Ajax Girl

Computerworld’s list includes Advanced CPU architectures, Hosted hardware, Ultra-Wideband, NAND drives, and Ruby on Rails. I don’t know if the list is in order, but Rails is listed as #1.

Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications… Released in 2004, RoR is an open-source project that originally served as the foundation of a project management tool designed by Web development company 37signals LLC. It is easily ported among Linux, Windows and Macintosh environments, and it can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which a Web development team is able to build and maintain enterprise Web sites and applications.

They also go on to list a few notable apps based on Rails and note that Rails will be shipped with OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/299-computerworld-the-top-five-technologies-you-need-to-know-about-in-07

Wired Magazine seems hell bent on convincing the world that Digg is falling apart. I have a problem with that because Wired Magazine’s parent company, Condé Nast, owns Digg competitor Reddit. And because Wired isn’t just reporting Digg news - they are actively engaged in using Wired to undermine Digg.

Reddit was acquired in late October. By December, Wired had predicted the fall of Digg, saying “Digg Becomes the New Friendster” without disclosing that they were a sister company to a competitor. I wrote about this on Crunchnotes, saying it was inappropriate because of the (undisclosed) conflict of interest.

Today Wired takes another, more elaborate shot at Digg. In a piece of investigative journalism, Wired reporter Annalee Newitz used a service called User/Submitter that pays people to Digg a story, which resulted in it getting to the home page of Digg. Newitz does mention the conflict of interest, albeit in a parenthetical in the middle of the story (”Wired News is owned by CondéNet, which also owns Digg competitor reddit”).

But my bigger problem is that Wired isn’t simply reporting news about Digg. They’re making the news. And they’re going negative. In the first example, they make a prediction that Digg will fall, comparing it to Friendster. No news was reported - it was just an out of the blue roundhouse punch at Digg. In the second example the reporter actually creates the story she writes about, and willfully violated the Digg terms of use in the process. And this was done for commercial gain - the Wired story describing this has received a ton of traffic (and is actually the number 1 story on Digg right now).

Digg can’t treat Wired like any other user that’s engaged in fraud. Wired is the press, and the press has tremendous power. Wired is putting Digg in an impossible situation, and they should be called on it. Reporting news is one thing (although they should note the conflict of interest there as well), but actively creating negative news about a competitor and then using the massive reach of Wired to promote that “news” is way over the line.

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/~3/98031088/

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/298-animation-of-a-samuel-l-jackson-pulp-fiction-speech-in-type

Ian Hickson (Hixie) has been interviewed regarding X/HTML 5.

There is some good stuff in the interview including:

• New datagrid “which is a tree view/list view control with built-in support for AJAX-backed data stores, so you can do something like the typical Webmail view of all your tens of thousands of e-mails, but instead of only showing 20 at a time, you can just scroll through all of them, without having to actually download them all until they’re needed.”
• Offline indicator: A simple API to ask if you are on or offline. There was talk of this with the Apollo team. It turned out to be a harder problem than Adobe thought, and there are levels of checking (are you on a network. are you on an intranet. etc).
• Cross domain and cross frame communication
• Scoped CSS: Wouldn’t it be nice to say ’style this content with these rules’? This way you could have the user generated content in a nice sandbox (e.g. RSS reader)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/xhtml-5-interview

Despite its title, Beginning Javascript with DOM Scripting and Ajax by Christian Heilmann is not for those just starting out in web development. What it is, is a great resource for those that already have some experience coding dynamic web sites. The book explores the principals of DOM scripting (using the Document Object Model) to build dynamic pages the right way- with standards compliant code that maintains the separation between content and presentation. The early chapters are devoted to giving the reader a quick overview of Javascript. chapter one takes a look at basic syntax and simple functions. Chapter Two covers datatypes and conditionals. If you don’t know Javascript, you might want to start with something else, such as Beginning JavaScript Second Edition by Paul Wilton. Some of the concepts and techniques used later on in the book require greater familiarity with Javascript than a begginer would have.

Read more of the review here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/book-review-beginning-javascript-with-dom-scripting-and-ajax

There has been a lot of coverage of the
Adobe Engage event.

Ben and I were also there and enjoyed being able to get a glimpse of what Apollo will have to offer.

Today was the day of a dive into the tech itself instead of a bunch of demos (some cool, many not actually using Apollo though!).

One thing is very interesting. As we look at the convergence of the web and the desktop (from both directions) we now see the Apollo 1.0 is very much Web+ rather than Desktop-.

This means that Apollo really is aiming to get web development just a bit further onto desktops via features such as being able to launch apps, offline support, file storage, etc. These features mean that you will have less and less of a reason to go for the full desktop approach.

This also means that there are plenty of applications that will probably require you to go for a full desktop application platform.

Apollo is not released, and there are still discussions on which features will be in there for us. Do you think they should go with the Java-like approach and abstract above the native platform so that you apps work everywhere? Or should we be allowed to get down and dirty and do native interactions if you need too?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/adobe-engage-apollo-as-web-rather-than-desktop

ColorJack allows you to visualize color theory with the sphere.

This reminds us of Kuler, the user generated color app from Adobe Labs. It is pretty amazing that so many people are sharing color groups

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/colorjack-visualize-color-theory

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The Chatters
Jacob DeHart (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Jeffrey Kalmikoff (skinnyCorp/Threadless)
Zach Klein (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)

Jakob Lodwick (Connected Ventures/Vimeo)
Moderated by Matt from 37signals

Continued from Part 1.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/295-fireside-chat-skinnycorp-threadless-and-connected-ventures-vimeo-part-2-of-2

The Insider Pages acquisition rumors that we posted on last week were accurate - later today Citysearch, a division of InterActive Corp., will announce that they have acquired the company.

The size of the transaction is not being disclosed, although our understanding from a source close to the deal is that the price is in the $13 million range. The company had previously raised approximately $9 million in venture financing from idealab, Sequoia Capital, and Softbank Capital.

Insider Pages went through a round of heavy layoffs in late 2006 in the face of intense competition from Yelp, Judy’s Book and others. The site has 2 million unique monthly U.S. visitors according to Comscore.

Update: The WSJ is now reporting this as well.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/97812189/

When was the last time that you played Shadow of the Beast? or launched Eyes?

Well, the beauty of the internet, and a bunch of time, has enabled an JavaScript emulation engine of the Amiga.

That has more “Wow” than Vista.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/amiga-emulated-in-javascript-2