Ajax Girl

News from Del.icio.us has been slow the last year - a couple of controversies and some solid overall growth. It’s an example of something the Internet really needed, but it’s also a bit of a one-trick pony. You bookmark stuff, tag it, and share it. Good data comes out of aggregrated user generated data. That’s pretty much the end of the story. I love Del.icio.us, but there isn’t much else to say about it, and the Yahoo team seems to be focused on getting del.icio.us, Yahoo Bookmarks and My Web onto a single back end platform.

Today, however, there is a bit of news. They’ve launched a website widget that displays the how many times that site has been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, along with popular tags. We’ve added the widget script below in this post. We may add it permanently to the site as well, in our effort to continue to provide full visibility into TechCrunch statistics.

To add the widget to your site, see the instructions here. It’s a one line script. Our previous coverage of Del.icio.us is here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/64423263/

“An artist emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes other things to make a statement.”

There’s a lot of inspiration about visual principles to be had at Temple Of The Seven Golden Camels, Mark Kennedy’s site about the art of storyboarding. The main topic is animation and drawing, but the visual principles discussed — what makes things blend together, group, separate, create interest, etc. — apply to more then just movie making.

Statements like the following, from Things They Don’t Teach in Art School #1, relate to the task of modeling a domain and creating an interface for it.

Real living forms are very complicated. But the point of art isn’t to capture life with all of it’s details….photography can do that just fine. An artist caricatures the world, filters it, makes choices. An artist emphasizes some things and de-emphasizes other things to make a statement…You can bend the forms to your will — make them what they need to be to make your drawing work. Make them be what will contribute to the best statement and/or the best design. If it looks right, than it is right. Design is more important than accurate structure!

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson once said information is “a difference which makes a difference.” The road to that difference is this filtering process of deciding what matters, what gets emphasized, and what gets downplayed in order to ultimately say something meaningful.

Character introductions
Another interesting post there is Character Introductions, which talks about the need to craft intros very carefully so they communicate to the audience exactly what the character is about.

So why is it important? I think it’s because you have to make the most out of every minute of film time you have. Film is “life with the boring parts cut out” and so every part of your film has to be interesting and make the strongest statement possible…Like many things in film, this works better if it’s done in a smart and effortless way…If your character is very complicated, than put the simple and strong statement over first and than add shadings to it as the story moves along.

The post also includes a fascinating dissection of the opening credits of Hitchcock’s “Lifeboat” (warning: movie spoilers at the link). “An analysis of the beginning of the film is like a master class in beginning a film quickly and effectively,” writes Kennedy. “He gets across a lot of setup in a really compressed amount of time.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/170-the-visual-principles-of-storyboarding

Jesse Kuhnert, the Dojo and Tapestry commiter, must have had one too many UIs with split-panes on his desktop.

It drove him to write about why splitpane views suck..:

I’ve recently been involved in some discussions surrounding ixd issues and attempted to use Yahoo Mail and Google Mail as examples of bad/good interface design techniques. There was a lot of push back because there were no follow up details outlining why one was good and the other bad. A complete analysis of the two applications would take much longer and require more effort than a random blog posting so I decided to focus on one core annoyance I have with Yahoo Mail - its use of ye old “Split Pane” re-sizable control.

Jesse’s core peeves are:

• Sizing - The size of the view I care about is never right! When I’m browsing a list of emails I want as much real estate as possible to view them all, I don’t care about seeing any one particular email at that point. When I do select an email and the content within it doesn’t fit into my split view it’s annoying. I don’t care about the emails anymore at that point, I just want to read the email I’ve selected. In fact, I might go so far as to say it’s almost impossible for the view to ever be what I want in this scenario. By nature of the control the size of the view remains static until adjusted by the user, but when reading emails you really need it to change based on what step of reading them you are in. Arghh!
• Scrolling - I know I know. It sounds like a real whiny thing to complain about, but it is annoying. After selecting an email message I must now consciously think about the interface and move my mouse over to the appropriate area before I can actually scroll through the content - otherwise scrolling right there and then would move me up and down through all of my other email messages.
• Claustrophobia - I don’t know about you, but these split views tend to make me feel pretty constrained. All of the scrollbars appearing on the page really start to make me feel like nothing is the right size. Like maybe my monitor sucks and I should get a bigger one? I don’t know. The screen looks pretty large, how hard is it to fit everything on there without an all out assault on the senses from a million different UI controls all telling me the same thing - nothing fits!

Do you agree?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/do-you-hate-splitpane-views

I was a die-hard Netflix fan. Apart from when I lived in Canada or Europe, I’ve been a Netflix customer for the last five years. There is a very tanglible tingle when a Netflix movie arrives in the mail, packaged up in its red envelope. When I lived in Canada I missed Netflix so much that I co-founded and ran a Canadian copycat service called Zip.ca, that continues to do well in that market.

But I also learned a lot about how the business works. The biggest variable cost is the two-way postage. And so the best customers are the ones that don’t return movies that often. For the business to work, the average has to be less than five movies per customer per month. If customers return movies too quickly, your only real choice is to slow down their shipments. Netflix and all of the competing services have complicated algorithms that add a day or two here and there to the “received date” when customers return DVDs. One way or another, high velocity customers are slowed down. And if they leave, that’s fine. They weren’t profitable anyway.

I understand the rules, and the deal was still worth it. $18/month for three or four movies. But the bigger issue is that I have a mix of new releases and classics in my queue. Netflix would always (always) send the classics and never the new releases, regardless of how I managed the list. Again, that’s just their algorithm kicking in and maximizing my profitability as a customer.

But that opened the door to Blockbuster. I still go there on Tuesdays when the new releases come out to get the new stuff that Netflix won’t send. Netflix is a great service for library titles, and a terrible service for new releases. Netflix made the mistake of being quite happy with me going into Blockbuster every week to get the movies I couldn’t get at Netflix.

Blockbuster’s Total Access Service

Blockbuster has had a service that competes with Netflix for some time. I tried the service out in 2005. The main advantage was that they gave two free in store movie rental coupons per month with the subscription (it is now just one coupon). But the service felt slower than Netflix, and I cancelled the subscription.

But recently Blockbuster changed the service in a way that can really hurt Netflix. Movies received by mail can be returned directly at any Blockbuster store. You get a free rental on the spot, and Blockbuster still sends out the next movie in your queue. And yesterday they announced that the monthly coupon for a free rental can be used for movies OR video games.

This is all combined with the fact that Blockbuster terminated its late fees a while back, meaning that rentals can be kept at least a week before you have to deal with them charging your credit card.

So I cancelled Netflix and signed up with Blockbuster. I return mailed DVDs to the store, where I can get the new releases. And the mail service is great for the library titles that aren’t in high demand.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/64176465/

Mike Chambers and Christian Cantrell of Adobe had some fun with a video camera, and Mike interviewed Christian as he demoed a couple of applications that has has written using the Apollo platform.

The demo’s show a lot of integration between the world of Flash and HTML. First, Christian shows a little app that keeps track of your address-book and integrates with Google Maps. You can drag vCards directly onto the Google Map web interface, etc.

Then they show an Amazon item viewer. One version shows them browsing Amazon, and one click in that interface talks to an Apollo app.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-apollo-demos

We are having fun watching Firebug’s network mode as we visit various sites, and seeing where the browser spends time waiting.

Yesterday we talked about cheating the system by using CNAMES to get around the number of connections per host limitation.

Today, Niels Leenheer blogged about making your pages load faster by combining and compressing javascript and css files.

The key points from his testing are:

• Combining the set of JavaScript files into one
• Compressing that resulting file
• Caching the compressed file to disk (instead of compressing on the fly for each request)

Niels released his combine.php script that does the work for him.

There seems to be a natural tension between:

“One big compressed file to minimize connections and size”

and:

“Multiple files are good as they can be cached separately (a change to file A affects the entire combined file in the first case), so use the CNAME trick to allow multiple downloads at once”

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/maximizing-performance-with-compression-and-combination

My sister-in-law was just asking me about editing ringtones, and then an hour later I get told about this free Ajax ringtone maker.

You can send it some audio, make quick edits (Flash/Ajax integration), and then create the new ringtone.

There are social features too. When you create the new tone, you choose how public you want it to be.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/free-ajax-ringtone-maker

Yahoo Personals is the largest dating site on the Internet (Match.com is second), so when they make a move, others in the industry notice.

Today they will announce a new feature called Quick View, and it’s designed to let users scan for potential mates more quickly. Instead of scrolling up and down to view profile information, members can simply select from fifteen different traits (non-smoker, enjoys traveling, etc.) and call them date “makers” or “breakers.” They can then view profiles organized by whether or not they include a deal breaker. It’s a good way to weed out those undesirables more quickly.

Certainly this stuff helps some people find a match. But basic human nature seems to be more visual when it comes to attraction. People don’t necessarily want to fill out an excrutiatingly long personality profile to help them sort through potential matches, then to find out there’s no physical attraction.

That’s why I think sites like HotOrNot’s MeetMe service and its web2.0ified twin, YesNoMayB, which we profiled in October are doing so well. You can scroll through hundreds of people in a few minutes, click on those you want to get to know and learn more about them. If the other person flags you, too, you can chat and go over all the non-visual stuff that determines if people are compatible.

Sheer volume is important when it comes to dating sites, and Yahoo, Match.com and the others will continue to do well. But there’s a lot of experimenting going on in this space, and some of these quirky business models are going to be successful, too.

What’s your opinion?

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/64119169/

Online office suite Zoho continues to quietly, and quickly, release new products and features on a regular basis. Last month they launched a Microsoft Office plugin that lets users save files directly to their Zoho accounts. Today they add a Wiki product to the mix.

The product itself contains all the bells and whistles of competing standalone, hosted Wikis (good comparison chart here). The feature set includes separate read/write permissions, RSS feeds, an admin dashboard for overall wiki management, and a number of skins to choose from. The underlying engine is Zoho Writer, and the popular keyboard shortcuts also work in the Wiki. The Wiki pages support HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

For an example Wiki page, plus some additional information about the product, see Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna’s sample page here.

Two things make this product stand out. The first is that the Wiki supports embedded data from other Zoho products. For example, a spreadsheet from Zoho Sheet can be embedded directly into the Wiki. Any changes to the spreadsheet, whether they are made in the Wiki or in Zoho Sheet, will be synced. The Wiki product also has a single sign in with other Zoho products.

Second, the entire Zoho suite of products is on the same overall architecture, making syncronization and new feature releases much easier between applications. Contrast that to Google’s suite, including two acquired products (Writely and JotSpot) and one mostly home-grown one (Spreadsheets). It will never be as homogenous as what Zoho has created.

In fact, it’s not clear (from a cost or speed standpoint) that Google will be better off by buying best-of-breed office applications one at a time and then integrating them. The Zoho project is not a small one by any test - they’ve been working on Zoho applications for two years and have 80 developers currently working on the project. But 75 of those developers are in India, where costs are far lower than here. My guess is that the overall investment by Zoho has been less than Google’s, and they have far more to show for it at this point.

Zoho, which claims 150,000 registered users, continues to develop an excellent product, that is ripe for picking off by someone other than Google. Whoever does it, will have the best online office suite at that time. Yes, their logo sucks. And yes, these guys don’t speak American English without an accent. Their product releases don’t get nearly the attention that Google’s do. But they are kicking ass and gaining a lot of respect along the way.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/64088569/

Pandora, which plays streaming music for free via a flash player on its site, is one of the first companies we profiled on TechCrunch, back in August 2005 during the original Bar Camp meetup. I still listen to it most of the time I’m writing blog entries.

Pandora continues to rack up new users (the current count is 4.5 million regular users, up from 1.8 million in May) and Pandora is now powering MSN radio through a deal signed last month.

Tonight Pandora is releasing a additional features aimed at increasing interaction among members. These social features include listener profiles with musical preferences, bio information, etc. (previously listeners had only a list of bookmarked songs), as well as listener search and lists of users who are fans of particular bands.

Download Pandora Songs

By the way, if you are really into Pandora, you can set up an application called Pandora’s Jar (see LifeHacker’s review here). Pandora’s Jar will save the current track playing in Pandora, and will optionally download bios, track stats, album art, and other info from last.fm as well.

Our previous coverage of Pandora is here.

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Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/64051849/