

• Creative spatial arrangements: Chairs, pin walls, charts, however no tables, therefore primarily work in standing and moving.
• Playground design: Charts for information inputs, flow graphs, project summary, craziness, safe place (people can say what is usually only thought), result wall, and open topics.

Enemies of flow include fearing what other people think…

A major constraint on people enjoying what they are doing is always being conscious of a fear of how they appear to others and what these others might think. Ecstasy includes rising above these constraining concerns of the ego.

…and mundane daily routines.

Stepping outside of normal daily routines is an essential element…This might be obtained through diverse routes or activities, such as reading a novel or becoming involved in a film.

More links on flow
Michael Buffington offers his tips for getting into flow (including listening to music he’s heard over and over again, a cold office, caffeine, and competition).

Prototype…Prototype…Protospiel summarizes a five phase creativity model (as defined by Csikszentmihalyi’s “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention”) used to improve the design of a game.

Beyond Creativity defines the nine elements of flow in the context of golf.

Flow with Soul is an interview with Csikszentmihalyi (btw, his name is pronounced “Chicks sent me high”).

The fact that you were completely immersed in what you were doing, that the concentration was very high, that you knew what you had to do moment by moment, that you had very quick and precise feedback as to how well you were doing, and that you felt that your abilities were stretched but not overwhelmed by the opportunities for action. In other words, the challenges were in balance with the skills. And when those conditions were present, you began to forget all the things that bothered you in everyday life, forget the self as an entity separate from what was going on — you felt you were a part of something greater and you were just moving along with the logic of the activity.

Everyone said that it was like being carried by a current, spontaneous, effortless like a flow. You also forget time and are not afraid of being out of control. You think you can control the situation if you need to. But it’s hard because the challenges are hard. It feels effortless and yet it’s extremely dependent on concentration and skill. So it’s a paradoxical kind of condition where you feel that you are on a nice edge, between anxiety on the one hand and boredom on the other. You’re just operating on this fine line where you can barely do what needs to be done.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/104-all-about-flow

Arve Bersvendsen of Opera let us know about the new working draft from the W3C: Widgets 1.0.

Everyone and their mother have created their own widget specifications, and now as a developer you need to make choices. Do you want it to work on Dashboard? Google? MSN? Yahoo!?

If the big hitters supported this widget standard then we could write once, widget everywhere. Kinda

This draft is similar to the opera widgets implementation, but it also has info from Apple’s Dashboard, and the auto discovery support was based on the work in Atom Autodiscovery.

This standard will live and die by the support that it gets. Now is the time to give feedback, and see where this train goes.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/w3c-widgets-10-working-draft