Ajax Girl

Happy New Year. I was tempted to post a top ten list of the best aggregators of top ten lists, but decided against it

I hope that 2008 finds everyone well, and the Web in a better place. In 2007, the Web development community has jumped a lot, but at the same time, hasn’t changed at all.

We have seen the browsers really kick into gear. Firefox 3 beta is looking surprisingly fast and good. WebKit has taken the browser world by storm from the stand point of so many companies hacking away on it. From Adobe AIR, to Android, to Nokia, and beyond. Opera gives us a good experience on the Wii.

And IE…. they have a name for the next browser, and showed a smiley face with the promise of good CSS.

The major libraries are all pretty solid, and the core features are all matched. It is hard to go wrong with your choice now if you keep to the main track. We had the promise of more tools, and Aptana has stepped up a little as well as others. In 2008, we should be seeing many more projects coming out of stealth mode. This is so needed as it is still too hard to develop web applications. For tonight, it is time to hope. Tomorrow, we try to make it happen.

Cheers to all. Here is the roundup:

Browser

• IE 8 now doesn’t trip on Acid
• IE.Next has a new name…. IE8
• IE 7: One year later, and no infomation on 8
• Silverlight Tech Talk from TAE
• Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency
• window.createPopup leaks 80KB in IE 7
• Opera sues Microsoft of standards compliance
• Mozilla Weave: More servers for your browser
• JScript 5.7: Fixing IE6
• WebKit gets native getElementsByClassName
• Fluid puts hat in the “Site Specific Browser” ring

JavaScript

• Evolutionary Programming and Gradual Typing in ECMAScript 4
• Really Simple History 0.6 Released!
• Nintendo ES Operating System on JavaScript
• Upcoming Changes to the JavaScript Language
• Use the Google Chart API to create charts for your web applications
• Making sure you get new instances in JavaScript
• Ajax Cross Domain Script
• Sucking in Dojo, YUI, or jQuery into any page
• Bindows 4: Clocks, Faces, and more.
• State of ECMAScript Implementations
• Dean Edwards releases base2 and base2.DOM beta
• Organise Your Code With base2.Packages
• JavaScript Benchmarks
• Er.js: Erlang-in-JavaScript
• Untold JavaScript Secrets
• 3D-style animation in JavaScript
• Working aroung the instanceof memory leak
• DOMAssistant 2.5 released - Making a run at the the major JavaScript libraries
• WireIt: Yahoo! Pipes Canvas Wiring API

Prototype

• NASA Relaunches 5.0 with Prototype and Script.aculo.us
• Packing Down Prototype

Ext

• ChartMaker: Ext 2 UI on top of the Google Chart API
• Ext 2.0 Final Released
• Ext.CFC: Easing Integration with Ext and Adobe ColdFusion

YUI

• YUI 2.4.0 Released

jQuery

• jQuery Glider Component
• Unobtrusively Mapping Microformats with jQuery
• Plotting in jQuery

Microsoft

• Silverlight 1.^H^H2.0: Controls are here
• Microsoft Labs Volta: .NET Web Toolkit

DWR

• DWR State of the Union
• DWR joins the Dojo Foundation - Joe Walker joins SitePen

Editorial

• Flash “Ajax” Update: Flex LiveCycle Data Services Goes Open-Source
• The problem with innerHTML
• Ajax Survey III
• 2007 Ajax Tools Usage Survey Results
• Adobe AMF and Flash Media Server
• Taking a peak at HTML 5
• OpenSocial Container Checker: IGCheck
• AppJet: Develop, Preview, Deploy all on the Web
• Wii Opera SDK
• Comparing the evolution of Java and JavaScript
• 3D Panorama in JavaScript
• Alex Russell is trying to save us
• Ajatus: Distributed CMS using CouchDB
• Facebook improves Ajax support with FBJS LocalProxy
• Interview with Ben and Stephan on Parleys.com
• Interviewed on GWT, Gears, Java, and JavaScript

Security

• Cross Site Scripting Joy: XSS in detail
• Filtering JavaScript From HTML Content with AntiSammy

Performance

• High Performance Ajax Applications
• YSlow 0.9 Release: Grokking XHR and more

Showcase

• Remember, the Milk has spilled on your Gmail
• WriteMaps.com: A tool for website planning
• Applebox: iTunes in Serverless Ajax

GWT

• JSTM: Java Shared Transacted Memory for GWT
• GWT Can Do Spinners?
• GWT Conference: Voices That Matter Summary
• GWT Voices: Cross browser sound API
• GWT and Volta

Comet

• Django and Comet
• Comet. Not as painful as you think!
• The Future of Comet: Part 1, Comet Today

CSS

• CSS Text Wrap: Squeeze that text around any line
• Canvas Bevel Script
• Infamous IE hasLayout is toast
• W3C CSS Grid Positioning

iPhone

• iPhone window.onorientationchange Code
• Unique Skins for the iPhone, Wii, and more… all with Ajax and Flex

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/209281787/ajaxian-roundup-for-december-2007-its-the-end-of-the-year-as-we-know-it

A new piece of software by Pointui launched this afternoon that makes Windows Mobile devices a little bit more iPhone-like.

The CrunchGear team isn’t answering emails or phone calls (It’s their job to test this stuff, but I imagine they are all drinking heavily somewhere celebrating the New Year), and I don’t have a Windows Mobile device in my house (they’ve been banned), so we haven’t tested it out yet. See the video below and screen shots, and if you are able to get it up and running, let us know what you think.

Why in the world all you people on Windows devices don’t just go out and buy an iPhone is a mystery to me. Yeah, Exchange Server and all that, I know. Anyway, perhaps now with Pointui you can be a little bit more like the cool kids and still sync with Outlook from the office.

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/~3/209178918/

If there is one thing I noticed this past year, it is that companies seem to be tripping over themselves more than ever before to claim the mantle of openness. Openness is now a marketing mantra. Facebook kicked things off in May by opening up its social network to outside developers through a comprehensive set of APIs. Google responded by trying to “out open” Facebook with the launch of its own platform for social networking apps, OpenSocial (which was more open than Facebook’s APIs, but still not open enough for some people). Google also introduced its open-source mobile operating system, Android, which prompted even old-school, closed-network mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T to play the open card. And in the face of the success of open-source blogging software Wordpress, Six Apart finally made its rival Moveable Type open source as well. These are just a few examples.

Building a product or service on top of open standards is held as one of the highest virtues in technology. It is certainly one of the easiest ways for a company to score points with consumers, developers, or other companies. And for good reason. The Internet, after all, is built on open standards. Open-source technologies such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and others have lowered the cost to start a Web company.

More importantly, open standards (whether or not they are technically open-source) are inherently more attractive to work with for startups and other companies. The best way to build a technology platform is to make it as open as possible so that the risk of proprietary lock-in is taken off the table for other contributors.  Also, compatibility can be baked right in. On the Web, everything needs to be compatible, which is one of the main drivers behind the widespread adoption of open standards. It is no coincidence that we are beginning to see a bigger push for openness in mobile networks as we start to use our phones more and more as Web devices.

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. For all the fascination with the iPhone, for instance, one of the big knocks against Apple is that it is taking its traditional closed, controlling approach when it comes to opening up the device to outside applications. (Although, the company has promised to open up the iPhone to developers soon). And when Amazon copied Apple’s iPod business model with its closed Kindle Reader (it is the only e-reader that can download digital books from Amazon), there were similar calls on Amazon to open up the device.

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

It is no surprise that, in general, startups tend to like openness more than larger, more established companies. Open standards lower barriers to entry and make it easier for multiple industry players to participate (and cooperate) in the same market. Bigger companies with more to lose tend to resist openness. Apple is being extra careful about how it opens up the iPhone precisely because it doesn’t want random third-party applications to ruin the consumer experience it has worked so hard to perfect by crashing the iPhone. The reason the iPhone is so successful is arguably because of Apple’s insistence that it control every aspect of how it works. Openness and control, though, don’t really go together.
I don’t mean to suggest that big companies cannot learn how to ride the momentum that openness creates. IBM is a great example here, championing Linux and other open-source technologies in markets where it does not compete or dominate (operating systems) in furtherance of businesses where it does compete that are built on top of those open technologies (enterprise software and IT consulting). Again, the point is that companies need to pick and choose.

Take Amazon and the Kindle. Amazon has more to gain from opening up the Kindle than Apple does from opening up the iPhone. Unlike Apple, which makes money from selling the device itself, Amazon makes money from the digital book store that comes with its device. (This is the exact opposite of Apple, which makes barely no money from its equivalent iTunes store). The appeal of the Kindle is the service behind it, not the $300 device itself (which is probably subsidized). Also unlike Apple, Amazon is not very good at industrial design. If it were to create an open-source reference design for the Kindle Reader, another company could make one that is less clunky. More electronic readers would be sold, and more digital books would be purchased from Amazon.

So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

(Image via j/f/photos).

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/~3/209092525/

From TechCrunch UK:

Israeli search technology start-up Hooja has raised $1.5 million from some well known-investors, including Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, and an early investor in Facebook. Hooja, currently in stealth mode, is said to be developing a technology that enables content providers to access personal and social information about users, and the tech is related to text messaging. Thiel has also backed Friendster, LinkedIn and Slide, and manages the hedge fund Clarium Capital.

cb_widget_report_widget(”cb_widget_1199207631″); cb_widget_report_element(”cb_widget_0_1199207631″,”hooja”);

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/~3/209124146/

A few years ago I switched from Cingular to T-Mobile because Cingular’s customer service stunk. My experience today was another proof that I made the right choice.

Late Saturday night my beloved Samsung T509 had full signal in my apartment, but I couldn’t place or receive any calls. Heading outside, I walked six blocks before my calls would go through. Some kind of cell phone black hole was centered right on my apartment. What a bummer, especially when you’re trying to order pizza without a landline.

So the next morning I went out for brunch beyond the boundary of the black hole. I called T-Mobile with a forkful of chilaquiles and expected to wait on hold. Much to my surprise, T-Mobile doesn’t make you wait. They take your number instead and call you back. Three minutes later, my phone rang. The girl on the other end was friendly, listened to my problem, apologized, and told me she’d send an engineer asap. She couldn’t promise a response before Wednesday due to New Years, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

Today my comatose phone gave a familiar chirp. T-Mobile had texted me this message:

An Engineer has reviewed your trouble ticket and a resolution has been found. Thank you for choosing T-Mobile.

After making a few calls and dancing around the room, I had to reflect on this. T-Mobile nailed this support experience from the beginning through the middle to the end.

1. I never had to stand in line
Waiting on hold sucks. T-Mobile knows it so they gave me another option and called me back.

2. The agent cared about my problem
The girl on the line was kind, attentive, and apologetic. She made me feel like it was their problem and their responsibility. Which is exactly what I want as a customer. She also promised an update by a specific date, which eased my uncertainty.

3. When the problem was fixed, I heard it from them first
I received a text message as soon as my service was restored. That little victory SMS taught me that when they have downtime in the future, I can trust they will work quickly and notify me when it’s fixed. It’s so frustrating to repeatedly pick up the phone every half hour to see if it works. Thanks to their communication, next time I can relax and wait for the good news.

Kudos to T-Mobile for the good example.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/755-lessons-from-t-mobiles-support

A picture of what may or may not be the next-generation Blackberry 9000 popped up in an online forum. The device does not appear to have a touchscreen, but it does sport a black iPhone-like sheen. Again, this could be the real deal, a hoax, or some unrelated prototype. But one thing is for sure: iPhones and Blackberries are on a collision course. As iPhones gain more enterprise-class e-mail capabilities, Blackberries will add more consumer-friendly design to its devices.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/208997956/

Okay, final list for 2007. Here are the top-25 bookmarked or shared posts from the year, as determined by people who used the “Add This” bookmark button at the bottom of each post (see also our other year-end lists: Popular, Headlines, Launches, Deals, Deadpool):

1		The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos
2		Forget YouTube: Go To These Sites If You Want Hard Core Copyright Infringing Content
3		Eventbee: AdSense for Events Has Busy Plans
4		Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday
5		If You Don’t Use Del.icio.us, You Will Now
6		Google To “Out Open” Facebook On November 5
7		The New Portals: It’s the Bread, Not the Peanut Butter
8		Google Earth’s Easter Egg: A Flight Simulator
9		Google Tops Feed Reader and Social Bookmark Rankings
10		9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
11		34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network
12		Google Launches Free 411 Service
13		Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?
14		I Want This In Photoshop Immediately
15		Google’s Response to Facebook: Maka-Maka
16		Facebook Source Code Leaked
17		Digg Surrenders to Mob
18		AOL One Step Behind Again: New Home Page Identical To Yahoo
19		MySpace v. Facebook: Its Not A Decision. Its an IQ Test
20		Adobe Open Sources Parts Of Flex Platform
21		Fotowoosh Will Turn Any Picture Into 3D Image
22		Kaltura Wins Spot as 40th Company at TechCrunch40
23		Breaking: Google Spends $3.1 Billion For DoubleClick
24		$100 Million Payday For Feedburner - This Deal Is Confirmed
25		Bubble 2.0: The Video

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/208988920/

Rounding out our year-end lists—see also the Most Popular Posts of 2007, the Year in TechCrunch Headlines, the Year in Deals, and the Year in Deadpool—here is a selection of some of the notable startup and product launches TechCrunch covered in 2007:

• Ribbit Pulls Back the Covers On Its Voice 2.0 Master Plan (And Raises $10 Million B Round) December 10
• Office Live Workspace (Beta) Finally Goes Live. Still Needs Work. December 10
• Health Search + Patient Social Network = iMedix December 10
• Adroll: The Social Ad Network (Beta Invites) December 3
• Zopa To Launch In U.S. November 30
• Kindle: First Impressions November 19
• Attributor Launches Service to Track Copyright Infringement Across the Web November 4
• The New York Times’ Blogrunner—A Techmeme Killer? November 1
• Details Revealed: Google OpenSocial To Launch Thursday October 30
• Hulu Launches Private Beta, Makes Very Good First Impressions October 28
• Twine Launches A Smarter Way To Organize Your Online Life October 19
• Stealth Startup Kango Working on Semantic Search For Travel October 11
• CNET Founder Shelby Bonnie Unveils His New Startup: PoliticalBase October 9
• FriendFeed To Aggregate Social Network Data Into A Single Feed October 1
• Bitgravity Officially Launches The Content Delivery Network Than Everyone’s Been Talking About September 30
• Polar Rose Debuts At Gnomedex August 9
• Amazon To Launch Payments Services; Will Compete With PayPal and Google Checkout Aug. 1
• Ooma Launches Free Consumer Phone Service July 18
• Kevin Rose’s New Startup: Pownce June 27
• Virgin Charter Launches: Private Aviation Marketplace June 12
• Movable Type 4.0 Beta Launches, Platform To Be Open Sourced June 5
• Lala Launches On-demand Free Streaming Music Service June 4
• Jason Calacanis Launches Mahalo Today: Human Powered Search May 30
• Justin.TV Network Launches: More Shows to Come May 22
• Truemors Launches May 15
• Silverlight: The Web Just Got Richer April 30
• Kyte Launches: More Rich Media Streaming Presence April 23
• Kongregate Gets $1M, Launches User Generated Games. March 22
• Adobe Apollo Launched. So Go Build Something. March 18
• PowerHype at PowerSet. February 12
• Yahoo Launches Pipes. February 7
• Geni Launches January 16, 2007
• Venice Project Launch Name: Joost. January 15
• Use WeatherBill To Bet On The Weather January 2

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/208966788/

Ah the end of the year, the time to write top ten lists and predictions. I am not going to go this here. We do that enough in our State of Ajax talks.

What I will do though, is the digital version of something I dislike. As an experiment, I used a “highlighter” on Matt Webb’s piece on wrapping up 2007, which is a fantastic (and long) flow of consciousness that manages to say everything and nothing.

Here are the yellow bits as I saw them:

So what does phenotropics mean for the Web? Firstly it means that our browsers should become pattern recognition machines. They should look at the structure of every page they render, and develop artificial proteins to bind to common features.

While browsers look for patterns inside pages, search engines would look for inter-page, structural features

…

I have a feeling that refactoring code is not a good thing. I am not in favour of deleting code. If there are problems with code the way it is written, there should be mechanisms to code over it gradually, and leave the old code there.

A codebase should be its own source repository: seeing what the code was like a year ago shouldn’t be a check-out from source control, but archeology.

…

What the Magna Carta did - or rather, what the process that the Magna Carta was part of did - was turn the king into a thing. The thing-king is the king revealed. The important feature of the document isn’t the constraints put on the king, but rather the fact that it is possible to bind to the king at all.

This means we’ll have metamarkets, in the end. Mini free markets captured and tuned to perform particular tasks, inside a society we can’t currently grasp, just as China held Hong Kong in a bubble to propel it into orbit, and the Large Hadron Collider intends to create new zones of particular kinds of physics in order to perform scientific experiments.

…

I want to think about social software in reverse. Can we take activities that are already group-based and irreducibly social in the real world, and make software that is good for them?

Perhaps the login system could be based around questions: ‘what is a name of a blonde person in your group?’

…

To generalise Flickr’s attributes, successful interactive systems will bend users back towards them, whether by play or not.

…

The cleverness of Getting Things Done is to wrap this finite-state machine in another finite-state machine which instead of running on the tasks, runs on the human operator itself,

…

Websites can also be seen as finite-state machines that run on people.
Instead of a finite-state machine, think of a website as a flowchart of motivations.

…

Imagine popularising a method like Getting Things Done crossed with the creation and value of the diamond industry

I am looking forward to see what you come up with in oh-eight.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/208945965/matt-webb-on-the-web-2007-wrapup-on-the-web

Todd Ditchendorf has released Fluid, a Site Specific Browser that allows you to ditch the 30 tabbed browser, and run web applications in the own world (icon etc):

Fluid 0.4 includes Dock badges and Dock menus for Gmail, Google Reader, and Yahoo! Mail, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB installation paths, and custom SSB icons.

And, how cool is this… a Flickr group for shared Fluid SSB icons!

How does it work?

Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created.

What makes Fluid different from Prism?

Fluid is very similar in nature to Prism, but is based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. And SSBs created by Fluid are true, native Cocoa OS X applications offering seamless integration into the Mac OS.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/208934935/fluid-puts-hat-in-the-site-specific-browser-ring