Ajax Girl

As techies, there are few components that affect our bodies as heavily as our chairs. Sitting in a chair for countless hours every day has a notable impact on our bodies. A crappy chair can cause immediate duress and also lead to prolonged pain. A quality chair, however, can do a lot of good for you. Recognizing this dilemma, CrunchGear has conducted a stress test roundup of several of the top ergonomic options currently available in a piece entitled Workspace Roundup: Ergonomic Chairs.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/68296321/

When PayPerPost announced the acquisition of most of the Performancing assets earlier this week, a lot of people asked about the future of the popular Performancing blogging plugin, which wasn’t acquired.

It’s alive and well and has been rebranded as ScribeFire. The site has a landing page up and will be launching shortly. In the meantime, the old plugin can stll be downloaded on the Mozilla site.

ScribeFire says that 400,000 people have downloaded the software. No word on how many active users there are, but a lot of bloggers swear by it.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/68278958/

A lesson in how to get fleeced. Common example: If you want your airline ticket in paper you’ll have to pay $75 at United; $50 at American, Continental, Northwest and US Airways; $45 at Virgin Atlantic. [via Wheaties]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/178-35-most-outrageous-fees

Dylan Schiemann of Dojo and Sitepen has expounded asking What is bloat?.

We do hear a lot of people talking about the Xkb of JavaScript that they are willing to put in a page/app, yet bloat is a lot more than that (as Dylan attests).

At the core of this article we hear loud and clear:

• We need better tools to minimize bloat of various flavours
• We need better tools to be mindful of the bloat
• When users have 6 tabs open with rich ajax apps within them, it isn’t fun right now

Where does Dojo fit into this?

Dojo will be working over the coming months to improve performance, which is something we have been doing with each release of Dojo. But improving toolkit performance is not enough… we also need to share best practices on how to get the most out of our browsers, and to ask for more from browser vendors (they’re already listening). We will be writing a series of posts on performance tuning and testing, and we look forward to reading your comments and trackbacks, and learning from your performance tips. We as a community need to fix this issue before Ajax suffers the same fate as DHTML. After all, no one likes to be bloated.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/is-your-ajax-application-or-library-bloated

Ninjawords is a simple dictionary service that uses Ajax to ping resources to retrieve dictionary content.

To feel lucky in this app, you click random.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ninja-words-online-dictionary

As we come to the end of 2006, we see that Ajax and Web 2.0 are high up on the Google Zietgeist for 2006.

1. define promiscuous
2. define web 2.0
3. define ftw
4. define calidad
5. define ajax
6. define ensayo
7. define ciencia
8. define administracion
9. define harlequin
10. define filosofia

Since this is the define list, does it mean people have no glue what this means? It is hard to know what to make of it based on the other entrants on the list too.

Anyway, it has been a great year for Ajax, and we look forward to the maturation of the space in 2007.

( via Mark Holton )

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-and-web-20-high-in-the-zeitgeist-of-2006

Tagging should be a feature of operating systems. It’s usually a superior way of organizing information v. folders because a file can be placed in only a single folder, but multiple tags can be associated with that file. It’s one of the reasons I like Gmail, because emails can be tagged with multiple descriptive terms instead of just throwing it into a folder. I find it much easier to find tagged items on flickr, del.icio.us and gmail, for example, than it is on Mac mail, my desktop email client that doesn’t support tagging. Properly tagged items are much easier to search for down the road.

Vista does support a limited form of tagging, although it’s hard to get to. If you right click on a file and click properties, and then details, you can enter in a set of tags for that file. Using the search feature of Vista you can then find those files by searching for a tag. Windows XP doesn’t support tagging, nor does Mac.

Austria-based Tag2Find, though, has created a nifty application that allows tagging for any type of desktop file. It only works with Windows machines running XP or Vista, and it relies on the .NET framework. In our testing on a XP machine, it did very well.

To see how it works, see the demo here. The application sits in the system tray on the bottom of the screen. Click on it and a search bar appears to tag files, or find tagged files (see image to right). to tag a file you type in the tags and then drag files to the icon. Tag2Find will also suggest other tags based on what you type.

There is also a larger view option that opens up a window showing tagged files, a tag cloud or tag list, and a built in media player to play media files that you’ve tagged (see image below).

There’s no word on the business plan, although it’s possible this could be advertising supported. The beta period, at least, is free. Right now the company is in private beta, you can request an account here.

This is a great Windows tool, and I’d definitely use it if I wasn’t on a Mac. Microsoft, by the way, has certainly given some thought to moving in this direction - see this video (works in IE only) for information on their Project Tesla.

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/~3/68071598/

It’s the time of year to be posting random predictions for 2007. Here are 2007 Ajax predictions from Dion and myself.

Dion predicts:

• Ajax beats AJAX in all but bad newspapers.
• Someone tries to coin Ajax 2.0.
• A large amount of apps have flash AND ajax, and users don’t know or care.
• Many frameworks consilidate or die.
• A widget api means componts can run on many frameworks using one api.
• Ajax wpf/e interop.
• Dashboards become front boards.
• More desktop apps get written with javascript.

Michael predicts:

• 2005 was the year that developers learned all about Ajax and by 2006 everyone else in the industry had caught up. In 2007, is is mainstream users who become acutely aware of the trend towards rich applications inside the browser, and discover that even word-processors and spreadsheets - along with a wide array of workplace applications - can be webified. At the same time, users remain oblivious - and rightly so - to the underlying technologies that power them.
• The boundaries of Ajax harden, with most developers gaining a clear understanding of what it can and can’t do with modern browsers and managers in a better position to decide on application architecture (whether to use Ajax, Flash, desktop, etc.).
• More attention on Ajax accessibility due to some government report or court case.
• Google Office. Finally!
• Backlash against Google Office as managers learn that their data must be hosted externally in order to use it. Pressure from bloggers and some analysts to make an Office appliance that can live behind the firewall, but it’s not happening in 2007.
• The advertising and media communities finally become aware that page view metrics are no longer the only way, but generally treat it as a problem and fail to see that the situation is actually better than before.
• Several fringe technologies heat up as developers notice they are already being used in some applications and learn how to apply them: HTTP Streaming (Comet), Virtual Workspace (Live Scrolling - never-ending scrollbars), Cross-Domain JSON (along with JSONP, JSON APIs, JSONRequest, and a general lack of awareness about the JSON security issues), Unique URLs (bookmarkability/back button), Lazy Registration (personalized functionality before formal signup). Comet in particular … it may be 8 or 9 years old, but it’s big news in 2007.
• Other fringe technologies grow, but remain, well, fringe. Such as Host-Proof Hosting and applications involving offline storage.
• With its excellent documentation and pattern language integration, the Yahoo UI library becomes the standard weapon of choice among mainstream developers seeking a pure Javascript framework. In the Java world, GWT makes great strides as the platform becomes richer and design patterns emerge.
• Mobile web development continues to suck.
• Javascript increasingly recognised as the world’s most popular “second language” and becomes popular as a lingua franca to describe generic programming concepts. Several attempts at server-side Javascript frameworks.
• IE7 causes more than a few headaches.
• Firebug is installed by pretty much any developer using Firefox.
• CSS is back, baby! Echoing the recent mass adoption of Javascript, developers who previously had a fleeting familiarity with CSS now become fluent practitioners.

Best wishes for 2007, however you play your Ajax!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/predictions-ajax-in-2007

Google’s Orkut social network, which has been having a bit of a renaissance this year, has been down for the last thirteen hours as of 2 am PST. It’s unlikely this is an upgrade given the amount of time the site has been offline. This just isn’t Google’s day.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/68039306/

Another day, another article bashing the Javascript toolkit everyone loves to hate - Prototype. The complaints can be narrowed down to a few points:

• “it breaks the ‘for in’ loop” - no it doesn’t - you were probably using ‘for in’ where you shouldn’t have. Javascript is a flexible, powerful freedom language, and its _okay_ if your framework uses that to the full extent. That means you and your development team need to be educated and aware of the ramifications of it if you want to play ball. The stuff that Prototype did to Object in earlier versions, btw, was a bit too much and has been removed in the latest versions. (related reading here)
• “its too big” - eh, cache it, compress it on the server side, or use a stripped down version.
• “its has no docs” - although I’m disappointed to see that Sergio hasn’t updated his excellent reference since May, there are still so many fantastic howto’s and tutorials written using Prototype. Plus the books out now that base much of their code on Prototype. One official reference doc somewhere would be very nice, however.

My main gripes right now with Prototype would be what looks like a low level of activity in the source and this doc project, and the lack of any good references on how to do solid TDD or BDD in Javascript (with Prototype, or otherwise I suppose). I’m aware of rspec clones in javascript, but what I’m missing is the big picture on how to integrate those tests into the main test suite and what to use for mocks and stubs. I want to be able to write the bulk of my JS tests in textmate, without having to start a browser or use anything like Selenium.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/prototype-sucks-20