Ajax Girl

I had a long debate yesterday with James Joaquin, the former CEO of oPhoto and one of the founders of When.com, about whether or not the iPhone will be just a toy or a serious business device. I dug up the video below which gives a pretty good demo of some of the office type applications on the device.

From what I know so far, I think it is going to be a killer device for people who currently use Macs, with seemless integration with Mac Mail, Calendar and Contacts. The visual email is a killer feature. The lack of a keyboard, though, is not. The addition of decent voice recognition software to allow for even typo-laden email responses would be very welcome.

It’s unclear if the iPhone will be such a killer business device for PC users. My recommendation is to simply throw out the PC and switch to Mac. You’ll do it eventually anyway. Might as well do it now.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74589916/

if you missed the first post, my name is Sam, i do explodingdog and i am doing drawings based on suggested titles.

i don’t know how many of the titles i will get to, but feel free to suggest more and i will do at least a few of them.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/192-this-is-good-for-you

Mary Jo Foley digs deep in her reporting. This time she noticed a wiki entry on the Mozilla side that thinks Apple may have Safari on Windows with likely ties to iTunes & .Mac.

I don’t know if this makes any sense. The reason I fire up Safari is:

• Very fast on the Mac
• Nice, native components

Would SafariWin just use Windows components? Would it be significantly faster than the other options on Windows to make it worth while?

As of this writing, the poll on Mary’s site had the following results:

Disclaimer: this is huge speculation

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/rumour-safari-for-windows

Understanding Comics (Amazon link) is a 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium. We recently chatted about it and how the concepts relate to online visual communication too (e.g. choosing what to include and what to leave out, guiding the reader’s eye, combining text and images for maximum impact, etc.).

Some excerpts we discussed:

Creating meaningful differences with “sequential art.” McCloud writes, “Taken individually the pictures [above] are merely that—pictures. However when part of a sequence, even a sequence of only two, the art of the images is transformed into something more: the art of comics!”

The first letter in each sentence is bolded to help separate statements.

It’s interesting how the placement of the “True Lighting” headline is unconventional yet works like a charm.

There’s a related thread on cartoons, comics, and information design at Edward Tufte’s site. Some of the interesting links mentioned there:

• A comic book that explains fair use from the Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain
• The Comic Strip Artist’s Kit helps beginning comic artists deal with perspective problems and other drawing difficulties. Check out this page on how thumbnail sketches help you think out problems.
• Tom Toles Cartoons shows how sketches turn into finished cartoons

Related:

Making Comics (McCloud’s new book)
“Forget the detail” and other animation-inspired lessons [SvN]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/169-scott-mcclouds-understanding-comics

It’s Friday, so maybe you want to sit back for a few minutes and walk through some time in Tobie Langel’s life as he tries to get IE to play nice with attributes.

This tale walks through the pain of thinking that you have a working version, and then being disappointed again.

• IE: element.foo === element.getAttribute(’foo’)
• iFlags to the rescue ? element.getAttribute(’onclick’, 2);
• attributes collection: element.attributes[’foo’];
• Maybe wait for Prototypes upcoming: readAttribute()

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/attribute-nightmare-in-ie

Kris Zyp has written an article discussing the demonstration using continuations in JavaScript to facilitate writing animations with straightforward linear code.

The example is a bunch of bouncing gears that animate up and down as they bounce.

Explanation

When you click on the button, this calls the addGear function and starts a new “thread” of execution. This execution then carries out the steps of the animation in a natural linear coding sequence.

The Narrative JavaScript framework creates the ability to have multiple threads. Each time you click the button, you are effectively creating a new thread of execution. Of course the underlying JS VM is single threaded, but cooperative multithreading is possible as threads suspend execution through the continuation system.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

1.  
2. function addGear() {
3.  
4.  var self = this;
5.  
6.  function makeGear() { // create the DOM img element for the gear
7.  
8.   var gear = document.createElement(”img”);
9.  
10.   gear.src=”images/Configurator.gif”;
11.  
12.   gear.style.position=”absolute”;
13.  
14.   self.gearArea.appendChild(gear);
15.  
16.   return gear;
17.  
18.  }
19.  
20.  function bounceGear(gear, positionX, velocityY) { // do a single bounce
21.  
22.   var y = 0;
23.  
24.   gear.style.left = positionX + “px”;
25.  
26.   do {
27.  
28.    velocityY = velocityY - 0.4; // make a parabolic bounce
29.  
30.    y += velocityY;
31.  
32.    gear.style.bottom = y + “px”;
33.  
34.    sleep(20); // pause for 20 milliseconds
35.  
36.   } while (y> 0);
37.  
38.  }
39.  
40.  function waitForClick(gear) {
41.  
42.   var notifier = gear.onclick = new EventNotifier();
43.  
44.   notifier.wait(); // pause until the click happens
45.  
46.   gear.onclick = null;
47.  
48.  }
49.  
50.  function doBouncingGear() { // this carries out the overall animation
51.  
52.    var gear = makeGear(); // create the gear element
53.  
54.    var x = Math.random() * 400; // random x position
55.  
56.    var bounceVelocity = 15;
57.  
58.    do { // do a decaying bounce
59.  
60.     bounceGear(gear,x,bounceVelocity); // do one bounce
61.  
62.     bounceVelocity = bounceVelocity/1.3; // the bounce/velocity decreases each time
63.  
64.    } while (bounceVelocity> 1) // gotta stop sometime
65.  
66.    // finished bouncing
67.  
68.    waitForClick(gear); // wait for the user to click on it
69.  
70.    // next in the sequence is to roll it away
71.  
72.    var velocityX = 0;
73.  
74.    do { // now we will roll it away
75.  
76.     velocityX += 0.2;
77.  
78.     x += velocityX;
79.  
80.     gear.style.left = x + “px”;
81.  
82.     sleep(30);
83.  
84.    } while (x <400);
85.  
86.    // now we will remove it
87.  
88.    gear.parentNode.removeChild(gear);
89.  
90.  }
91.  
92.  doBouncingGear(); // execute the animation
93.  
94. }
95.  

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/animation-with-continuations

Jack Slocum is a machine. We had to add the new YUI-EXT category for him as he is coming up with such good material.

His latest, is an article on DomQuery - A lightweight CSS Selector / Basic XPath implementation.

Support for more complex schemas and document structures in the grid’s XMLDataModel class has been requested many times. Currently, you are limited to a schema which consists of only element level tag names and attributes. That is where DomQuery started. When loading a grid from an XML Document, there would be quite a few rapidly executing queries so great performance was imperative. Thanks to the FireBug Profiler, I was able to trace the bottlenecks and test different execution plans to see what was the fastest.

This library is nice and speedy. According to John Resig it is faster than Dean Edwards cssQuery. John wrote about this in response to the benchmark figures of jQuery that Jack shows:

We’ve been holding off on talking about the speed of the jQuery selectors for the new 1.1 release until our release was closer to being ready - however, it seems as if that process has already been expedited. So with that already out of the bag, lets look at the selector speeds of jQuery.

In short: For jQuery 1.1 we worked really really hard to make its selectors really fast. In fact, according to all our tests we were faster than any other selector library. Working on the 1.1 release, Dean Edwards’ cssQuery far out-performed any other selector library. It’s really comprehensive, and really fast.

Today, Jack Slocum announced his new DOMQuery selector library. In short: The bar has been raised. His library is very very fast. Quite possibly the fastest available today.

However, in the comparison between his library and ours, some mistakes were made that we’d like to clear up. (By both Jack and jQuery) (For reference, here’s the comparision suite that I used for my tests.)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/domquery-a-lightweight-css-selector-basic-xpath-implementation

Screencasts are a nice way to learn certain things. Adobe has done a fun one, and got their own James Ward, and the knowledgeable Bruce Eckel together to write some code.

The coding session is the pair of them building a sample app from scratch using TurboGears on the backend, and Flex on the front end.

It is fun to see Bruce using plain old vi for his python hacking, and James gets to go into uber-IDE land with the Flex Builder (built on Eclipse).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/creating-a-flex-application-using-the-turbogears-framework

I’m still trying to figure out how this works, and by the time I do the service may be gone. Regardless, Iowa based AllFreeCalls is letting people make phone calls to many foreign countries for free. Or rather, for the cost of a call to Iowa. You call the AllFreeCalls phone number, which is 712-858-8094, and at the prompt dial 011, the country code you are calling and the number you wish to call. The call is made at no charge to the user. A list of supported countries and prefixes is here, and the company says they are adding ten more countries in the coming weeks.

Here’s my understanding of how this works: the founder created his own telephone company in Iowa. Iowa is apparently the only state taking advantage of an FCC kickback scheme that gives telco’s a portion of the fees generated from every inbound call to an Iowa number. So when you call the AllFreeCalls phone number, a portion of any long distance fees you are paying go to the company. The kickback is apparently authorized via the Universal Service Fund. These kickbacks are enough on average to more than cover the international outbound calling fees.

I expect to revise every sentence in the above paragraph as I work this out more completely (and then call my congressional representative), but that’s my current understanding after an email discussion with the founder.

I don’t know if calls originating outside of the U.S. will work, although I assume they will. I’m not sure if that would save the caller much in fees, though, v. calling directly to their destination.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/74361925/

In December we reported that Google’s much rumored foray into radio advertisements may be significantly delayed because Google didn’t have access to enough radio airtime for advertisers to test the product. We also reported that Google was working on a deal with CBS Radio to get access to more ad space.

Earlier today, Merrill Lynch Analyst Jessica Reif Cohen said that Google was very close to closing that deal with CBS. And that deal may be much bigger than a simple radio advertising agreement.

It may also include a large payment by Google to buy off any claims CBS may have against YouTube (see our previous post on this) for television content. The sticking point seems to be the size of the revenue guarantee Google will be giving.

On the radio advertising side, Cohen estimates that the deal would lock up 10% of CBS’s radio advertising and generate $200 million or so in revenue.

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/~3/74356197/