Ajax Girl

When I went to United to look for some tickets I had a pleasant surprise. Normally I curse the website, as I do with most of the airline sites.

We are used to some nice usable websites these days. We have rich date pickers and the like. The airlines often have us in old-school land, opening up a new window to select a date and erroring out often.

United has cleaned up its act, giving a more clean looking site and experience.

The search has a nice inline date picker that is fast. I expected that clicking on one-way and other types would change the forms on the fly, so it was a bit surprising to have to req/resp wait.

The results were simple to use, and selecting different flights dynamically changed the page with new costs and highlighting. A floating div with the cost information staying put at the top right of the page.

All in all a nice simple experience. This isn’t a Kayak or a Farecast, but for the old school airlines it is a lot better.

Then again, their session management easily broke with the back/forward buttons, giving me fun “NA_error.system.missingSessionAttribute” error messages.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/united-updates-their-web-site

More details on the RockYou financing are leaking, although we still can’t get confirmation from the company or previous investors. A source close to the company says they raised $11 million in this second round, most or all from European investor Partech. The company had previously raised $1.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

All outside data sources suggest RockYou is second to Slide, which raised a large round of financing late last year. However, an investor, Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew, argues that RockYou is actually bigger than Slide in a comment to our previous post.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99602915/

Cute, clever, and cool are all important ingredients in a delicious application experience. But often their role is over- or understated. Too much and it’s hard to stomach, too little and it’s all bland.

So how do you get it right? One way to think about it is to treat these three C’s as spices. Spices are there to heighten the flavor of the main dish, not dominate and conquer its entire taste.

You can’t litter your page with darling kittens unless you’re Cute Overload, but you can add a few puns or quirky comparisons to put a smile on someone reading your help section.

You shouldn’t try to discern if someone is writing a letter in your word processor, but you can add a Google Maps link to something you know is an address.

You’d be foolish to make every link a fancy Ajax transition, but you can hide/reveal a very commonly used form with a nice fade.

It’s not about either or. You can be cute, clever, and cool in moderation and end up with character instead of clown.

Credit to Jeff Bezos for planting this comparison in my head.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/301-treat-cute-clever-and-cool-as-spices

When we’re not spotting gadgets or watching Tron, the guys at CrunchGear like to travel. We will be at four shows this month and would love to get in touch with folks who are attending/like beer. Here’s the low-down:

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/~3/99508178/

Presented by the Silicon Valley WebBuilder, this event brought together Mike Shaver from Mozilla, Chris Wilson from Microsoft’s IE team, Håkon Lie from Opera, and expertly moderator Douglas Crockford from Yahoo! to talk about the current state of the browser landscape.

At first, each person got a chance to say their peace. Here are some core items that each person said:

Chris Wilson

We are not about to enter another browser war. This isn’t about destroying each other. This time it is about building the standards based web future, which means we need to work together. This isn’t 1995, so let’s not build that platform. The problem that we have is that as soon as you improve something, you break the web. This is especially hard since Microsoft has ~500 million users.

Chris queried the top 200 web sites and 50% of them are in strict mode. When he did this in IE 6, only one of them was like this. He hinted at having developers opt-in to standards mode in a different way.

Mike Shaver

Mike also said that he doesn’t consider it to be a browser war….. but rather a “mindshare struggle”.

The new “war” is having cool applications being built on the web itself. If the next flickr/gmail/… is built on the web, it is winning.

Don’t look to the W3C for the future.

Håkon Lie

“If you need a good browser for Windows 98 we have it”

Ajax is bad. We need to add HTML, CSS, and the like, and he had some funny acronyms.

He then discussed the ACID 2 test and had a lot of fun with IE 7 showing how it compared to Opera 3.6 from 1998.

The Wii (which uses Opera) is going to change the web. More people are trying to get their sites rendering correctly with the Wii than “who cares about that Opera browser”.

We need to support video as a first class citizen (and sound). “We can’t leave it to plugins anymore”.

What video formats should we support? There aren’t many open formats, so they use Ogg formats.

Where’s Apple?

They refused to send someone saying that “we are busy writing software”.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/browser-wars-mozilla-ie-opera-join-up-for-a-panel-discussion

AOL has launched their AIM Webmail beta that uses Dojo for rich interaction a la Gmail and Yahoo! Mail.

AOL has been a long term fan of Dojo and it shows in view source:

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/aol-launches-dojo-based-ajax-webmail

Opera has published a proposal (that is implemented in an internal build) for a <video> HTML element.

This has been talked about for quite awhile, and they got around to doing it.

Example

[html]

function play(video) { document.getElementById(video).play() }
function pause(video) { document.getElementById(video).pause() }
function stop(video) { document.getElementById(video).stop() }

… description of the news …
Play the news!
Pause the news!
Reset
[html]

The src=”” attribute, if present, specifies the address of the video. If
present, the attribute must be a URI (or IRI).

When the src=”” attribute is set, the user agent must immediately begin to
download the specified resource, unless the user agent cannot support videos,
or its support for videos has been disabled. As soon as enough data is
received the user agent should start decoding the video. This means that
play() and other methods can already be used before the resource is downloaded
completely.

When downloading a video resource HTTP pipelining must not be used.

If the download fails, the resource is not a supported video format or the
resource can’t be decoded due to an error the user agent must fire an error
event on the <video> element and if it was still downloading it must abort
that process.

Any opinions on the issues?

• Should we very much like the element just ignore 404 errors and
  the Content-Type header?
• We could dispatch a load event once the complete video is downloaded,
  but it probably makes more sense to have some kind of streaming here. Perhaps
  the process event stuff from Web API is even enough if a Content-Length header
  is provided.
• Maybe have a loop([times]) member like Audio() has?
• height / width

Ready to get rid of generic ugly object/embed tags?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/opera-element-proposal

You may have seen the AddThis buttons on blog at some point while surfing the web. It’s a simple, free widget blog owners can add to their site that shows a number of bookmarking options at the end of a blog post (there’s also a feed reader widget for easy RSS subscriptions). Readers can bookmark the post on Digg, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Bluedot and other services with a single click. As an example, we’ve added an AddThis button to the end of this post.

The service launched in October 2006 and announced that the widget was being served over 1 million times per day last month. Tomorrow they’ll announce that they’ve reached the 2 million milestone.

If you’re interested in adding the AddThis widget to your site, the customization tool is here.

AddThis is gathering some very interesting data that can form the core of a business model now that they have fairly deep penetration. They’re releasing some of this data tomorrow - showing the top bookmarking services and feed readers where their users store data (see the graphs below). Given that AddThis also sees what stories people are bookmarking, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine other things they could do with all of this data.

The top bookmarking services, after the browser feature itself (”favorites”) are del.icio.us and Google Bookmarks, followed by Digg and Yahoo My Web. No surprises there. The top feed reader by a large margin is the much improved Google Reader, which is more popular than Yahoo and Bloglines combined. I am surprised at that - Recent Feedburner data suggested Google Reader was doing very well, but not as well as the AddThis data suggests.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99426040/

While all the online TV guides are adding bells, whistles and other tricks to their basic product of showing TV listings, none have created a really perfect, simple, online guide to what’s on TV.

Yahoo’s done some new things (which were largely hated by users), and MeeVee has started to integrate online video into its listings. Others we’ve written about have added social aspects to their services.

Couchville doesn’t do any of this, but they’ve nailed the most important feature - the guide itself. Tell it your zip code and cable or satellite provider and it shows you a simple, easy to navigate TV guide. A vertical red line shows you what’s currently on, and via an Ajax interface you can grab and drag the listings vertically (for channel) or horizontally (for time) to see more (this works much like the Google Maps interface).

Coucheville is a service launched by Snapstream, which offers a PC based digital video recorder for people who’ve added a TV tuner to their computers. Data from Snapstream, like the most popular recorded shows, is included in the listings.

It’s very simple and it’s very useful.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/99416036/

Today, Y Combinator backed Octopart has launched a vertical search engine for electronics parts, ideal for electrical engineers and hobbyists alike. The engine helps electronics buyers find the best deals by aggregating and normalizing product data from Allied Electronics, Digi-Key, Mouser, and Newark InOne. The site was started by two physics grad students, frustrated by continuously facing difficult price comparisons while buying supplies for their lab. They recently dropped out to pursue the development of Octopart along with other verticals.

Searching supports advanced search functions like wildcards, phrase matching, and boolean operators. The results feature price comparisons by varying quantities, availability, along with a flashpaper and pdf report on the part specifications. After playing around with the engine, I know more about the prices and specification of plug-in relay switches than I ever thought I would. The two founders, Sam and Andres, hope to integrate the engine into hobbyist websites, making it possible to find the cheapest deals on all the parts going into your latest late-night garage project.

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/~3/99407485/