Ajax Girl

Yahoo Design Week started today. The week brings a handful of young design students to Yahoo’s corporate campus to show off their final projects to a crowd of press and employees. The students are from a variety of backgrounds and geographies, some coming from as far away as the Indian Institute of Technology and the Academy of Media Arts in Germany.

Joy Mountford has been running design weeks at various companies for the past 18 years. This week, she’s running Yahoo’s Design Week as the Vice President of User Experience Design and Design Innovation Group. She runs the programs to help spark new ideas around human-computer interaction and strengthen their ties with up and coming designers. Like HackDay, Design Week is tied closely with the Brickhouse group, the idea incubator Yahoo launched earlier this year.

Over many years of running the program Joy has noticed one great theme: the convergence of design and engineering. The first projects often needed a team of designers and programmers to bring the idea from design to implementation. Even still, they didn’t always match up with the originally conceived idea. But programming is becoming easier. Most of the teams now consist only of one or two members using a visual programming language out of MIT called Processing.

We’ve seen this trend in spades on the net, from single installation development platforms to the latest easy-as-pie mashup applications. New tools are empowering users and designers to fix problems they used to have to seek specialized programmers to solve.

The projects ranged from the practical to the perplexing. Here’s a roundup of some of the more entertaining projects at the event:

Cube Browser

CubeBrowsers is a photo cube and Flickr mashup controlled by a real cube.

By rotating a physical white cube you control the photos displayed on the virtual photo cube. Shaking the cube vigorously populates the sides of the cube with Flickr photos from a random tag.

Rotating left or right moves forward and backward through the set. Rotating up changes to a new set on a related tag. Rotating down goes back in the history.

Whisper

Whisper was the most intriguing project at the exhibit. It featured spartan garden of 9 Callie lilies on a white slab. If you moved close enough to put your ear to the flower you could hear a woman moaning. Literally - they play the sound of a woman moaning sexually through the flowers.

Think Georgia O’Keeffe 2.0.

The lillies carried the sounds from speakers placed under each flower below the surface. This was one of three installations UCLA grad student Jay Yan had made.

StreetStory

StreetStory was spawned from another HackDay project PlacesToDo. PlacesToDo let you catalog interesting places by emailing them to the website from your mobile phone. Then, while your out, you could SMS the service for interesting places suggested by you or your friends within a five block radius of your current location.

StreetStory was a reaction to people’s reluctance or confusion over emailing the service. The new service allowed anyone to call in their thoughts about an area tagged by zipcode. Anyone can retrieve these messages by calling the service or visiting the website. Like every other mobile application, they have plans for an iPhone version that will take advantage of the phone’s heavy web integration.

In the future, the site could easily become a real-time reviews service where people could call in their complaints or compliments about any movie or restaurant they just finished with.

Experimental Devices for Performance

Andrew Schneider started as a street performer before going to design school at NYU and it shows. His project was an array of 5 types of sensors attached to his body. The sensors picked up movements he can use to cue music and visualizations on a laptop. A jut of the elbo would shoot off a record scratch. A twist of the wrist could set off a movie on the monitor. Another gadget is a pair of face masks with lcd screens that can trade lips with each other (pictured right).

The highlight was a pair of shoes he could use to control the tempo of accompanying music by lifting or dropping his heels. They’re the perfect moon walk accessory.

Andrew uses the accessories in his NY street performances.

MegaPhone

Mobile games are big business, but have traditionally been confined to the phones they’re stored on. MegaPhone is a download free game where players compete on a projection screen by calling in and manipulating their spaceship through shouting and keypad. The keypad controls the movement of the spaceship while yelling causes it to fire.

There are also a few other existing games. There are trivia and shooting games that just require the keypad, while a taxi and noisy noisy hippo game respond to your shouting.

The service seems perfect respite for people cuing up in large public areas like movie theaters or concert halls.

Identity Protection System (IDPS)

Privacy is becoming a hot button issue, with the heat lamp currently shining on search engines. IDPS goes after another rapidly growing encroachment on personal privacy, video broadcasting. Current technology requires editing out people who don’t want to show up on film. IDPS does this editing on the fly by blocking out the bodies of people wearing a specially colored green sticker.

The sticker, or any other unique feature spotted by computer vision, could be placed on shirts and jewelry, opting the wearer out of being filmed.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/136716218/

I just noticed something really useful on the iPhone. If you click the Recents option in the Phone app you’ll see a list of recent outgoing, incoming, and missed calls. If you don’t recognize a number, tap the little blue arrow to go to the info page for that number. Below the number you’ll see the physical location of the number based on the area code.

That’s just plain thoughtful! I just love stuff like that. The little details that make you go “Ah ha!”

I didn’t recognize a call from 574 so I tapped the arrow and found out it was from South Bend, IN.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/531-iphone-tells-you-where-someone-is-calling-from

We first wrote about Slideshare when it launched last October. It provides a useful service by allowing users to upload and share powerpoint presentations. Tomorrow they’ll announce a much-requested feature - synchronization of audio files with slides.

This is a great additional feature. We’ve had lots of requests to upload presentation decks to Slideshare after I’ve spoken at conferences. Now, if I can get my hands on a MP3 file of the talk itself, I can add that too.

An example is embedded above. More examples are here.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/136721129/

It seems like the only way for virtual mobile operators (MVNOs) to get any news today is by shutting down. Amp’d, the high-flying mobile operator, is powering down on July 24. Or to be more accurate, they are “potentially suspending US operations on July 24th.” I guess TechCrunch could be suspending U.S. operations on July 24, too, but we wouldn’t be posting that unless we thought it was pretty certain to be happening. The company has been going through bankruptcy but it was not certain they would be shutting down until now.

Meanwhile competitor Helio, which entered the market at about the same time as Amp’d, keeps on surging. Last week they announced that they reached 100,000 customers and have ARPU (average revenue per user) of $100 - way above the average for mobile startups.

A lot of Helio’s success can be attributed to their new Ocean, a killer dual-slider phone. I actually considered using the Ocean over the iPhone because it has a keyboard and great instant messaging support, but it doesn’t sync with Macs.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/136671837/

HP has acquired IT Automation company Opsware for $1.6 billion.

Whilst any acquisition of this size is interesting in itself, the back story to Opsware is even more so; Opsware was originally LoudCloud, a Web 1.0 company that took $350million in funding during the Web 1.0 boom. Marc Andreessen explains the story:

In September 1999, at the height of the dot com boom, a small group of colleagues and I started a new company, Loudcloud, based on the idea that the huge Internet infrastructure buildout then underway — by startups and big companies alike — required a new approach to running modern datacenters and computer systems at high scale: automation.

Loudcloud took off like a rocketship, raised $350 million in equity and debt financing, went public in March 2001, and was rapidly nearing $100 million in annual recurring managed services revenue when the entire market blew up and virtually all of our competitors and peers went bankrupt.

In September 2002, we did a complete restart as a public company — we sold our managed services business to EDS and turned Loudcloud into Opsware, a software company based on the core intellectual property developed at Loudcloud. Over the next five years, we executed on our original vision — automation of large-scale modern datacenters and computer systems — within this new model, and built a comprehensive family of state-of-the-art automation software products that power the full range of technologies you find in a modern datacenter, from servers and applications to networking and storage.

Opsware clients include Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Home Depot, GE, Microsoft, Samsung, Comcast, Tivo, and the US Department of Defense. The Sunnyvale based company has 550 employees and $100million in annual revenue.

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/~3/136667149/

Just like last year, we will be giving every attendee of our party this Friday a signed limited-edition lithograph created by Hugh MacLeod. Thanks Hugh! Here’s last year’s version. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next year.

The invite list is completely closed for the party at this point. The last 50 spots are reserved for TechCrunch20 attendees who are not yet on the list.

If you are currently on the attendee list and can’t make it, please let us know so we can add someone else.

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/~3/136652186/

One of the top Backpack requests has been the ability to move data between pages. The new Backpack makes that possible.

It’s a drag

So how do you move items between pages? You just drag the item to a page in the sidebar. Any “unit” can be moved — a list, a note, a photo gallery, a file, etc. The unit will be dropped at the top of the page.

Drag to make a new page too

Another twist is that you can drag an element to the “Make a new page” button to create a new page out of that content. It’s really handy.

Watch

Watch a quick video demo of the feature in action. Things are slower than they normally would be since we’re running in development mode, but at least you’ll get an idea of what to expect.

Coming soon

The new Backpack is coming soon. Thanks again for your patience and stay tuned for more previews and the launch announcement.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/529-backpack-preview-3-moving-items-to-different-pages

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

The latest chat is with three inventor/entrepreneurs:

Brian Crabtree of Monome (creators of the monome 40h).

David Rose, CEO of Ambient Devices (creators of the Ambient Orb and the Ambient Umbrella).

Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun Electronics.

Moderated by Matt (ML) and Jason (JF) from 37signals.

ML	for starters, explain to our audience what you guys do/make.
NS	SparkFun is a bit difficult to describe. We provide the widgets to the hardware world for creating prototypes. Before a new product is released to the consumer market, the company has to design the product. We product the parts to build the ‘mock up’. This spans hobbyists, research, and students. We see a lot of business from all markets.
NS	‘We sell the parts’ to build the mock up.
ML
NS	Ok That has nothing to do with a product prototype
NS	That was just for fun – to see if we could pull it off.
ML	ha, link up a better example.
NS	12 Channel Copernicus GPS Receiver
NS
ML	another fun one:
ML
ML	Picture Frame Tetris
NS	Actually, Tetris was really just an application of Brian’s work.
ML	what role do these “fun” ideas play in your company?
NS	We sell bits and pieces. Tetris was a demonstration of all these bits put together to do something interesting.
BC	monome is kelli cain and myself, we design adaptable hardware interfaces. our first device (called the 40h) is a grid of keypads with internal backlighting. the systems are decoupled, so it becomes a dynamic blank canvas. everything is open-source, community participation is highly encouraged, and we’re dedicated to domestic/sustainable production techniques.

BC
ML	video demo of monome
DR	Ambient Devices is a consumer product co
DR	that makes information displays where stocks, weather, traffic, etc. is rendered in Glanceable ways
NS	The orb is really cool. I’ve talked to a ton of people trying this application.
BC	how large is the orb?
DR	The orb is a grapefruit-sized frosted glass ball
DR	with 18LEDs inside so it can glow any color
DR	and a small wireless radio 929mHz
DR	we broadcast data over 8000 towers every 15 min
DR	to cover over 90% of US homes
NS	Holy smokes! Really? That’s pretty phenomenal.
BC
JF	The orb is battery powered? Rechargeable?
DR	we do have battery powered products, like the Ambient Umbrella
DR	but the Orb must be plugged in to power the LEDs
JF	Gotchya. I’m so enamored by the orb. Can’t wait to get one.
DR	It’s sold at Amazon, FYI
ML	How did y’all get started in your businesses? Did tinkering expand into a full fledged biz or was there more to it than that?
NS	Tinkering lead to a business opportunity, lead to a full fledged business. It was a long process, but my business in particular has adapted quite a bit over time.
BC	“full fledged” can be interpreted different ways. we’re still two people working out of our warehouse-loft space in philadelphia. we still do everything involved—electronics, programming, design, packaging, assembling, shipping, websites, etc.
NS	Brian -> Very true. There is a 100:1 ratio from people who are selling things on the internet and have a full time job doing something entirely different.
ML	what’s the 1 in that ratio?
NS	I would say the :1 is the person doing it as their sole source of income.
DR	I had been a frustrated interface designer for digital camera, phones, children toys
DR	I wanted to invent products that took advantage of web content + wireless networks to make simple internet objects.
DR	we raised money from Nicholas Negroponte who I knew from the Media Lab at MIT
ML	ah, he seems like a fascinating guy
DR	Nicholas is a good visionary, but when we STOPPED paying attention to his advice, we finally achieved a product hit with the Weather Watcher.
DR	We have around around 20 people now and $7m in revs
NS	Wow! That’s a lot of orbs. Is it primarily a subscription model?
DR	Nope. We licensed technology to LG and a handful of other Consumer Electronic companies
ML	more products from ambient: http://www.ambientdevices.com/cat/products.html
DR	LG baked 5-day forecasts into their high end fridge door
DR	And we’ve sold 100,000+ units of weather watchers through retailers
NS	Fridge: Wow! That’s a great application.
DR	I’m MORE fond of our new products that focus on helping commuters avoid jams
DR	or people stay on a medication program
DR	or encourage public transportation by helping people “trust the bus”
BC	i decided to manufacture a small run (200 units, eventually ran 200 more) of the grid device solely based people asking for one after seeing myself or a friend perform with a prototype. (the friend toured internationally, so quite a few people saw the device). the internet-induced viral spread of the first demo video really helped us get over the first financial hurdle (we self-funded the project).
DR	have you guys talked to thinkgeek.com?
BC	not us.
DR	they have been a good “early adopter” audience aggregator
ML	From Ambient site: “Current information interfaces are either interruptive or too detailed.”
ML	Monome site also mentions devotion to minimalistic design.
ML	What is it about minimalistic design that turns you on?
BC	it’s much more difficult to arrive at a proper minimalist interface than to include every feature… (not a new sentiment here)
NS	Very true
ML	What advice can you give to other designers when it comes to saying ‘no’?
BC	just say no?
BC	probably, start your own company, so can decide onr own.
DR	My advice: there will be many products that satisfy different people’s information needs at different times
DR	one product doesn’t need to answer all questions
DR	there will be a constellation of products and services that each offer different resolution of data

ML	other than your own stuff, what’s a hardware interface you love?
DR	iPhone pinching to resize
DR	Another hardware interface: I love dials and meters.
DR	They can be aesthetically amazing and so fast to read
BC	cheating, here’s the new design:
BC
DR	porsche timepiece
ML
BC	i’m particularly fond of nixie tubes
BC
DR
DR	Our Ambient Dashboard product was plagued by mechanical engineering issues. But I like the “digital meets analog” idea.
JF	I love those analog dials.
JF	Man, I have no idea what I’d do with them, but I love ‘em.
DR	Each meter shows some web-based content.

Coming soon: Part 2.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/526-fireside-chat-brian-crabtree-monome-david-rose-ambient-devices-and-nathan-seidle-spark-fun-electronics-part-1-of-2

I realise that I am just one person, but my experience with Dreamweaver has been:

• There was a time in the past that everyone used it
• A lot of designers still use it, but developers don’t
• Developers poo poo it.

That being said, I have heard some developers talk about Dreamweaver again. I then saw that Nitobi now has Dreamweaver extensions for their components so I thought I should put a survey up so we can all see what the community is up too!

Take Our Poll

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/136496764/dreamweaver-for-ajax-should-we-take-it-serious-again

Any time a hot technology comes along — and GWT is certainly white-hot — publishers compete in a mad scramble to get the first books out the door. Often quality suffers. I am happy to report that GWT in Action is a strong effort that doesn’t seem to suffer from this quality problem. (That isn’t to say there aren’t any errors and omissions in the book, just no obvious ones that I’ve found in my reading of it.) Instead, the book offers a solid, learn-by-example approach to understanding the Google Web Toolkit.

This learn-by-example approach, tied together through the development of a dashboard application over the course of several chapters, strikes, I think, the right balance for a broad audience. This is not the reference “bible” for GWT, though it does contain more reference material in one place than any other source so far, so you’ll have to wait for that sort of reference work. But for anyone wanting to get a jump start on GWT, start developing applications, and understand what all the fuss is about, I heartily recommend this book.

The book is organized into 17 chapters, split into four parts: Getting started; Building user interfaces; Advanced techniques; Completing the understanding. So, on to what’s in the book, chapter by chapter:

1. Introduces you to the central ideas of GWT: compiling Java in JavaScript and debugging in Java. Does a good job of touching on most of the features of GWT — widgets, internationalization, JRE emulation library, RPC, browser history, etc. — and illustrating them with code samples. Finishes off with a complete client-side (no RPC) tic-tac-toe example app.
2. Things slow down a bit here, as the authors delve into the organization of a GWT project and the details of the GWT development cycle. I’m torn on whether this chapter could have been illustrated more clearly with an example application, rather than just by enumerating the steps and components and diagrammatically illustrating the work-flow. The information that’s here is solid and correct, but the approach seems to conflict with the learn-by-example used so well in the rest of the book.
3. Begins the process of developing the Dashboard application — essentially a web desktop or portal with draggable component apps. It makes concrete the more abstract development life cycle notions of the previous chapter. At the end of this chapter you have a skeleton application with menus,
   a trash icon and some basic CSS styling, and you will have run it (and debugged in Eclipse for hosted mode) in
   both hosted and web mode. This chapter attempts to instill good behavior by adding i18n (”internationalization” with the 18 letters between the “i” and the “n” omitted) at the very beginning. That way if you leave it our of your apps, you have no one to blame but yourself. You’ll also have a good understanding of the major project files: the HTML file, the EntryPoint, and the module XML file.
4. The start of Part 2 of the book which introduces GWT “widgets” — in short, GUI components. Dissects their dual nature as Java objects and DOM elements and introduces the basic GWT widget set. Covers several common GUI and Web concepts, such as DOM events, focus, keypresses, etc. Shows two different ways of developing custom widgets — one from scratch by manipulating the DOM and the other, the PNGImage to support transparent PNG’s in IE6, by extending an existing widget class. Finishes off by building the first two custom widgets for the dashboard application, the TwoComponentMenuItem and the ToggleMenuItem. The full details of building the PNGImage class, using GWT’s technique of deferred binding to handle browser differences, is split between here and Chapter 15. Small nit: I think the concept is important enough to have merited a section of its own in this chapter or the other.
5. Presents the basic concepts of GWT panels — the containers that hold widgets and other panels. If you know Swing, this will all seem pretty familiar, in particular DeckPanel, FlowPanel and DockPanel should seem familiar. (It is interesting to note that in GWT, layout is specified through inheritance (Is A FlowPanel), while in Swing it is a pluggable behavior (layout manager).) Of course, remember to pay no attention to the HTML Table behind the curtain, at least not if you want your code to keep working when the implementation changes. The chapter finishes off by extending DialogBox to a DashboardPanel that can be used and manipulated in a multi-window interface (or MDI).
6. Focuses on Events, both Browser/DOM events and it’s custom Widget events. This is a long chapter (over 50 pages) and covers lots of territory. If you already know your way around Java and the various kinds of Listeners, you’ve won a quarter of the battle, but you may want to brush up on the browser side of the equations a little bit before reading it (see here, here and here). Not that the chapter doesn’t do a good job of presenting the material, but sometimes you need to have a firm grasp of one topic before combining it with another, and I think this is definitely one of those times. The chapter finishes off by implementing drag-and-drop for the Dashboard app, combining the widget knowledge from the previous two chapters with your new understanding of events.

more…

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/136486942/review-of-gwt-in-action