Ajax Girl

Google Blogscoped points to a Google video created by a Google employee (now private) that shows the Gdrive Platypus icon overlaid with the lyrics, “I’ve been ready to launch my product since 2002 … At least round here 5 years ain’t so long overdue.”

Philipp Lenssen suggests that perhaps Google’s online storage solution might have been canceled, but not surprisingly no one at Mountain View is confirming a thing. It does raise the rather valid question: What ever happened to GDrive?

Our GDrive coverage goes back 18 months with Google including references to “Google Drive,” “a place for users to store 100% of their data online” in a company presentation. In April 2006 there was speculation that Microsoft would launch Live Drive prior to GDrive. In October 2006 there was a confirmed GDrive client being used by Google employees. Ten months later and there is nothing.

What is perhaps stranger in a market sense is Google’s continuing slide from being the market leader in online storage to becoming a potential minnow. Google set the standard with the then unprecedented 2gb storage for online mail with Gmail. Today Google’s 2-3 gb of storage sees it lag behind Microsoft who recently announced 5gb for Hotmail, and Yahoo and AOL who provide unlimited email storage. Microsoft has already launched its online storage solution and startups such as Omnidrive continue to grow market share in the non-email based online storage space.

So is the GDrive more endangered than the Platypus it uses for its logo? If you’re a Google employee and would like to set the record straight on or off the record drop us a line.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/145955323/

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/145791601/

Vancouver based MyProgress offers a service that provides progress monitoring features (generally used in computer role playing games) for life tracking.

MyProgress allows users to track their personal finances, skills, “knowledges”, wealth and health dynamics.

The site tracks every piece of information users enter, from a new purchase, capital gains, an hour of photographic or driving experience, or a rental price change, and provides a detailed overview on how fast they are progressing in comparison with the others across multiple categories, such as age, occupation, and location. The service provides analytics about user’s life and build forecasts based on past data.

MyProgress is billed as the world’s first online application “designed to helping an individual [not a corporate] manage their progress and read their life log as an RSS feed.”

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/~3/145712796/

We have all been frustrated with CSS over the years. The implementation has been spotty across the browsers, and it has all but died off. IE 7 stepped up and fixed a lot, even if some weren’t happy with how far they got. CSS 3 has been out there for quite some time, but apart from Opera, other browsers have selectively implemented their pet features. Some have done interesting non-standard work too: -mypetfeature-foo-bar.

Today, I was sitting at BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, participating in a session on CSS futures. I got to see the doppelganger effects of CSS in action:

Random Features

How do new CSS features get into the browser? Do engineers throw in what seems cool to them? Is it based on input from some small part of the community? I have heard quite a few “yeah, this is just cool so I want to implement it for v.NEXT” comments.

The micro-picture

People get in the weeds on tiny little features to implement. We see subtle tweaks, and little features that are nice to have but they miss the elephant in the room….

Undercover Elephant

CSS is great for simple web style. CSS is awful for layout. Rich Ajax apps need layout. You spend the majority of your time trying to get CSS working correctly!

There are various people starting to fix the problem. Hell, you can even use ascii art for layout.

It isn’t like there aren’t good examples of how this can work. Just take a look at XUL, XAML, and Flex.

It is time to create a CSS module for layout that works. Take the best of those above, and make it happen. You only have to work with simple examples to see how hard it is to get things right with current CSS, let alone looking at the code behind something like Gmail, that has to rely on subtle bugs to even work.

It sounds like CSS 3 as The Big Unit is basically dead, and small modules are the way forward. We should see good support for CSS 3 selectors, media queries, and who knows what else. Hopefully that new layout manager!

What would you like to see?

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/145702882/the-future-of-css-and-the-end-of-30