Ajax Girl

If you like original animation, you should subscribe to the Channel Frederator RSS feed. Each week they put together an episode containing some of the best user-submitted animation. They’ve published 66 episodes so far.

Tonight they are hosting an award party in Hollywood for the best videos as determined by viewers. The winners have already been announced here.

Some of the winners are excellent (my favorite is embedded below). Others are funny.This one, however, make me want to engage in violent behavior. All are worth a look.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/81092358/

Mkemne:) is a German “finance 2.0″ website aiming for a simple, easy, interface for users to assess the state of the market. It presents company info and you get to add your favorite companies to a persistent watchlist. It was developed by Nader Cserny of Brand Infection, who was also responsible for the UI design of several Ajax sites we have previously featured here - Blummy, BandNews, WizLite, all sites developed by Alexander Kirk. (I’ve recently worked with Nader.)

Like a lot of Ajax/Web2.0 sites these days, it uses Lazy Registration - or what Mike Arrington recently termed “Auto-Login via a browser cookie” - to build the watchlist without requiring a formal signup process. Interestingly, Nader calls it “extremely lazy registration” because there is no sign up at all, ever. And for basic personalization like a watchlist, there’s a good argument that cookies are all you need.

mkemne:) is a user-friendly stockmarket portal, currently available for the German market.
…
I am interested in the stockmarket since the age of 14 and until today I am horified by the existing services. Google Finance being a welcome exception. With mkemne:) I wanted to create a portal that enables everybody to access market data in a fast and easy way.

Features:

• Reduction to the max. No 1000 links, banners, colors, etc.
• Keep a watchlist of your stocks. Add and remove them with a simple click
• Quickly catch the Winners/Losers of the day. A click saves your preferred indexes for the next time you visit the front page.
• Very Lazy-Registration. Actually there is no registration
• Read News about the stocks you keep in your watchlist, subscribe to your personalised RSS-Feed

Technology:

• LAMP, cURL, cron
• moo.fx + moo.ajax
• ezSQL
• Snoopy
• magpieRSS
• FeedCreator
• PHP/SWF Charts

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/mkemne-make-money

TechMeme’s blog news search engine is gaining popularity and becoming increasingly influential. Perhaps too influential.

Dave Winer, who writes the popular and venerable blog Scripting.com, has requested that TechMeme stop indexing his site. TechMeme automatically determines news headlines on its site by analyzing linking patterns among influential blogs (”influential” being defined by TechMeme’s founder, Gabe Rivera). Winer doesn’t like the fact that when he links to a story it gives that story extra juice on TechMeme.

It’s rare for a blogger to take action to reduce her/his own influence, but that is exactly what Winer has done. It’s just an experiment for now, he says. Something tells me we won’t see droves of bloggers rushing to take similar action.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/81010700/

i am drawing pictures based on titles

more at explodingdog.com

suggest more titles for drawings or other ideas

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/226-i-am-the-last-one

Macy’s

The example purchases and totals section of this Macy’s ad uses real items/numbers to make an abstract idea more concrete.

DrawerGeeks

The navigation at art site DrawerGeeks.

Senduit

Senduit’s straightforward layout.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/222-screens-around-town-macys-drawergeeks-senduit

low-hanging fruit n. The easiest task or the most readily achievable goal.

“Low hanging fruit” search results from our internal Campfire chat room:

(For sticklers, a real world reality check on “low hanging fruit”: Experienced fruit pickers actually start at the top in order to avoid harder picking and poorer fruit. And one expert says, “In the past, we had larger trees that required ladders. The new trees are ‘pedestrian’ trees that don’t require ladders. So instead of picking the low-hanging fruit, the industry has lowered the tree.”)

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/219-37signals-lingo-low-hanging-fruit

David Pogue wrote a post about Worth1000.com’s recent contest that asked contestants to submit fake designs for nonexistent Apple products.

All of these are funny because Apple is so about design. It’s just ripe for parody, in a way that no other company is. (Quick: What would a parody of HP or Gateway designs look like? Ummmm….)

Interesting take. If someone was going to make fun of your company, how would they do it? (And if there’s no answer, is that a sign you’re lacking a defined point of view?)

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/224-ripe-for-parody

Joe Walker (DWR. I know you know) is talking about The Hardware of Tomorrow Versus the Platform of Tomorrow.

The problem is that web-browsers are a step backwards as far as multi-threading goes. In Javascript there is no such thing as a new thread, and worse than that, the entire platform (i.e. a browser) runs a single JavaScript thread. If a script in one window goes into a tight loop, or runs some synchronous Ajax then the browser HTML display freezes.

So are the any solutions?

• Adding thread primitives to Javascript might technically possible, but it seems to me to be impractical; the single-threaded assumption is built fairly deeply into many applications.
• It might be possible for browser manufacturers to create a thread per domain. I don’t see how this could cause problems, but I’ll admit that I have a suspicion that I’m overlooking something. If it does work then it might be possible to allow developers to create new threads by dynamically creating iframes in other domains and having some safe way to communicate between them.
• There is a Javascript pre-compiler called Narrative JavaScript that looks like it might be of some use: it contains a spawn() method to start a new thread of execution. It’s written in Javascript so you can deliver the pre-compiler to the browser or deliver the output. However until there is support for something like this at a language level that can exploit newer hardware, it doesn’t solve the problem.

The solution that I’d like to see is a language emerging that pushes the job of creating threads to the compiler, that runs on the JVM, and that is available in all browsers. I think I can safely predict that this is not going to happen any time soon though.

I agree that it will be interesting to see how Ajax fits in after we see great looking apps via WPF and the new Apple APIs (and Apollo….).

However, faster CPUs also mean faster running Ajax applications.

And, threading? The idea of having actual threading code in Ajax apps scares me. It is hard to get threading code right. We don’t want to repeat the problems of the past by making people mess up multi-threaded code. Instead we need to have better mechanisms for handling concurrency and threads. If we ever go there, we can learn from COmega and the world of chords.

What do you think?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-hardware-of-tomorrow-versus-the-platform-of-tomorrow

Steve Marx has created a PHP library for the Microsoft Ajax 1.0 release that uses the JavaScript piece in PHP land.

The Microsoft AJAX Library is a pure-JavaScript library that’s used by ASP.NET AJAX but is also available as a separate download. Because it’s pure JavaScript, it’s not tied to ASP.NET on the backend. PHP for MS AJAX is code to help you make use of the Microsoft AJAX Library from PHP applications. With this first Alpha release, it simply supports exposing PHP classes as AJAX-enabled web services, just as in ASP.NET applications. In fact, the generated proxies are identical to what you get from ASP.NET, meaning you can have full interoperability.

Hello World

The service on the backend so to speak:

And the front end that will talk to it:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/php-for-microsoft-ajax-library

Gez Lemon and Steve Faulkner have gone into more detail on using the virtual buffer in JAWS to enable Ajax interactions.

Popular screen readers use a virtual buffer to allow users to interact with web content, whereby the virtual buffer provides a mechanism for screen reader users to interact with web content. This article uncovers undocumented behaviour in JAWS 7.1 and later, which allows web developers to build Ajax applications that update the virtual buffer without any interaction from the user.

The hack relies on a hidden input form:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/using-the-screen-reader-virtual-buffer-to-make-accessible-ajax