Ajax Girl

Endless.com is a new site created by Amazon “in response to customers’ desires to shop a destination dedicated to shoes and handbags”.

They have created a very rich experience that is highly dynamic including:

• Ajax pagination
• Image zooming to get closer
• Dynamically changing other choices as you mouse over an element (e.g. mouse over the size and the price and colors could change)
• Instant feedback to let you know if you have to select more items to get work done

They didn’t go over the top, and instead kept the site very clean and simple.

What do you think?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/endlesscom-amazons-beta-experiment

Tom Yeh over at the ZK project has released his roadmap for 2007. It’s an intriguing list of tools, features, and developer support:

• Expanded support for data binding.
• A visual design tool for Eclipse.
• Support from mobile platforms: ZK Mobile, a Java ME client, will be released in the first half of 2007.
• To work with existing applications more efficiently, ZK components will be available in the form of JSP tags. Maybe also as JSF components.
• Support for browsers without Javascript.
• Support for other scripting languages than Java, such as Groovy and Ruby.
• ZK books and more online tutorials.
• “Mega” components, such as spreadsheets, forums, etc.

Lots of good stuff, especially the news about ZK Mobile and the visual design tool.

One thing I’d like to see happen with ZK (and Echo2, the other, similar server-side framework), is the development of something similar to the Spring Rich Client framework. What is Spring Rich Client?

The Spring Rich Client Project (RCP) is a sub-project of The Spring Framework. Spring-RCP’s mission is to provide an elegant way to build highly-configurable, GUI-standards-following rich-client applications faster by leveraging the Spring Framework, and a rich library of UI factories and support classes. Initial focus is on providing support for Swing applications but a goal of Spring-RCP is to be view agnostic as much as possible.

Both ZK and Echo2 resemble desktop GUI frameworks, and thus could benefit in the same way as Swing. In fact, if Spring-RCP is truly view agnostic, it might make sense to try to use Spring-RCP directly.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/zk-roadmap-for-200

Waiting on hold yesterday after pressing 5 buttons, getting cut off, being misunderstood by the automated “I can speak English but I can’t understand it” attendant, and finally getting the wrong answer reminded me that frustration is exponential.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/185-frustration-is-exponential

In a quirky move, Amazon.com has launched their own independent shoe and handbag niche website, Endless.com. Shoes and handbags will still be available on Amazon.

Endless really hides the fact that Amazon owns them — you have to dig into their ‘About Us‘ page, and even then you won’t see Amazon.com’s logo. Amazon.com offers an API that allows etailers/developers to integrate customer reviews of Amazon.com products, but this isn’t even integrated into Endless — here is a shoe on Amazon.com with 9 customer reviews, but 0 reviews on Endless.com for the same shoe.

The only other noticeable Amazon associations are that the product images are hosted at Amazon.com and Endless is powered by Amazon.com, meaning you login with your Amazon account information.

The Endless website provides an enhanced browsing experience for shoe buying, compared to what Amazon.com does. For example, the visual search is real nice — you can keep refining your search by price, style, color, size, or brand. Endless.com’s search experience reminds me a bit of Like.com’s browsing experience. Endless.com’s focus is on free overnight shipping — they have a countdown clock on every page letting you know the next delivery date.

The question is — did Amazon really need to launch an entirely new brand for this new shoes/handbags shopping experience? I understand people are use to the consistency of the standard Amazon.com shopping experience, but what about launching an enhanced shopping experience option in each product category on Amazon.com ? Or maybe Endless was launched with this focus on free overnight shipping and thus it’ll expand to carry as much from Amazon.com that would allow for free overnight delivery — however, the Endless logo clearly specifies shoes and handbags, so I doubt this will be the case.

Amazon.com has been diversifying their business lately into a variety of initiatives that seem to branch away from their core competency. Endless seems to be more in-line with their core — will it be the first of an endless list of niche websites they launch in an effort to improve (”web 2.0′ing”) the buying experience for each of their product lines?

Editor’s Note: This post was written by Steve Poland, a guest contributor.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/71204067/

Sidekiq is a new search site developed by the guys that brought us Ajax Agent.

Sidekiq is an Ajax based search engine portal. It uses a combination of Web 2.0 app development techniques like Ajax, hidden iFrame hacks & user behavior analytics to perform simultaneous searches from multiple sites. Users can perform search in various categories including video, audio, social bookmarks, people, employment, real estate, shopping, travel, downloads, movies & many other. Search results are obtained from more than one top search engines in each category.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/sidekiq-multi-search

Tenni Theurer has posted a second part of performance research on Browser Cache Usage - Exposed!.

The article measures the performance of yahoo.com with a full cache compared to an empty one (2.4s vs. 0.9s) and then shows a surprisingly low number of people heading over cached up:

40-60% of Yahoo!’s users have an empty cache experience and ~20% of all page views are done with an empty cache. To my knowledge, there’s no other research that shows this kind of information. And I don’t know about you, but these results came to us as a big surprise. It says that even if your assets are optimized for maximum caching, there are a significant number of users that will always have an empty cache. This goes back to the earlier point that reducing the number of HTTP requests has the biggest impact on reducing response time. The percentage of users with an empty cache for different web pages may vary, especially for pages with a high number of active (daily) users. However, we found in our study that regardless of usage patterns, the percentage of page views with an empty cache is always ~20%.

Conclusion: Keep in mind the empty cache user experience. It might be more prevalent than you think!

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/browser-cache-usage-only-40-60

September 4th was the one year anniversary of this blog, but I’ve been too busy (!) to stop and ponder the significance of it until tonight.  While I’ve had many blogs before, EmilyChang.com is the first professional blog that I’ve started that’s purely focused on web, design and technology, and it’s been an extremely gratifying experience.  I’ve met hundreds of people, many of whom I used to merely read from a far, become friends with those that I only once admired, been fortunate to have a stellar line-up of clients at Ideacodes that share my core philosophies, and had that satisfaction of turning an idea into a reality. 

“In the design of lives, as in the design of most other things, you get better results if you use flexible media.” - Paul Graham

eHub began as a list on September 12, 2005 to keep track of the explosion of web applications that I seeing and using.  I didn’t spend much time planning eHub, but installed a new blog, modified Max‘s blog design to suit eHub’s needs, customized the database, and added the thirty or so apps that I was tracking.  Since then, it’s become a steady stream of resources for those addicted to web services with over 1400 resources, including over 80 eHub interviews with the creators of web applications and the founders behind hundreds of startups.  The interviews have enjoyed international readership and success as a channel at eHub @ CNET Japan, where editors translate interviews as they’re posted.  I still post to eHub daily except on weekends and still signup for and try every app that’s listed.  I plan to add more social and community features to eHub in the next few months, as well as several other projects related to eHub, so stay tuned!

My written blog posts have inevitably slowed a bit due to our company‘s growth, but this year I’m building writing time into my daily schedule so expect more posts.  It still amazes me that my few thoughts have reached so many of you.  Thanks to my readers, commentors, and those that have written to me personally with your stories and thoughts.  At some point in the last couple of months, the number of RSS subscribers for my blog overtook the number of subscribers to eHub.  Between the two trackable feeds, my entire site receives around 16,000 daily RSS readers. 

I wish I had an app to track the timeline of events that have occurred over the last year.  Between offline documentation (notebooks, sketchbooks, moleskins, bits of paper) and online (text files, to do lists, calendars, photos, video, basecamp, too many other web apps to name) it’s hard to keep track of the amazing chronology of events that have transpired.  I need a mashup of these sources to get a holistic sense of what’s happened.  If anyone knows of an app that will pull all the data from my Mac hard drive and from my online social networks and display it on my 30” cinema display with Wii as the controller, let me know In the meantime, I look forward to seeing, sharing, and discussing the innovations coming in this new year!

Source: Emily Chang
Original Article: http://www.emilychang.com/go/weblog/comments/happy-one-year-four-months/

I first heard of Gliffy via the Confluence plugin.

Gliffy is a web based diagram tool that lets you build and share any type of diagram. They are pretty too.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/get-gliffy-with-it

We quietly launched a new area of the site tonight - TechCrunch Forums. Reader feedback and comments are an integral part of this blog (in fact, any blog in our opinion), and we want to be able to expand the conversation beyond whatever posts are fresh at a given time. The Forums is the place to do that.

Create a thread on any topic you like. This is a good place to pitch your new startup or product if it hasn’t been featured yet on TechCrunch (or even if it has), share tips with the community, spread rumors, or endlessly debate the definition (or existence) of Web 2.0. When interesting conversations spring up, we’ll link to them from the main TechCrunch blog.

We’re still getting the bugs worked out, so it will evolve from its current state over time.

The software behind the Forums is from Jive Software. Their stuff is bulletproof (or so we hear), and they power the Apple discussion board as well as 1,450 other forums on the web. Thanks to them and Media Temple, our primary hosting provider, for their help in getting this set up.

We’ll roll out dedicated versions of this for the other blogs in the network as soon as this is nailed down. Please let us know of any bugs you find.

A permanent link to the TechCrunch Forums is in the navigation bar at the top of the site (on the left), or you can get there directly at forums.techcrunch.com.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/71038084/

In August and November, we highlighted parts one and two of the IE team’s JScript performance tips. Peter Gurevich is back for part three:

1. Avoid Closures if Possible. What happens when [a closure registered as an event listener] never fires? We expect it to, but it might not. If it doesn’t fire, the closure [may have] a reference to [a] source object and the source object back to the closure. This is an implicit circular reference, hard to spot, and IE leaks memory. This is never good for performance.
2. Don’t use Property Accessor Functions. A common technique in object oriented programming is to use property accessor functions… in the form of [get/set]_PropertyName (or many others depending on the style)… [This makes for] terrible JScript.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoft-ie-javascript-perf-tips-part-trois