Ajax Girl

Its difficult to claim perfection in anything, even Ajax. While Ajax has enhanced the web experience for many users, and there is not shortage of people constantly praising its merits, it is perhaps no longer the newest standard. Sure, it allows relatively easy integration of interactive elements in web pages, but is it really all that powerful and versatile as is often claimed?

There are three major standards for the development of Rich Internet Applications: Ajax, Java, and Flash. None of these are perfect solutions, but each has its own advantages over the others.

This is where the choice comes in. Ajax is at its strongest for such applications as information submission, but weaker when applied as a true asynchronus system.

On the other hand, Ajax is probably the most versatile of the options available. While not always the most efficient, it can get the job done. Many of its disadvantages can be blamed on web browsers not following standards and not being optimized for the desired degree of interactivity.

Most embedded audio players offer a tiny player with the basics: play/pause and a progress bar.

While this design works great for the casual listener, Soundcloud has another audience in mind. Musicians, producers and sound engineers want to do more than listen to a track. They want to provide feedback on specific details. The bass at 2:36 needs more compression. There’s a mic out of phase at 4:01. Can we try another patch for this one chord in the bridge?

In order to allow this kind of collaboration, Alex and the guys at Soundcloud could have used a standard player and tossed a comment stream below it. Instead they decided to stretch the player and allow commenters to add notes directly inside on the waveform itself. The result is pretty cool. People can post tracks and receive a flurry of comments attached directly to the waves.

The player spans the full width of the screen, so it’s easier to set the playhead at the exact spot you want. Commentor’s avatars appear in the bottom of the player, and their comments pop up on hover.

I like how these guys set out to build a collaboration site for music makers, and what did they concentrate on? The music player. It cuts straight to the epicenter (more).

They also scratched my persistant itch for larger link targets in their “Actions” section of the sidebar:

Soundcloud is still in private beta, but Signal vs. Noise readers can check it out with this link: http://soundcloud.com/guestlist/signalvsnoise .

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1143-soundcloud-expands-the-audio-player

I was in a three-hour meeting yesterday. I’m meeting averse, you know that. But one of the things I liked about this meeting was when the guy in charge stopped someone mid-sentence and said “Don’t say everyone or no one. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We all do this. We try to justify our position by saying “No one knows…” or “Everyone knows…” or some derivative thereof. When you throw around these extremes you weaken your point. There is no such thing as everyone or no one. Don’t justify your position by putting an unjustifiable abstraction at the core.

Even “Most people” is a bad one. “Many people” isn’t as bad, but it’s still loaded. I find myself saying it all the time. “Some people” is better. A clear “these people” is best.

So when you’re making a point or taking a position, watch out everyone or no one — they aren’t really there.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1144-watch-out-for-everyone-or-no-one

When I see stuff like this I’m 1. filled with envy, 2. filled with envy, 3. hungry. More wonderfulness can be found at eatPES.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1141-western-spaghetti

Facebook and MySpace, the two largest social networks, eagerly launched new iPhone applications last Friday. Both quickly shot up the top apps list. Apple has since turned off the download count feature, but Facebook is no. 7 on the free list, MySpace is no. 11. But while both applications are useful for heavy users, they won’t drive new users to the services because they failed to leverage the killer iPhone feature - location awareness.

The applications are pretty good mobile versions of the standard experience. MySpace, which we reviewed last week, provides users with most key features of the service, and they’ve added some nice touches like the ability to upload photos from the iPhone camera. You can download the application here (and add me as a friend).

Facebook’s iPhone app is clearly better. They had a bit of a head start with their web app last year that was at the time the finest example of an iPhone-specific website. The new iPhone app was created by the same guy - Joe Hewitt - and includes deeper integration with the phone. Tap on a friend’s name and call them. Or use the included Facebook chat application and skip those text messages. One big problem with Facebook on the iPhone - it takes forever to load and the application crawls, just like the web version.

Location? Hello?

But both MySpace and Facebook miss the real opportunity to drive usage growth on the iPhone - location awareness. The reason? Privacy concerns. The lost opportunity? Huge potential user growth and connections.

Social networks today rely on friends of friends or real world connections to drive growth. But a handful of iPhone-only social networks actually help drive new connections in the real world. And the backbone of those applications is location awareness.

I’ve written about this opportunity repeatedly in the last year. In February I speculated on the demand for an iPhone-only social network to drive real world social interactions: “I think an iPhone-only social network…would be a huge hit…if it had presence awareness and was able to tell you both where your friends are and what they are up to. And also let you meet new people around you who were open to it.”

In April I saw a demo of the new product Loopt was building for the iPhone. It had all the features I suggested, and more.

Users of these new social networks can choose to notify other users when they are physically close to them, and show a picture, first or full name, and basic profile information. If you’re both in the same bar or at the same conference, you can browse and filter other users to find a date or do a business deal.

And you know how awkward it is when you run into someone that you sort of know but have forgotten their name or what they do? Your phone can see them coming and alert you. That means you can have richer conversations with people you are acquainted with but don’t know very well.

These new social networks can help you meet new people, remember details of the people you already know, and find your friends when they’re nearby.

MySpace and Facebook are sitting on the sidelines while these new networks try to get a foothold. And it’s all because of privacy concerns and fear of litigation.

Privacy (and those pesky Attorneys General)

The media loves nothing more than to talk about sexual predators lurking around the big social networks. Both MySpace and Facebook have had to make big changes to their privacy policies, particularly how they set up accounts for minors. So when the product guys say “hey, let’s add a feature so that any MySpace user can see the basic profiles of any other MySpace users near them,” the lawyers freak out.

Certainly privacy rights need to be considered, and Loopt has already had some problems with unintended invites going out (although this hasn’t happened to me and I’ve been using it since launch). But they can be addressed by allowing users to opt out of showing others their location, or only showing it to certain types of people (by age range, sex, friends of friends, etc.). And minors can be permanently segmented from older age groups as well.

To be fair, both MySpace and Facebook have said they will eventually roll out location based services to help users meet each other. It’s unlikely any of the early networks will get an insurmountable lead on the new platform anytime soon, so they can take their time with their lawyers to make them comfortable. But if they wait too long, or release overly-restrictive products, that may change.

We’ll have more to say on this shortly - our goal is to have iPhone users at our meetups and conferences be able to network with each other, swap contact information, and meet new people. Hopefully by our big August Capital party on July 25, TechCrunch readers will be using their iPhones for a little social networking.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/facebook-myspace-ignore-location-on-iphone-at-their-peril/

Apple apologizes and compensates for MobileMe downtime and their loose definition of “push.”

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1140-me-so-sorry

The Dark Knight Trailer

Well, our tickets to tonight’s IMAX pre-screening of Batman The Dark Knight are all sold out, but we do have 10 tickets left to give away (2 sets of 5 tickets). We will give the tickets away to whoever leaves the best comment about why they should be invited attend the screening (video comments get more credit). Our summer interns will pick the winners.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/hey-los-angeles-just-a-reminder-techcrunch-and-myspace-pre-screening-of-batman-is-tonight/

Dojo developers will be pleased to read about the recent update to the Dojo grid control. Version 1.2 of the grid control focuses primarily on improving integration with Dojo data stores, improved grid layout handling and providing advanced in-place editing capabilities. The update was fairly extensive forcing the team to rethink the design of the widget and refactor quite a bit of code. As such, the updated version of the grid has been setup as a new control allowing developers to continue to use the older version while being able to take advantage the updated features. This will ensure that applications based on the previous grid control won’t break.

The biggest benefit truly is the tighter coupling between the new DataGrid and Dojo’s existing dojo.data stores:

In order to use dojo.data stores with the grid in previous releases, you needed the dojox.grid.data.DojoData model which would bridge the gap between the grid and the store. DataGrid has been engineered to remove that bridge. Instead of using stand-alone models to store data for the grid, any dojo.data store that implements the Dojo Data read API can be used. Additionally, DataGrid can use the write and notification API’s if they are available.

For example, the following code will create a new dojo.data store based off of a JSON file from a URL and populate the new DataGrid by passing it as an option to the DataGrid constructor:

Building a solid grid control isn’t an easy task and it seems like the Dojo team have done a great job of enhancing their widget.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/337055310/dojo-grid-widget-updated-data-integration-and-editing-improvements

The Humanized folk who now work in Mozilla Labs have taken their Enso work and created Ubiquity, a Firefox plugin that implements the Graphical Keyboard User Interface:

Web applications, much the same as desktop applications, are a bit like isolated cities: it’s difficult for an end-user to arbitrarily share data and functionality between them. This is alleviated to some extent by creations like Firefox Add-ons that add toolbars or sidebars to Firefox’s UI, Bookmarklets, and Greasemonkey, but while all of these solutions are powerful, each comes with its own set of problems. The buttons and bars of many Firefox add-ons don’t scale well because of the valuable screen real-estate they consume; Bookmarklets are restricted in scope because they only have the access privileges of the website they’re running on; and Greasemonkey doesn’t prescribe any kind of interaction model, which makes it difficult to reuse the functionality of a script in a context other than the ones it was expressly designed for.

Ubiquity attempts to alleviate all of these problems by allowing end-users to apply textual commands, or verbs, to whatever they’re looking at. For instance, let’s assume that I’ve found a typo on a friend’s blog, and I want to let him know about it.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/337041476/mozilla-labs-is-ubiquitous

Sharath Udupa, an IE developer at Microsoft has posted on the IE 8 page navigations feature:

In IE8 mode, we provide support for script to update the travel log components (for e.g. back/forward buttons, address bar) to reflect client-side updates to documents. This allows a better user experience where users can navigate back and forth without messing the AJAX application state.

What is interesting here is that even though Sharath said: “adopted in IE8 from HTML5” we have Richard Monson-Haefel (Curl evangelist) saying Ajax is dead RIA walking. This strong conclusion comes from the fact that IE implemented an HTML 5 feature???

The Open Web always has baggage from the fact that there are many parties involved, but the benefits have always made it win out. The browser is the virtual machine of the Web. While Richard thinks that fragmentation can kill Ajax, I see a brighter picture. We have HTML 5 to look at, and browser are innovating in interesting ways. That is a good thing. It pushes us forward.

It is interesting that the articles pushed are on Silverlight using this for its own goals, but Sorry Richard, this doesn’t mean people will be learning Curl

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/337014601/ie8-html-5-ajax-page-navigations