Ajax Girl

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

37signals suite
Zendesk integrates with Highrise and Campfire
“You can now lookup customer information in your Highrise CRM application directly from a Zendesk support ticket. Say you receive a support ticket from a Michael Johnson. This may be the first time Michael has contacted your help desk, but if he is a customer of yours you probably have some information on him in your CRM system already. With this new integration you can populate the ticket page with that information.”

Branding agency uses 37signals tools to stay small and stay connected
“The benefits are that they allow us to manage our clients and their work, and our time and our ‘stuff’ more efficiently, and quicker, and easier. They essentially allow us to get on with what we are paid to do, help solve our clients problems with minimal problems…We have found that by spending less time and effort managing our business, we can spend more time and effort helping our clients to run their businesses.”

Campfire
Neat Campfire tricks: Graph your usage and autocomplete names
“Probably my favorite, undocumented feature, of Campfire is using the @ in chat to auto-complete someones name. It is something I have found myself using in other chats besides Campfire, just to find that it does not complete their name for me!”

Basecamp
Periscope: Basecamp control on your iGoogle homepage
Periscope (stil in beta) provides “Basecamp control on your iGoogle homepage.” The extra is made by Ten Seven, Interactive.

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1195-product-blog-update-zendesk-integration-graph-campfire-usage-periscope-etc

I was at the University of Minnesota when Gopher, the Internet protocol, was in its prime. It was created by a professor at the University of Minnesota you see, and I had to help implement gopher services.

When the Web kicked off, they still tried to hang on, but made the fatal mistake of not having it totally open, and it quickly died off.

But now it is back!

Cameron Kaiser has updated the Mozilla code with the good ole Gopher protocol implementation. Ah, old times.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/363032546/gopher-away-in-javascript

Call it the Facebook World Tour. Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world,—with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing.
(At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace. Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

If you break down Facebook’s growth into regions, its presence in North America is still growing at a healthy 38 percent rate (with 49 million visitors a month). Europe (with 35 million visitors a month) is growing nearly ten times as fast. And growth in rest of the world is on an even faster tear (403 percent growth in the Middle East and Africa, 458 percent growth in Asia Pacific, 10,555 percent growth in Latin America), albeit from a smaller base.

Much of these huge growth numbers come from the fact that Facebook had hardly no presence in many of these regions until recently when it started its major push to translate the site to other languages. A year ago, it had only one million uniques a month in all of Latin America, three million in the Middle East and Africa, and four million in all of Asia Pacific. When you look at it that way, 10,555 percent growth isn’t as amazing as the raw numbers would suggest. And within these regions, it still has a lot of work to do. For instance,it is floundering in Japan.

The takeaway here is that Facebook’s growth is now coming from abroad, and it still has a long way to go in other countries. Will it get lost in translation, or are we looking at another global superpower here?

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/MrnCk-a4WLY/

We had a blast last week answering Q&A for about an hour during the first 37signals Live session. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thanks to all 1000+ people who stopped by to watch or participate.

Next Show: Wednesday, August 13 at 11:00am central time

We’re ready for the second show. Down the road we’re going to do more focused Q&As around specific topics, but we want to do another round of general Q&A this time. So please join us at http://www.37signals.com/live at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th. We’re going for the morning so more of Europe can join us. We’re excited to see you there!

37signals Live: New and improved

We got a lot of feedback during and after the last show. We’ve taken some of this feedback and made some improvements.

There were a few issues with the first show:

1. Spammers cluttered the chat window.
2. The chat flew by so fast that we missed a lot of questions.
3. The chat itself was distracting.

We thought a lot about how to resolve these issues. We liked the spontaneity of real-time question asking via chat, but the spamming and general noise hurt that experience.

A lot of people suggested an option to pre-submit questions. We could even have digg-style voting to move questions up or down on the list. This sounded like a good solution on the surface, but if we just had a list of questions ahead of time it would kill the “live” part of 37signals Live. Questions in advance kill spontaneity. It kills the magic. We might as well just record the answers on video ahead of time and play the video later.

What you’ll see: Video & question submission

Here’s what the new on-air screen looks like:

Live video on the left. No more chat, but question submission on the right. Enter your name, location, and your question. A few of the questions we recently answered will be listed below.

What we’ll see: Review, approve (or reject), and answer

Behind the scenes we’ll see:

On the left we have the approved queue. On the right we have the incoming queue. As questions come in, someone else from 37signals (generally Matt) can approve, reject, or edit (fix misspellings, edit so it’s easier to read, etc.) the question. We can also ban the questioner if they’re just spamming. We’ll approve just about anything as long as it’s above the waist.

Once a question is approved it shoots over to the left side in big type so we can see it on a second screen positioned at the other side of the desk. After we answer a question on the left we just click it and it turns dark grey and moves to the bottom of the screen so it’s out of the way.

Excited to give it a go

We’re pumped to give the new system a go. We hope you’ll join us at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th at http://www.37signals.com/live.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1194-the-next-37signals-live-wednesday-august-13-at-1100am-central

This is the hack that John Grubber used to test whether iPhone 2.x had snuck in SquirrelFish. He was curious due to the performance improvements that he witnessed:

What about iPhone limits though? David Golightly tests the limits on the iPhone with a script that keeps downloading tiles until it can no longer do so:

After downloading about 210 images, the iPhone simply stops downloading new ones. This is probably due to hitting the hard 30MB same-page resource limit.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/362844923/squirreling-out-the-fish-on-the-iphone

Micah Tischler wasn’t happy with the variety of approaches for allowing transparent PNG support in IE 6, so he continued his work with mtjs_iepnghandler which intelligently provides true background repeat functionality for transparent PNGs as well as full positioning.

In this script image tags are supported, both with and without a blank spacer GIF, and background image PNGs may be positioned, as well as repeated, even if they’re smaller than the content element they’re in. Also, the repeat functionality is implemented to provide true repeat functionality, rather than just stretching everything willy-nilly.

mtjs_iepnghandler.js traverses the DOM, making adjustments where it runs into PNGs. The methods used depend on whether a PNG is in use as an image, or as a background, and, if it’s a background, whether it is repeated or positioned. The script also takes into account the dimensions of the PNG to make intelligent decisions about how to implement repeats. It should be noted that, like mtjs_csswalker_iepnghandler.js, the script just sits quietly and does nothing on browsers other than IE5-6.

Micah finishes up his post comparing his solution to the others out there.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/362824652/mtjs_iepnghandler-more-png-support-for-ie-6

The much anticipated DataCase application for the iPhone launched this morning.

The app, which costs $6.99, turn your iPhone into an easy-to-use wireless storage device that can be access by any other device on your wireless network. A one way drop box can be added to a normal machine to drop files onto the iPhone, or alternatively you can set up a two-way shared drive to move files between the iPhone and a computer.

I’ve been testing it and it works, for the most part (I’m having trouble re-connecting after closing it down and re-opening). Definitely worth the $7. Any business user will want to download this immediately. One cool feature that I wasn’t able to test - DataCase says it can stream video from the iPhone to a computer.

See the demo video in our previous post. More information and the download link is on the DataCase website. The app is available for both the iPhone and the iPod touch.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/zPOeSOgZSYs/

The tradition of placing small, useful services on App Engine continues. This time, Adam Burmister has created img2json, a Google AppEngine service that extracts metadata from image URLs.

The metadata can be as simple as width, height, mime type, file size, but it also extract EXIF metadata (camera make, manufacturer, GPS positioning, orientation, etc).

To use the service you just need to talk back to a URL such as:

http://img2json.appspot.com/go/?callback=myCallbackMethod&url=http://assets.flog.co.nz/favicon.png

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/362692326/img2json-get-your-image-metadata-via-app-engine