Ajax Girl

Firefox has been downloaded 400 million times in the three years since v 1.0 launched. It’s been roughly doubling every year. After six months they had 50 million downloads. 100 million after a year, and 200 million after two years.

There are 120 million or so regular Firefox users.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/153654636/

We’ve been writing software at 37signals since 2004. About a year later I bought a new place that came with a little backyard garden. Over the past few years I’ve seen patterns in curious places. Growing plants and building software have a lot more in common than I ever thought.

Plant spurts

When you have a garden one of the things you start to notice are the seasons. I mean really notice the seasons—and micro seasons. Instead of winter, spring, summer, and fall, you notice hibernation, sprouting, prolific growth, rest, growth, rest, flowering, rest, reproduction, transformation, rest, hibernation, etc. If you watch closely you can tell when it’s working on its roots or its flowers or its leaves. If you watch closer you can tell if it’s passive, aggressive, stubborn, clever (vines are really clever), etc.

Software spurts

It recently dawned on me that software grows much in the same way that plants grow. New features are the flowers of the software world. And just as most plants aren’t flowering all year long, software isn’t sprouting features all year long. There’s flowering season. There’s new feature season. There’s infrastructure season.

Sometimes software is working on its roots. Bolstering its infrastructure. It’s growing underground where the public can’t see it. It looks like nothing’s happening, but there’s really a lot going on. Without those roots new features can’t sprout.

And sometimes it’s rest time. Plants rest in the winter. Software often rests in the summer (it’s too nice to work too hard in the summer). Everything can benefit from a deep breath, relaxation, and sleep. Chaotic constant growth and change doesn’t make room for order and organization. Growth requires new energy and new energy requires rest.

Cycles

It’s the downtimes that make you appreciate the uptimes. Winter gives way to spring which leads into summer. When you start to see shoots, new leaves, and nascent blooms you start looking forward to bigger flowers, more growth, wider coverage.

When software’s been resting for awhile, and something new blooms, you look forward to more updates. Development season takes hold, attention gathers, and things start happening. This week there’s improved search, next week there’s a brand new feature, and next week there’s something great that’s entirely unexpected. Software gains momentum and change rolls into more change.

Then the whole cycle begins again.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/591-brainstorm-the-software-garden

Bill Scott of Yahoo! showed us an early version of Protoscript at The Ajax Experience. He got some good feedback, and has just announced the first version.

What is Protoscript?

Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web. With Protoscript it’s easy to bring interface elements to life. Simply connect them to behaviors and events to create complex interactions.

It is a way to take an existing web page or a prototype of a web page and “sprinkle” rich behaviors to play with concepts. Ideally you should be able to express an interaction in a declarative manner without having to write JavaScript directly (but not kept from it if you need to). And even more ideally you should be able to build up the “legos” of interaction in simple GUI tool embedded in the browser so that you are not encumbered with even a simple syntax to type in.

Note, this has nothing to do with Prototype the library, or prototype the OO system that JavaScript uses. Gotta love overloading of terms!

The heart of this all is a JSON based DSL for declaring behaviour.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

a) Define behaviour on an id=”avatar” image to make it fade and close out.

b) Load in some content when the area is clicked

c) Use a Popup when clicking on an image, and fade in another image in that popup

Bill has done a great job in thoroughly documenting the tool, and providing simple demos to get across how it works.

Since the DSL is so simple, it is ripe for plugging in any JavaScript framework (currently YUI is used, with jQuery for CSS selection), and for tools, such as the bookmarklet that lets you “boot up” Protoscript in any page.

And of course, here is a little walkthrough (see if you can see the error in the docs!)

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153472771/protoscript-prototype-web-apps-with-a-json-dsl

One of the hardest concepts to grasp in CSS is how to float elements. In order to create a good layout you need to understand this concept in order to know how your elements will be handled within the flow of your page.

The team at Max Design have created an excellent tutorial, aptly called the Floatutorial, which provides a step-by-step explanation of how floating works.

Floatutorial takes you through the basics of floating elements such as images, drop caps, next and back buttons, image galleries, inline lists and multi-column layouts.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153467135/ajaxian-featured-tutorial-understanding-css-floating

We covered the Ajax upgrade to Google Book Search, and it just got a nice new feature.

You can now share clippings from public domain books.

All you have to do is click on the new clipping icon, and select the area you wish to clip:

At this point you can choose whether you just want text from the snippet, or an image. Then you have simple embed code that will suck in your choice.

Very simple and clean.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153448787/google-book-search-now-with-clipping

The Prototype framework continues to be a popular solution for client-side development and with the renewed development efforts by the Prototype team, looks stronger than ever.

In this example-oriented tutorial, Juriy Zaytsev, who authored the very popular Context Menu plugin for Prototype, discusses how to use Element.addMethods method of Prototype to extend DOM elements with custom methods and allow chaining:

As an example, here’s a little helper, that I use quite often to display notifications (usually when form verification fails). We will update element with content, make it appear, wait couple of seconds and fade it out.

Note: The following example uses prototype version 1.6.0_rc0 and requires Scriptaculous’ effects module:

Element.addMethods({
flash: function(element, content) {
element = $(element);
new Effect.Appear(element, {
beforeStart: function() {
element.update(content);
},
afterFinish: function() {
Effect.Appear(element, {to: 0, delay: 3,
afterFinish: function(){
element.hide().setOpacity(1);
}})
}
})
return element;
}
})

Now we can simply do:

$(’errorBox’).flash(’login field should not be empty’);

The full tutorial can be found here.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153448790/ajaxian-featured-tutorial-extending-dom-elements-prototypes

Alex is on a roll (just call him butter!) and has written about the state of browser WYSIWYG editing:

The state of in-browser WYSIWYG is somewhere between pitiful and mind-numbingly painful. Opera and Safari have pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and soon all the major browsers will be at the same level of awful, more or less. This area of DHTML doesn’t get much love from browser vendors in part because only the heartiest souls ever venture into these deep, shark-infested waters so there aren’t many people clamoring for fixes to the underlying capabilities. Everyone sane just picks up the Dojo Editor, TinyMCE, or one of the other good editing packages that are available.

Since watching Abe Fettig talk about his experience building a cross browser editor in Dojo, I have stayed away with a ten foot poll. Everyone is broken.

Alex has a set of APIs he would like to see:

Since it’s not really reasonable to expect that browsers will remove contentEditable, here are my proposed APi additions to it which would allow any sane editing UI to ditch the entire command structure which can slowly fade into the background over time.

• editableElement.openUndoTransaction(callbackHandler): starts an undo transaction, implicitly closing any previously opened transactions. All subsequent DOM manipulation to elements which are children of this element will be considered part of the transaction and normal browser-delimited undo transaction creation is suspended until the transaction is closed. The optional callback handler is fired when the user cycles back this far in the undo stack from some future state.
• editableElement.closeUndoTransaction(): ends a manual undo transaction. Implicitly called by openUndoTransaction. Closing the transaction has the effect of pushing the current DOM state (or whatever differential representation the browser may use internally) onto the browser’s undo stack for this editable element. When an undo transaction is closed, browsers may resume automated generation of undo states on the stack intermingled with the manually added states.
• Support for non-standard DOM positioning properties of range objects as outlined in MSDN

These APIs added to elements with contentEditable set will allow us to use regular-old DOM methods of manipulating user selections and adding complex content from user input without fighting for control of the undo stack or inventing our own (which has so many problems that I don’t want to begin to address them). Additionally, this method of manipulation will allow toolkit authors to deliver editors which operate on the semantics of the markup more easily.

Robbert Broersma of Xopus already commented that “developing a WYSIWYG editor in-browser will eventually not involve contenteditable anymore”. Somehow I don’t see the browser vendors stepping up? :/

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153442780/on-browser-wysiwyg

Mika Tuupola took inspiration from the YUI ImageLoader and created a lazy load plugin for jQuery.

You can see the difference in action by comparing the lazy page to the “normal” agressive image downloader page.

To use the library, after script src’ing it you can simply:

Or you can tweak it via options such as setting a placeholder image, and an event.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153438140/lazy-load-plugin-for-jquery

Remy Sharp has ported his Microformats Bookmarklet to IE. The bookmarklet scans the page for microformats and allows the user to download individual items.

For some good microformat reading:

1. Part I - Traditional HTML Semantics
2. Part II - Standardizing Vocabularies
3. Part III - Directions in HTML Semantics

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/153402094/ie-microformats-bookmarklet

The winners of Seedcamp, the new incubator-style event for European startups, have been announced. In an extraordinary decision the 36 judges (made up of Seedcamp investors including nine of Europe’s top VCs, mentors and Seedcamp board) have decided to fund not five but six of the companies out of the original 20. They are (in no particular order):

“Project Playfair”

Currently still in development, Project Playfair - coming out of Scotland in the UK - is about “hypernumbers”. What hypertext did to text, they want to do to numbers. It’s a bold and fascinating idea, one applicatoin of which could be collaborative spreadsheet working were each cell talks to another cell on another spreadsheet held elsewhere. Chair of the judges and Seedcamp founder, Saul Klein said: “This team had a had a night and day improvement from Monday to Thursday. Its almost a classic seed investment. It’s a massive leap of faith, but you have got to want to encourage people who want to do for numbers what happened to text. It’s Excel 2.0. This is an extremely technical team who have solved tough technical issues in their space.”

Zemanta

Zemanta (from Slovenia)has created a ‘content intelligence’ platform to automatically enhance content, making it web-ready. The upshot? Paste in some text and Zemanta looks at it and then start to add the most likely links to the text, which you can then edit (something a lot of bloggers would kill for no doubt). This kin of application exists a lot in academic and enterprise content management systems but hasn’t appeared on the Web very much to date as the tend to be very CPU/resource intense technologies. It’s a web service API not unlike Akismet in its ability to look intelligent at content and decide what to do with it. Saul Klein said: “We loved the founders, these are passionate, smart guys. They have even got a working application and a customer (albiet in Slovenia, where they are based). This is a great value proposition for publishers. And how many bloggers would like this tool. We also liked the fact that they were coming out of Slovenia [where Seedcamp had lot of applications] and Seedcamp really is about getting to all corners of Europe.”

Kublax (site in development, but it has a working application)

Kublax syncs with all your bank accounts, utilities, even loyalty schemes like Air Miles and presents all the information in a user friendly format so that you an track you incoming and outgoings and start to really analysis your personal finances. All the key information (log-ins etc) stays on the desktop in hyper-encypted files. It also create a social network around your personal finances where key information is not revealed but the “crowd” can source intelligence on investments, savings accounts, mortgages, you name it. Saul Klein said: “The consumer proposition is killer. I would love to see with one click all my spending information in one place and visually graphed. We have not had a desktop publishing revolution in the personal finance space. Now personal finace handling doesn’t have to be a desktop application but live and networked. You can even benchmark your spending habits against other people. Sites like Mint are venture backed in the US but this business is very local and can be integrated with local markets. Even though there is a US model the US sites have not been out long. The team has done a lot with nothing. Plus, they are Open Coffee alumni who have really gone all out to get into the entrepreneurial space.”
Tablefinder

Coming out of Sweden Tablefinders’ mission is to aggregate the world’s online bookable restaurants. It’s a marketing platforms for restaurants, but more than that. Normally restaurants use one of two global booking systems, Open Table or Live bookings. Tablefinder will aggregate those systems, allowing them to compete on the level playing field. The payment goes from the restauremtn to one of the systems and Tablefinder is a partner, so making an unspecified commission on the restaurant booking. Funding to date has been via a small VC in Sweden. The aim is to partner with LiveBookings and OpenTable, so expect an announcement on this soon. Eventually restaurants could place bids for table bookings in a similar way as you can bid for Google Adwords and even - eventually - creating a sort of Last.FM style network which learns your preferences for restaurants. Saul Klein said, “They mad a massive improvement over the week. They started off as not a standout idea. But now it’s a search engine and booking engine. We really like the entrepreneurs, they are very focused and passionate. When they weren’t pitching to us they weren’t sightseeing in London - they had a business meeting instead. They had local funding in Sweden but decided that the investment of 50,000 Euro for the 10% was worth is for the Seedcamp experience. Scandinavian entrepreneurs tend to think big, are ambitious and serious, but not arrogant. They are cut form the same cloth as the Skype founders, it’s an amazing zone of innovation.”

Buildersite

Buildersite is designed to be a web-marketplace for construction services providing homeowners and tradesmen with a trusted venue for transacting business. The domestic construction market in the Uk is worth £10bn. Competitor sites tend to be about lead generation but Buildersite instead charges a success fee which is 5% of the project fee. This means the whole service can be free to the homeowner, and it can track bad builders and bar them from the system. Buildersite launched in mid-2006 and now has 3,000 tradesmen on the site. Saul Klein said: “This is a superb proposition, brilliantly communicated. The founder, Ryan Notz, has domain expertise having been a builder himself. It’s a solid idea. This is a market where when you are told how big the market is you say I can’t believe it’s that big. And it’s hard to believe how big just the addressable market is. He presented the business well and has already signed a lot of tradesmen. He’s a brilliant bootstrap entrepreneur and is also one of those who has taken advantage of Open Coffee meetings.”

Rentmineonline

This site connects owners and renters, through an online market place providing goods for the renter and capital for the owner. The idea resembles eBay but instead of purchasing, the model is based on renting. Saul Klein said: “Ed Spiegel, the founder, started his first business at university. He went from there to Silicon Valley to be in business development which shows his tenacity. He went form Silicon Valley to be a senior associate in venture funds. He’s seen startups from the inside as an investor and employee. He’s been doing all this so he could do his own thing. He left, went to business school and used his time to find the right software firm in Bulgaria. He moved to Amsterdam to set up the business and bought a boat to run it from. He launched his site this week based on the advice here at Seedcamp. Although it’s a proposition that some might describe as ‘Web 1.0′ we’ve all seen that there have been business opportunities that tried to launch in the late 90s but the market wasn’t there. But if you get the timing right it can really take off. Ed is tapping into trust networks and by integrating with Facebook he has a trust network of 37m ppeople. He’s tapping into a big trend. This notion that it has to be a novel idea is nonsense, it’s the right idea at the right time with the right people.”

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/~3/153382152/