Ajax Girl

ubroadcast provides a platform that gives users the ability to create and broadcast their own internet radio station.

ubroadcast’s Station Manager software allows users to host a live internet talk radio or music show complete with play list support, inline CD ripping, MP3 uploading, commercials and other pre-recorded content.

User generated internet radio stations are far from being new. Live365 and Shoutcast have provided similar functionality for years. Where ubroadcast differs is the simplicity and cost: setting up and running a ubroadcast station is free and the learning curve is close to zero. It’s more internet radio creation for the mass market.

Setup takes no more than 5 minutes. The client is quick to download and registration options are built in. Users can immediately broadcast live content, upload music from MP3’s, or select from music uploaded by other ubroadcast members. There is a lack of depth in the existing ubroadcast playlist; this isn’t a Last.fm or similar site with an extensive music library, it’s strictly user uploaded content and I’d imagine that this will become less of an issue as the service grows.

The only real negative I could find with the service is the need for listeners to download the ubroadcast player to listen to stations. ubroadcast’s John Castiglione told me that “some of the features are unlike anything Internet Radio has seen before, and this level of interaction between the broadcaster and listeners can only be accomplished with our own Player”. The service is free so perhaps asking for Real or Windows Media streaming options is too much.

Professional internet radio station operators will stick with Shoutcast and Live365, but for casual users, ubroadcast is a strong alternative to the more complicated and expensive existing players in this space.

For those looking to test the player, Channel 677 on ubroadcast is currently the “TechCrunch Test Channel” and is playing non-stop music from the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123094855/

Something Awful has a flat out hilarious (if somewhat long in the introduction) article on the nerd bias of wikipedia. The point isn’t to say that one article or another on Wikipedia has factual inaccuracies, but rather to show how much more attention certain topics get than others. They suggest opening up two somewhat related articles, where one appeals to the nerds and the other does not, and see how much longer and more complete the nerd-related entries are. Some of my favorites are below. If you want the quick results, just click on Lightsaber Combat and you’ll get the point (”The master practitioners of Form IV make extensive use of acrobatic maneuvers often thought physically impossible without the aid of the Force.”). People contribute to articles they care about. And Wikipedia’s community cares about light sabres, fantasy characters, video games and acne.

• Modern Warfare v. Lightsaber Combat
• Prime Number v. Optimus Prime (the Transformers character)
• Girlfriend v. Video Games
• Half Life v. Half Life 2
• Love v. Masturbation
• Bathing v. Acne

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/~3/123062704/

Deep video tagging service Click.TV sent an email to their users today stating that they will be shutting down their video player, taking any videos served by Click.TV offline. We’ve covered Click.TV before as well as the other deep tagging startups. Click.TV says the shutdown will be accompanied by bigger plans for the future. We’re adding Click.TV to the deadpool in the meantime and have contacted them for clarification on the plans. In their email below they say “You’ll be seeing Click.TV technology very soon doing *much* bigger and better things,” so perhaps the Click.TV story is not quite over.

Here’s the letter:

Dear Click.TV User:

Effective June 8, the Click.TV Player will be shut down. Thus, videos
placed on web pages using the Click.TV Player will not play. If you
would like to continue playing those videos on your web page(s), we
suggest that you replace the Click.TV Player with another video
player.

While I regret this shutdown, I am very excited by the reason behind
it. You’ll be seeing Click.TV technology very soon doing *much* bigger
and better things.

Lastly, I want to thank you wholeheartedly for your interest in and
support of Click.TV. Customers like you, along with your videos, are
incredibly important to us.

- Mike Lanza

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123058432/

Earlier this week we covered Trivop, which billed itself as the first video guide for hotels. Today, Tvtrip, another European startup, is launching their own guide. Counter to Trivop’s straightforward mashup of videos and Google maps, Tvtrip is focusing on “experiencing” the hotel and location overall before you rent. And yes, the names are ridiculously similar an confusing.

Tvtrip’s listings include maps, ratings, pricing and videos touring the hotel’s different classes of rooms, amenities, and exterior compiled by their teams of videographers. They have a library of 1500 videos, including 25 European destinations. You can see an example here. Over the next couple of months Tvtrip will be adding several more elements to enhance the user experience, including nearby geocoded Flickr photos and integration with Eventful and Plazes. I’m sure they’ll be adding more imaging features as mapping services like Google incorporate them, such as streetside view.

Tvtrip does have some drawbacks, however. In depth information about hotels is great news for price insensitive consumers, but you still have to hop to one of their affiliates for the best deal (Expedia, Venere, Booking.com). Competitor Trivop, instead, relies on TripAdvisor for their deals. Video guides also take a great deal of time to put together. Tvtrip is also only available in London, Brussles, Paris, and Berlin because of the large overhead involved in compiling the in depth information. Trivop is currently only available in London and Paris.

Tvtrip.com was founded by 4 former managers of Expedia Europe: Marc Ruff (former Vice President Europe), Fabien Bourdier (former managing director France), Marc Pfohl (former marketing director France) and Anja Keckeisen (former managing director Germany). They are currently angel financed, but expected to close another round of financing next week.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/123058433/

CrunchGear writes about some troubling signs around the upcoming iPhone on the same day BusinessWeek says it could become a $10 billion business for Apple. The launch date is the last business day of June, for example, suggesting Apple really needs more time but fears the consequences of missing their June launch date. Another problem: the iPhone may have a glass screen which will break very easily. And more on that touch-screen keyboard.

I’m on Apple’s side on this one. CrunchGear is simply spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about this revolutionary new product. See here for all of our iPhone coverage.

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/~3/123051671/

A new site called Blogstorm went live today - it shows basic inbound link stats for blogs based on Yahoo link data. The site also shows how many links more recent posts have generated, and includes several charts. This is a great way for bloggers to see which of their posts are more popular.

TechCrunch stats are here. You have to submit your site to them before they track it. The submission page is here.

There are a few other bells and whistles, including a browser add-on. See their blog for more details.

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/~3/123029439/

Tiny code is always best

“The fundamental nature of coding is that our task, as programmers, is to recognize that every decision we make is a trade-off. To be a master programmer is to understand the nature of these trade-offs, and be conscious of them in everything we write…START WITH BREVITY. Increase the other dimensions AS REQUIRED BY TESTING.”

Top ten reasons why web 2.0 sucks

“M&A Wack-a-mole stopping innovation in its tracks…Most of Web 2.0 is going to wind up becoming the corporate walking dead of long forgotten or poorly understood acquisitions. Consumers suffer when entrepreneurs won’t make a go of it on their own and make a bigger impact on their online experience.”

Flickr fails “The Mom Test”

“I told Mom to peruse the pictures and click Order Prints for each one she wanted on paper. Unfortunately, Flickr was the wrong tool for that job. The terminology is confusing — quick, what’s the difference between a Photo Group, a Photo Set and a Photo Stream? Worse, it takes seven mouse clicks, two pop-up menus and two dialog boxes to order one print of one photo. My mom wound up spending hours on what should have been a 10-minute job.”

Fellini on freedom

“I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.” -Federico Fellini

Turn off ads for repeat visitors?

“It didn’t matter how big or small the site was, how narrow focused or completely open-ended the content was. The biggest single group of visitors to these sites were people who had never seen them before and would never return again. Among my informal polling of friends and my own sites, the lowest percentage of one-time visitors was 53%. Some sites had as much as 75% of their traffic come from people that had only visited once.”

Ten Questions with Jeffrey Kalmikoff of skinnyCorp/Threadless

“Question: Does Threadless’s effort in forums, podcasting, etc really increase sales or are they just fun/cool things to do? Answer: Both, most likely. Honestly, we’ve never really measured their effects because it’d be really boring to do so. Participating in the forums, definitely helps to people understand that the owners and employees of the company really are part of the community and don’t sit up on high looking down onto our business. Most everyone who works for us was part of the Threadless community before they were employed, so it’s a pretty natural thing.”

Culture comparison between Apple and Microsoft engineers

“One software developer compared the two men’s approaches to the difference between martial marching band music and jazz. Mr. Sinofsky’s approach, he said, is meticulously planned out from the beginning, with a tight focus on meeting deadlines — a crucial objective after the delay-plagued Vista project — but with little room for flexibility. In contrast, the atmosphere inside Apple’s software engineering ranks has been much more improvisational.”

Response of Last.fm customers to acquisition by CBS shows importance of quick response

“I found it interesting that the comments were far more positive on Last.fm’s blog than on their forum. In the forum there was little presence from Last.fm staff (and even less from Last.fm’s founders), whereas on their blog the comments immediately followed a post (obviously) in which Last.fm founder Richard Jones assured people that things would stay the same. Takeaway? Users have vivid imaginations, so keep them in the loop.”

Fast Company: iPhone is not the next iPod

“The question is how many people desire these kinds of features; are there enough to propel the iPhone to the top of the heap? I kind of doubt it…Many users continue to prefer stand alone devices that perform their designated function as simply and effectively as possible, others may simply shy away from the idea of having one master device that could get lost or broken.”

Jitterbug phone sells technology to technophobes

“The configuration and programming of the phone is handled entirely through a Web-based interface and transmitted to the phone automatically. The Web interface even offers an option to do the unthinkable: disable a feature entirely. Turn it off on the Web, and the feature simply disappears from the phone. ‘We don’t want them to see a screen that they don’t want,’ Harris says. ‘If all the customer wants is the phone list—no call history, no voicemail—that’s all they see.’”

Nature colors

Butterfly-inspired color palettes with codes.

NPR’s “Fresh Air&” 20 year anniversary show

“To celebrate, our producers have picked memorable moments from the past 20 years that they want to play back for you…Plus, our producers tell you some of the stories behind the stories — how they found guests, why some interviewees are tougher to book than others, and in some cases, what happened after our interviews were broadcast.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/453-sunspots-the-freedom-edition

A note on heart by Hillman Curtis:

I once gave a talk called “Putting Your Heart into Design” at a design school in Connecticut, and one of the students asked me what advice I had for people who, just starting out, will no doubt be doing the same things all the time, just churning out banner ads — or like me, when I started at Macromedia years ago, building executive presentations over and over. “How do you put your heart into that?” he asked.

I told him about my first year at Macromedia, about the corporate presentations that consisted mainly of bullet points, pie graphs, and dull charts. I told him that I decided to focus on the exactitude of each design, and made each pixel as perfect as I could. I got deep into exploring the Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann and grids. I focused on typography and consistency in design. And through all of the repetition I became aware of the power of restraint and simplicity. On the few occasions that I incorporated motion, I was always very conservative and moved elements in ways that reflected the theme of the presentation. They were not simply gratuitous.

I came to believe that even though a viewer might not be able to point to the screen and indicate exactly where an element had move two pixels from page to page in a presentation or Web site, he or she could sense it, and too many of those mistakes could leave the viewer with a feeling of imbalance. I explained all of this to the student. When I was finished he replied, “So, rather than just taking on jobs you can put your heart into, you should find a way to put your heart into everything you do.” Which was a wonderful way to put it.

From Curtis’ book Creating Short Films for the Web.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/452-how-do-you-put-your-heart-into-that

A little over a year ago, we published an editorial entitled Google Web Toolkit: The correct level of abstraction? In it, Dion raised some important questions about GWT:

* Isn’t debugging generated Javascript going to be messy?
* Wouldn’t the large size of the generated Javascript make it’s use infeasible?
* Where is all of the cool stuff, like effects libraries, etc.?
* Is generating “assembler” in Javascript really the right level of abstraction?

Now that a year has passed and people have had a chance to experiment and develop with GWT, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit these questions. I interviewed GWT practitioners Dr. Adam Tacy and Robert Hanson, who — aside from working on commercial projects featuring GWT — have just finish their first book on the subject, GWT in Action: Easy Ajax with the Google Web Toolkit. They were kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

Q: Has debugging with GWT been a nightmare akin to the early C++ compilers (or RJS), or has hosted mode solved most of those problems?

Debugging GWT code is as easy as debugging any other Java application. Just open up the Eclipse IDE, and launch the application in debug mode - the key is to really harness the power of the Java IDE and tooling to ease debugging. There may be some quirks here and there, but in general it is a very pleasant experience.

An issue that is sometimes raised by newcomers to the tool is the lack of a “debug window” component for the JavaScript (think of YahooGUI widgets, etc.) - but that basically misses the point of GWT where 99% of debugging can be applied to application logic in your Java IDE. If you want to hang onto the “printf/println” style of debugging, then in hosted mode it is possible to log to the hosted mode console. For client side code, GWT could be improved to allow for Log4J style log levels. But why would you do this in general when you have access to the powerful debugger in your IDE?

Once you get out of the hosted browser and deploy the project to your site, if there is still a need for debugging you can use the same debugging techniques as you would with any other JavaScript application. Some of our favorite tools include Web Developer and Firebug, two add-ons for Firefox.

One of the initial complaints from JavaScript developers was that the JavaScript code generated by the GWT compiler is obfuscated, and impossible to debug. To quote the Ajaxian story from a year ago, “I can’t imagine how scary it will be to have a JavaScript error show up in a browser talking about line 2123 which has “a[b] = push(c)” in it”. The author of that piece missed the rest of the story.

On the few occasions that you have an error that can’t be debugged from the Java IDE, GWT gives you the ability to alter the output of the GWT compiler. You can select from two levels of verbosity (”pretty” and “detailed”) that will emit JavaScript code that can easily be mapped back to the Java source. Once you have your “pretty” or “detailed” JavaScript, you can easily insert debugger commands to be picked up by a JavaScript debugger. You could use this verbose version of the JavaScript code when you deploy your application to production, but it is usually desirable to use the default mode of the GWT compiler, which is to compress the code as much as possible.

At another level, GWT has a powerful concept called Generators, which effectively auto-generates code for you (GWT itself uses them for its RPC, i18n, and JUnit integration approaches). Generators do get a hook into Log4J style log levels, and when running hosted mode or compiling for web mode you can follow the compiler decisions that led to the generation of code you are using - this leads to an easy way of debugging that, for example, could detect that GWT hasn’t picked up the latest locale you added.

We have never had any problems debugging a GWT application - and don’t forget, unless you are trying to do something really at the edge of the underlying technology (DOM, HTML and JavaScript), using GWT lets you concentrate on debugging your application logic rather than on browser differences.

The other benefit of GWT is of course the use of a strongly typed language - which reduces the probability of introducing errors in the first place. In our development experience so far, there has only been one occasion where we’ve had to drop down to JavaScript debugging - and that was really to understand what Opera was doing under one particular circumstance with the underlying DOM!

More…

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/gwt-a-year-later-was-it-the-correct-level-of-abstraction

Ian Hickson has written up a strong opinion titled The CSS working group is irrelevant.

Ian details his frustration with the progression of CSS, and how in some ways it mirrors the HTML issues.

HTML 5 was driven by real world usage, and the next CSS should be similar. How much time do you spend writing your Ajax applications, where you are tweaking CSS for browser issues. I know it is a bane in my world. Layouts are very painful indeed.

It is hard to really learn CSS right. It is too tempting to tweak a padding here…. add a _margin: there, until it looks good enough. This is a really Bad Thing ™ as it means that you aren’t working out the core issue, so you can’t learn about it. We need help.

The CSS specs show their age; they come from a time where specifications were much vaguer than those of the modern day. Someone really needs to do to CSS what the WHATWG has been doing to HTML, defining everything in detail, explicitly, with strict and clear normative conformance criteria, taking implementations into account, defining things like quirks mode. (The WHATWG community refers to such a hypothetical project as “CSS 5″, as a reference to the way the current WHATWG specs define HTML5, XHTML5, and DOM5 HTML.)

Of course, we have had CSS 3 for ages, and hardly anyone implements it. How do we get the browser vendors to pony up to support these things?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-css-working-group-is-irrelevant