Ajax Girl

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Highrise
Why The Demo Coach switched from Salesforce to Highrise
“To my surprise, Highrise turned out to be an amazing SAAS, which allows us to have basically the same functionality as Salesforce. The biggest differences to me is that the user interface is much more enjoyable to work with and the cost is a fraction of what I am used to paying for CRM.”

Basecamp
Coming soon: Outpost will let you manage Basecamp projects on your iPhone
Outpost (coming in August 2008 from Morfunk) promises to let you manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone: “Take notes away from the office. Delegate tasks from the train. Check on deadlines. Upload photos to projects. Anywhere.”

Entrepreneur/Author at CNNMoney.com: “Basecamp brought a ‘best practices’ rigor to my business”
“Basecamp brought a ‘best practices’ rigor to my business. It gave us a common nomenclature for projects and allowed us to organize our content workflow into headings like Overview, Messages, To-Do’s, Milestones and more, tied to each project.”

Backpack
Blue Flavor thinks the Backpack Journal is “fan-frickin-tastic”
“About a month ago I read about Backpack’s new Journal feature. It seemed very interesting and after about a week of playing with it, I decided to get the rest of the team to try it out. Now we’ve got an amazing status tool (ala Twitter) AND an ongoing record of what everyone has an is working on. I find this really useful in planning my resources and projects. It’s also got all sorts of side benefits; keeping the team in touch in a low-noise way, reducing distraction by allowing people to announce that they’re busy. ‘Hey don’t bug me! I’m heads-down!!’”

Getting Real
vi.sualize.us creator on Getting Real and building an app in his spare time with no budget
“I developed the site in five months using only my spare time (nights, holidays…) and $0 budget…I started to read it and after a few chapters I couldn’t believe how lucky I was: a lot of the questions I was doing myself during the development, could finally have answers, or at least guidance! Your book came in at the right moment, completely out of the blue.”

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Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1138-product-blog-update-switching-from-salesforce-to-highrise-outpost-to-bring-basecamp-to-iphone-backpack-journal-is-fan-frickin-tastic-etc

Brad Neuberg has built a very easy to use client side search tool called PubTools Search using Gears. The project is open source and provides a great avenue to share knowledge on Gears itself.

To accompany the code, Brad wrote a detailed article:

Did you know that you can use Gearsto do fast, client-side searching of data, similar to a client-side search engine? Gears bundles Full-Text Search (FTS) abilities right into its local, SQLite database. MySpace, for example, uses this feature with their MySpace Mail application, downloading all of a user’s messages for fast, client-side search. Because all of the data is local, you can do nifty things like search over the data in real-time as the user types, something that is much harder if you have to query over the network to a server to do the searching.

Would you like to add the same kind of fast, local searching to your own web page and web applications? This article introduces you to PubTools Search and the Gears features that power it, namely Full-Text Search and Workers. PubTools Search is an open source JavaScript library that drops a client-side search engine right into your page. You configure it with basic HTML plus a list of URLs to index. Once loaded, a search form that uses the local Gears full-text search abilities will appear in your page to quickly and locally search over the documents in real time as a user types into the search field.

Brad sat down with me to discuss the project, some of the best practices, and his use of Dojo.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/336144509/pubtools-search-fast-client-side-searching-with-gears

Robert O’Callahan and Dave Hyatt have been chatting about paint servers as Robert creates SVG ones and then arbitary elements.

This continues the meme of taking common use cases and making them easy via CSS (e.g. reflections).

Here is the SVG version:

And here for canvas:

Exciting!

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/336049168/paint-servers-svg-and-canvas

Zvents, a local events network, announced the addition of Paul Levine, the former General Manager of Yahoo Local (and current VP Marketing at Adbrite) to their board of directors this morning.

Zvents first launched in 2005 and has raised just over $7 million in venture capital. The site gathers events from around the web (and directly from partners) and suggests activities based on what you want to do (concert, theater, etc.) and when you want to do it. It also powers the recently launched Yellow Pages iPhone App.

Before Levine started his current position at Adbrite, he was in charge of the Yahoo Local product that included services such as yellow pages, local search, and maps and grew to 20 million monthly visitors.

Zvents has been in quiet mode for the last year or so, but they’ve been growing and recently surpassed competitor eventful by some measures.

More news should be coming from the company shortly.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/336039142/

Wouldn’t it be nice if we actually had a decent component model? Instead of making JavaScript frameworks have to mess around and try to create one on top of the crud they have to deal with?

This is what XBL 2.0 is all about. I talked about XBL in one of my Web Archeology posts, and how Jonas Sicking of Mozilla was back working on the implementation for Firefox.

In WebKit land, we can now see that Julien Chaffraix is making it happen with very current commits.

This means that fairly shortly we will have Firefox and WebKit/Safari running with XBL 2 support. That in turn means that we will have an interesting component model for the first time, and who knows where that could lead us!

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/336038696/xbl-2-the-component-model-is-coming-to-webkit-and-gecko

Muzu TV, one of the companies that demo’d at our recent TechCrunch Meetup in Dublin, has emerged with $8 million dollars in VC with another take on music videos: advertising supported.

It’s built up a library of music related video content (documentaries, TV shows, interviews, tutorials etc) and signed deals with 200 labels, one of which is Sony BMG which has a global artist roster including The Ting Tings, Foo Fighters, Kylie, Justin Timberlake, Beyonce and MGMT.

This is an ad-supported streaming music video site which enables artists, labels, festivals, venues, fans and any other music content owner to broadcast their music TV on the web, “legally” and at no cost. The legal aspect is key - the player is designed to protect copyright holders buy giving the artist control and allowing it to earn revenue from adverts in the video player.

Read the rest of this entry on TechCrunch UK & Ireland

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/335944062/

Tap Tap Revenge, a Guitar Hero-like game for the iPhone where the user taps colored dots in time with the beat of a song, is surging up the iPhone App Store rankings despite having launched a few days after most of the original apps.

The game, which was released by new startup Tapulous, is currently number 7 on the list of top free applications overall (ahead of AOL Radio and MySpace Mobile) and number 1 on the top games list.

And there’s a good reason for the surge - the game is a ton of fun, particularly the two player version with both users playing simultaneously, head to head, on the same iPhone.

The game was originally created by Nate True for hacked iPhones. Tapulous bought the game from True and added a number of features, like the two player mode.

Tapulous, which hired a team of “all-star” developers to create applications, raised $1.8 million in capital from a number of high profile angel investors. The company has another six applications coming soon.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/335936292/

Is someone you work with taking Provigil to give them an extra competitive edge? I’ve spoken with one executive who says he uses it regularly to work twenty hour days, and the buzz lately is that it’s the “entrepreneur’s drug of choice” around Silicon Valley. Over the last week two separate entrepreneurs have mentioned it casually in conversation, and one said he tried it once and loved it.

Provigil (aka Modafinil) is marketed by Cephalon in the United States and is available by prescription only. It’s only approved use in the U.S. is to treat narcolepsy, a sleeping disorder. But since the main effect of Provigil is to keep you awake and able to concentrate, a lot of people who get their hands on it use it to be able to work longer hours, even though it has not been deemed safe for that kind of use.

Recreational Provigil user testimonials are all over the web. Not only are people able to work with little or no sleep, the drug has the advantage of spurring weight loss and some users report a general mood enhancing side effect. The U.S. military has also reportedly tested it on helicopter and F117 pilots to see if they remain effective for up to 88 hours without sleep.

There are few side effects to Provigil compared to stimulants and it is supposedly not habit forming. That, of course, doesn’t mean it’s safe to take it just to be able to stay awake for 20 hours a day.

What’s so funny is that entrepreneurs apparently aren’t interested in typical drugs - instead they find the one that gives them a mental and stamina advantage. Perhaps some enterprising venture capitalist will start requiring founders of their companies to get a prescription in order to close on an investment.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/335845222/

If you have an interest in Adobe AIR, Mike Chambers has 100 free copies of the Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocketguide, and one of them could have your name on it.

All you have to do is email him at mesh@adobe.com with your name, shipping address, and phone number if you are outside of the US. The information will only be used to ship the book.

First come, first served.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/335778607/free-copies-available-of-the-adobe-air-for-javascript-developers-pocketguide

The Google-Viacom showdown over the handover of YouTube user data appears to be over. The two sides agreed to changes in a previous ruling that would have required Google to hand over user id’s, IP addresses and a list of all viewed YouTube videos to Viacom in connection with their ongoing copyright infringement litigation.

After an online uprising against the order, Viacom tried to assert that they never requested personally identifiable information (they did), and later promised not to use the information to sue individuals. The value of that promise was questioned by us and many others.

The new order, filed this evening, states that Google will substitue user id’s and IP addresses for anonymous but unique identifiers. The full order is below, but the key language is:

When producing data from the Logging Database pursuant to the Order, Defendants shall substitute values while preserving uniqueness for entries in the following fields: User ID, IP Address and Visitor ID. The parties shall agree as promptly as feasible on a specific protocol to govern this substitution whereby each unique value contained in these fields shall be assigned a correlative unique substituted value, and preexisting interdependencies shall be retained in the version of the data produced. Defendants shall promptly (no later than 7 business days after execution of this Stipulation) provide a proposed protocol for this substitution. Defendants agree to reasonably consult with Plaintiffs’ consultant if necessary to reach agreement on the protocol.

Without IP addresses and user names it will be significantly more difficult for Viacom to determine which individuals may have viewed any particular video. I for one have no further objections to this data being handed over from a privacy standpoint, although I still urge Viacom to stop the endless litigation and consider more innovative business models around their content.

google viacom youtube agreement - Get more Legal Forms

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/335761848/