Ajax Girl

As much as I love the BBC, I can’t help but wonder if they would have written about this new virtual world if it wasn’t their own property.

Details are very thin. In fact, as Ben Metcalfe, a former BBC’er, points out, we don’t know if this is a simple Flash game or a real competitor to Second Life.

It is slated to go live this summer, and will be called “CBBC World” because it is part of CBBC, the BBC channel for 7-12 year olds. Users will be able to “create almost every aspect of their avatar” and money/finances will not be a part of the world.

Hopefully more details will emerge soon.

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/~3/80494260/

Microsoft has announced the final 1.0 release of ASP.NET Ajax (a.k.a. Atlas).

It consists of a core platform, and a bunch of controls:

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0

ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 delivers a rich client-side AJAX library that provides cross platform, cross browser support for a core JavaScript type-system, JSON-based network serialization stack, JavaScript component/control model, as well as common client JavaScript helper classes. ASP.NET AJAX also delivers a rich server-side library that integrates AJAX functionality within ASP.NET, and enables developers to easily AJAX-enable existing ASP.NET 2.0 sites with minimal effort.

ASP.NET AJAX is available for free, and can be used with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS 2005. It is a fully supported Microsoft product, and is backed by a standard 10 year Microsoft support license (with Microsoft Product Support available via phone 24 hours a day x 7 days a week).

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit

In addition to the fully-supported ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release, you can use the more than 30 free ASP.NET AJAX enabled controls available within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.  The control toolkit is a shared-source collaborative project built together by a team containing both Microsoft and non-Microsoft developers (visit the CodePlex Project to learn more, or volunteer to contribute).  All source for the controls is provided completely for free (with full re-use and modification rights). 

The majority of controls within the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit leverage the “Control Extender” pattern that the core ASP.NET AJAX library introduces, and which delivers a super powerful way to easily enable specific AJAX scenarios on a site with minimal effort.

Future Plans

While the core ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 release is now officially shipped, we are definitely not slowing down.

All of the ASP.NET AJAX 1.0 features will be integrated directly into the next release of ASP.NET (codename: “Orcas”). Visual Studio “Orcas” will also provide client-side JavaScript intellisense, JavaScript compilation checking, and rich JavaScript debugging support for ASP.NET AJAX scenarios.

We are also already at work on the next ASP.NET AJAX release, and will continue to add new features and improvements to the supported ASP.NET AJAX core. You can already start using many of these new features with the ASP.NET AJAX Futures CTP (available for download now on the ASP.NET AJAX site - it also supports a “go live” license).

Is the Microsoft camp of developers going to listen to the ivory tower and use this? Or will you be looking for alternatives?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/microsoft-announces-the-aspnet-ajax-10-release

Kiptronic, an advertising network for podcasting, has closed a $4 million round of financing. Investors include Blueprint Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. The company had previously raised $400,000 in angel funding.

The company was founded in May 2005 but didn’t launch its current product, a marketplace for podcasts, until January 2006. They have an important partnership with Libsyn, running all of the ad infrastructure for the Libsyn podcast hosting.

Kiptronic is based in San Francisco and has seven employees.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/80294053/

Weston Ruter has created a cross-browser JavaScript implementation of the WHATWG Web Forms 2.0 Repetition Model after taking to heart the spec that annotates:

The entire model can be emulated purely using JavaScript and the DOM. With such a library, this model could be used and down-level clients could be supported before user agents implemented it ubiquitously. Creating such a library is left as an exercise for the reader.

A simple example is:

Read the spec for more details, such as the add/delete/moveup/movedown features.

• RepetitionModel Project Home
• Test suite
• Latest Changelog

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/whatwg-web-forms-20-repetition-model-implementation

Brad Neuberg keeps it moving with the Dojo Offline Toolkit API. His latest work details the early API via example. The example is a web based email system, and the code using the API is below (and shows you how you would use it).

The interesting news is that you can start work even without the local proxy that was mentioned before, as long as you set the right headers for development.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/dojo-offline-toolkit-in-code

Matt Reider decided to write a password vault called LockBin.

What is it, and why is it different?

LockBin is an AJAX website built in PHP. It stores our passwords securely, and uses OpenID to do so. It is sort of funny to me that it uses OpenID, because the technology was never intended to be used in this way. But it serves as a good way of encrypting data because I can save unique encryption keys for each user, without storing their keys anywhere on my server. The encryption key is their OpenID, which is located elsewhere and verified using a neutral 3rd party.

Isn’t this risky

This is a grand experiment about trust. Will people take a leap of faith and use a system like this? I am not sure that I would, but I am. But I trust it, because I built it. And if other people take that risk, it is likely that more will follow.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/lockbin-an-openid-password-vault

Logitech Harmony 880 Remote

Cheshire Dave Isaacs writes:

I just got a Logitech Harmony 880 Remote for my birthday last week, and I think it’s the kind of product you’d want to promote on SvN: it’s smart and relatively simple: if you want to watch a dvd, one you press one button and it turns on the tv and sets it to the correct input, turns on the dvd player, and turns on the receiver and sets it to the right mode. And it even has a little menu that asks you if everything turned on ok and actually helps you remedy the problem if something didn’t turn on correctly. Awesome UI, and it’s a pretty little device, too. It took me only about 30 minutes to get it set up with my system, and the whole thing is handled online. It beats the crap out of every other universal remote I’ve had. I’ll never have to photocopy my remote and draw little circles and arrows for houseguests anymore.

Go Light On My Lips

“Go Light On My Lips is the new generation of Mascara and Lip Gloss. Our unique micro-lighted applicator gives you illumination whenever you need it with up to 10,000 lights and comes with its own mirror built into the cap…giving you the versatility to apply color in any lighting situation.”

Terrariums

A Flickr photoset of Paula Hayes’ Terrariums. [via MM]The Heads of State

The Heads of State is a design firm that creates groovy posters, packaging, etc.

The Douche Card

The Douche Card: “Tired of arguing with complete morons? Tired of getting into bar room brawls? Well now avoid the confrontation with our glorious Douche Card.” Related: Coudal “Shhh!” cards for noisy cell phone users.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/217-designed-logitech-harmony-880-remote-go-light-on-my-lips-terrariums-the-heads-of-state-the-douche-card

Luxembourg-based Wikio, Europe’s best hope against Digg, Google News and Technorati (it is sort of a mashup of all three), has closed a €4 million ($5.3 million) Series A round of financing. This follows a previous angel round of financing of an undisclosed size (investors in that round included as Loic Le Meur, Martin Varsavsky, Freddy Mini, Ouriel Ohayon, and Jeff Clavier). The financing round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners along with Gemini Israel Funds.

The company recently launched English, German and Spanish versions of the site.

TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon is an investor and board member at Wikio, although we have no other conflicts with the company. Personally, I think Wikio has a lot of work to do before it can effectively compare itself to Digg, Technorati and others. This thing is no Skype.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/80248388/

Chip and Dan Heath were recently interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. There’s an interesting part where they discuss “the Curse of Knowledge.”

People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.

There’s also a bit about how General Mills cut costs and increased sales by eliminating some flavors of Hamburger Helper.

What they found was that moms didn’t care about variety of flavors. This was a shocking insight within the company: previous generations of marketers and food scientists had created thirty flavors of Hamburger Helper! On the other hand the moms did care about being able to find the same predictable flavor that their kids would actually eat. Using this concrete information, Studzinski’s team convinced people across General Mills to reduce the number of products. Costs went way down and sales went up.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/213-the-curse-of-knowledge

Visual WebGui provides developers with WinForms like GUI components all accessible from the design time framework of Visual Studio .Net. The design time components look, act and interface like they do in their WinForm format since they inherit their object model from the existing WinForms components. Visual WebGui’s components become a de-coupled version of the well-known WinForms components allowing for transparent Ajax communication with our patent pending Ajax client. The Visual WebGui client employs javascript, XSL and CSS to deliver application like GUI components that look, feel and behave like their desktop counterparts. Visual WebGui provides extensibility by enabling developers to develop additional GUI components that can be used in both runtime and design time. Furthermore, the platform enables simple interfacing of existing web controls, browser client controls ( e.g. Java applets, Flash, ActiveX) and provides a themes schema enabling extensive customization.

The latest feature is dual-mode, which means that you can deploy to the web, or as a standalone WinForms application.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/visual-webgui-develop-with-winforms-and-dual-deploy