Ajax Girl

Social/mobile payments site Billmonk had a mini merger with competitor Obopay last month (we called it a “battle for relevance” since PayPal has a strong product offering in the mobile space as well). Buxfer is another social money Y Combinator funded company that softly launched last September. It provides the same basic functionality of Billmonk, such as keeping a running total of debts and credits with your friends (only money), but has grown up a little and added some nice data visualization.

Buxfer is deeper than Billmonk, letting you track and tag out your expenses with friends and groups over time. The groups option makes it great for managing debts between roommates or within a club. Billmonk is more geared to managing splitting debts between friends and lending out your stuff. Buxfer goes further, letting you analyze you expenses over time through a Google finance-style pie chart with adjustable time frame. Buxfer has gone to great lengths to make importing transactions as easy as possible. They currently support adding transactions to your account via SMS and the ability to import your credit card statements (.csv,.qfx,.ofx). From there you can tag and divide up your expenses as you see fit.

What’s great is that these sites start with a simple day-to-day problem that can frustrates us all and present a solution. However, without intimate integration with payment services, it’s still a chore. I’m not so OCD that I will tag and text myself about every payment I make. Wesabe has payment integration, but is also going after the quicken market. Billmonk really benefited from integration with Obopay deal and perhaps Buxfer will find a similar partner.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/98716721/

Call them pipes, teqlos, dapps, modules, mashups or whatever else but fact is that recently we have seen a good number of new services that allow developers and users to build mini-apps and mashups that mix and re-mix data. Here we run through 5 applications that allow you to mix, rip and mash your data, looking at the data input, output, REST support, suggested use, and required skill level:

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes is a GUI web app that lets you create new data feeds by remixing syndication feeds (RSS, Atom, RDF). Pipes takes in feeds from around the web, letting you sort, join, and analyze the feeds items before outputting them in RSS or JSON. It also has a good query builder module that lets you grab feeds based on URL parameters. Yahoo! has also created a community around the service, letting users publish and remix other people’s pipes. The resulting data from the pipes can even be used for other mashups, as Teqlo has done.
Ideal for:Pipes is best suited for mashups between well formed feed data with Yahoo! services such as Search, Local, Flickr, or even Google Base, since the modules are already included. Programming experience is limited to an understanding of procedural programming control structures (loops, logical tests) and aided by the visual interface.
Examples: Apartments near something (Craigslist and Yahoo! Local). eBay Price watch (eBay RSS API).

Teqlo

Teqlo is a new widget-based mashup application. You build mashups by dropping specialized widgets onto the canvas and specifying interactions between them. For instance, you can map the results of an eBay search by dropping an eBay search widget and Google map widget on the canvas. Then you connect the two widgets by specifying an interaction such as when an item is selected in the eBay widget, add a marker on the Google map. The application is then accessed by a webpage with the active AJAX widgets. Other widgets include Google Calendar, Gadgets, Spreadsheets, LinkedIn search, DabbleDB search, YouTube viewer, contact lists, and to do lists.

The service is currently in beta, so they have a limited number of modules and have not turned on publishing to the web yet.
Ideal for: Teqlo is a high level masher best suited for non-programmers. Users create interactions between widgets by specifying an action in one widget causing a reaction in another. However, Teqlo’s high level approach means most of its power lies with its developers ability to craft useful widgets and interactions.
Examples: Examples are not public yet, but an example Teqlo is covered in their blog.

Proto

Proto is a Windows based mashup application meant to join your desktop apps with the web. You need the Windows application to both create and use the mashups. It’s component based, joining your desktop and web apps by pulling data from your desktop applications, such as Outlook, and feeding it into online web components, such as Yahoo! maps. Proto has the Visual Basic for Applications development environment (VBA IDE) and Adobe Flash baked in, so you can create your own modules to pull and display data from your applications. Proto also has a light database it uses to broken and manipulate data between the application and online component.
Ideal for: Proto takes some familiarity with database concepts and hopefully VBA experience so that you can program your own modules. Their 5 minute intro is indicative of the experience level you need to really use the program. Since Proto allows you to share your mashups, non-programmers can also use Proto for their library of pre-existing mashups.
Examples: The intro video provides a good example of the program, but downloading the viewer is needed to view modules like the restaurant viewer or more enterprise minded Salesforce reporter.

Dapper

Dapper is a web based application for generating XML for website content. You create “Dapps” (web services) by using Dapper’s virtual browser to grab content from web pages. Dapper is trained by feeding it several example urls that hold examples of content you’re interested in. Dapper looks at the similarities between the pages to take a guess at the important content to pull from the page. After Dapper has analyzed the page, you can narrow down the fields on the page you want to track. For instance, the titles of stories on Digg. Dapper can then output the content you select from the page in various formats (XML, JSON, HTML, and YAML) and incorporate that data to trigger alerts or even map locations found in the feed. Each Dapper application, “Dapp”, is published to the community for anyone to use.
Ideal for: Dapper takes minimal programming experience and is useful for making well structured feeds for pages that don’t have them already. Their demo movie is a good place to start.
Examples: Fidget is a tool that lets you find videos of your favorite bands based on searches carried out by Dapper.

OpenKapow

OpenKapow is the industrial strength version of Dapper. It’s a desktop app that programs RSS feeds, REST apps, and web clips through a browser interface. You can use OpenKapow to make a web robot to pull from a web page like Dapper, but can direct that bot to navigate web pages (including form submission), carry out loops, branches, recover from errors, and accept user input at any point in the process. OpenKapow has a community where developers can share their robots to be used and remixed by other users.
Ideal for: OpenKapow is ideal for serious web scrapping. It takes basic knowledge of procedural programming and web markup to use.
Examples: Here is a robot that logs into Gmail and outputs your email in XML. Here’s another one that searches deep into TechCrunch’s posts for a keyword.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/98638849/

Lots of news today around YouTube’s efforts to get big content providers under agreement to provide their stuff to YouTube.

First, the good news. The BBC has agreed to allow some of their content onto YouTube in exchange for a share of advertising revenue. Only promotional clips will be included, not full length programs. This is a small win for Google - the big win will be if/when content owners put full episodes of shows on YouTube. Meanwhile, YouTube is also hyping the fact that they’ve entered into 1,000 or so agreements with small an independent content producers as well.

The bad news - Viacom is going guns blazing at YouTube, announcing today that “traffic to its MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon websites rose sharply over the past month” since they demanded that YouTube pull down over 100,000 clips. This conflicts with a previous statement by CBS that promotional clips on YouTube drove strong viewership gains in offline television.

Where do the other networks stand? NBC recently slammed YouTube as well. Fox has done a lot of behind-the-scenes trashing, although their $900 million advertising deal with Google prohibits them from openly attacking YouTube. A widely expected deal with CBS that would include both radio ad time and content on YouTube has failed to materialize, and CBS isn’t saying much.

Lots of posturing by the networks, and Google hasn’t helped things by putting offers on the table and then pulling them, frustrating Viacom and the other networks. Ultimately everyone wants to get a deal done, and most of these announcements are tactical moves to grab more of the advertising pie. Once one networks breaks from the pack and starts to provide full length programs on YouTube in exchange for a share of advertising revenue, I expect the rest to fall in short order.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/98556339/

Pavel Simakov has created a href=”http://www.vokamis.com/products/cword/app/enterGame.php?ns=/a/a&or=V&h=128&pub=2&ex=http://www.softwaresecretweapons.com/jspwiki/Wiki.jsp?page=GangOfFourSoftwareDesignPatternsJavaScriptCrossword”>JavaScript Crossword Puzzle system.

The sample crossword is on the gang of four software patterns. Doubly fun.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/javascript-crosswords

If you use Apple’s Mail.app, check out this tip. It really works. It’s like night and day for me.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/300-speed-up-mailapp

Hans Schmucker has updated his Canvas 3D Renderer with new sample data, a few performance tweaks, background image support, support for colored polygons and a few other tweaks here and there.

The car you see is not a sprite, it’s simply an image put in front of the canvas for my amusement. Right now the sample data has around 200 faces and while the code is almost ready for shared vertices (which means that one vertex belongs to many faces, resulting in a much lower number of vertices in memory and therefore a lot less calculations) right now a face still consists of 3 vertices, meaning that it does about 500-600 rotations, projections, clipping and collision tests per frame update, with very few optimizations so far and for that the speed is (at least in my opinion) amazing.

Hans informally tested in a few browsers and had some feedback:

Opera 9.1 is definitely the slowest one, but with a very steady framerate, which probably means that drawing and garbage collection are very fast (as these tend to take up a variable amount of time), but arithmetic is slow.

Firefox 2 is pretty steady as well, and a lot faster than Opera.

Firefox 3 Alpha is certainly the fastest browser, but with a very unsteady framerate. I guess the new garbage collector is causing this while drawing speed is increasing thanks to Cairo.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/canvas-3d-renderer-tweaked

Bart Melton has a sense of humour, and came out with ADLib: Another DHTML Library.

The highlights are:

1. XHR (of course)
2. Behaviors (custom written, but same principle, so I used the same name)
3. Event management
4. Effects creation engine
5. Hashes
6. Array and string extensions
7. Functions for basic styling (setStyle, addClass etc)
8. Several DOM searching techniques ($, $c, $a, $css, $t)
9. A few widgets
10. Lots of random things that may or may not be useful.

We had to ask Bart: “another library? really? why would we want that?” and he came back with a nice response:

The library has been an evolving tool I have used for ~10 years now. It started as the basic_dhtml.js portion of the current library and has grown. With the recent trends in ajax and effects libraries and so forth, I decided to update it to a more industrial strength library and release it in the wild. I have had very little formal programming training, so for me, learning has always been through doing. As such, I don’t use other people’s libraries, I see a neat concept and figure out how to do it myself. First and formost, it is a tool for me to use and it has been a great learning experience in writing it that has taken my programming ability to the next level. Now that I have it, my on the job coding has become much easier, faster, and more efficient.

As to the name, it originally started out as just a DHTML library (just style getters/setters) . It is also a late comer to the party, thus the another. Lastly, I am a lazy typer and when I was deciding whether to namespace the entire library or not (I settled on not), I didn’t want something that would be long and add unnecessary file size. To be honest, I couldn’t think of anything really catchy.

As to why others should use it. I think that depends on the same reasons why people use any library. Does it fit their needs? Do they find it friendly, understandable, and in general, something they like? Does this library fit every need? No. I know there are some things missing that I look to add in the near future. As one friend of mine put it though, “it is very robust”. It is designed to fit most any need. It has simple things for the most basic JS operations (style getters/setters) to very advanced programming capabilities and a lot in between. I attempted to keep as much flexibility in the library as possible. For some of the larger, more complicated tasks (events, effects, xhr), the goal was to remove as many of the annoyances (x-browser, scoping etc) as possible while still leaving as many options open to either override the defaults and/or to allow the developer to have more control. Where possible I tried to add things with flexible parameters, flexible ways to set information (e.x. the XHR functionality allows for adding query string items 1 at a time and it will build the query for you, or you can just set the data manually), or adding additional information where traditionally there isn’t any (e.x. events can be assigned with an additional parameters that will be passed to the handler).

One last bonus, it isn’t huge. If you run it through jsmin to kill the comments, the core file isn’t too bad in size for the amount of functionality and the rest of the files can be included on an as needed basis (individually they are fairly small).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/adlib-another-dhtml-library

Shure: The best?
This Q&A at the Shure site is interesting because the company rep actually backs away from declaring its industry standard microphone “the best.”

Question: I was just wondering, the sm57 seams to be the mic that most artists use for their Guitar Cabinet, but is it really the best mic for that or is it just that it’s been such a classical model so long that they just presume that its the best and therefore use it? I mean the technology must have gone forward since it was first released?

Answer:
There is never a “best” microphone. Is there a “best guitar amp”? Is there a “best guitar”? The selection of a mic, guitar amp, or guitar is subjective. It is what appeals to your ear that is important. Many artists prefer the sound of the SM57 for miking a guitar amp, thus its popularity.

“I mean the technology must have gone forward since it was first released?”
The SM57 has been internally improved in many ways over the years, but the styling has stayed the same because customers like it. Some styles are classics: Marshall amps, Fender Telecaster, Gibson Les Paul, Shure SM57 and SM58. Why change if it a model is successful?

Steven Berlin Johnson: Insane, etc.
At author Steven Berlin Johnson’s site, he provides snappy and straightforward summaries for each of his books. The kind of unique p.o.v. stands out from the accurate but dry summaries you usually see.

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter
The title says it all. This one sparked a slightly insane international conversation about the state of pop culture—and particularly games. There were more than a few dissenters, but the response was more positive than I had expected. And it got me on The Daily Show, which made it all worthwhile.

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
The story of bottom-up intelligence, from slime mold to Slashdot. Probably the most critically well-received of all my books, and the one that has influenced the most eclectic mix of fields: political campaigns, web business models, urban planning, the war on terror.

TriTours: Asking the ugly questions
Usually, travel sites just give you hype. That’s why a site like TriTours stands out. It has a Morocco FAQ page that deals honestly with topics that might concern potential tourists. Here are the questions at the “Safety and health” section.

Is Morocco safe for Americans?
Is it safe for a woman to travel alone in Morocco?
Is it safe for a Jew to travel to Morocco?
Should I get any vaccinations before I travel to Morocco?
Can I drink tap water in Morocco?
Are Morocco’s beaches safe to swim?
Is it safe to hitchhike in Morocco?
Is it a good idea to travel to Morocco with children?

Maybe more FAQs should address fears instead of hyping the sunny side of things.

Design Observer: What if I told the truth?
In This is My Process, Michael Bierut wonders, “What would happen, I wonder, if I actually told the truth about what happens in a design process?”

When I do a design project, I begin by listening carefully to you as you talk about your problem and read whatever background material I can find that relates to the issues you face. If you’re lucky, I have also accidentally acquired some firsthand experience with your situation. Somewhere along the way an idea for the design pops into my head from out of the blue. I can’t really explain that part; it’s like magic. Sometimes it even happens before you have a chance to tell me that much about your problem! Now, if it’s a good idea, I try to figure out some strategic justification for the solution so I can explain it to you without relying on good taste you may or may not have. Along the way, I may add some other ideas, either because you made me agree to do so at the outset, or because I’m not sure of the first idea. At any rate, in the earlier phases hopefully I will have gained your trust so that by this point you’re inclined to take my advice. I don’t have any clue how you’d go about proving that my advice is any good except that other people — at least the ones I’ve told you about — have taken my advice in the past and prospered. In other words, could you just sort of, you know…trust me?

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/264-on-writing-keeping-it-real

BuildASign is a simple Ajax tool that lets you design signs.

If you fancy printing a quick sign that uses Dojo on the client side to .Net on the back end, you have found the place.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/buildasign-ajax-enabled-design-tool