Ajax Girl

More on why Pixar’s movies are so much better than the competition: According to “Pixar Rules — Secrets of a Blockbuster Company,” the company has created an incredible work environment that keeps employees happy and fulfilled. The result: “A tightknit company of long-term collaborators who stick together, learn from one another, and strive to improve with every production.”

At the heart of this effort is Pixar University:

The operation has more than 110 courses: a complete filmmaking curriculum, classes on painting, drawing, sculpting and creative writing. “We offer the equivalent of an undergraduate education in fine arts and the art of filmmaking,” [Randy Nelson, dean of Pixar University,] said. Every employee — whether an animator, technician, production assistant, accountant, marketer, or security guard — is encouraged to devote up to four hours a week, every week, to his or her education.

Randy Nelson is adamant: these classes are not just a break from the office routine. “This is part of everyone’s work,” he said. “We’re all filmmakers here. We all have access to the same curriculum. In class, people from every level sit right next to our directors and the president of the company.” [...]

Thanks to Pixar University, employees learn to see the company’s work (and their colleagues) in a new light. “The skills we develop are skills we need everywhere in the organization,” Nelson said. “Why teach drawing to accountants? Because drawing class doesn’t just teach people to draw. It teaches them to be more observant. There’s no company on earth that wouldn’t benefit from having people become more observant.”

That helps to explain why the Pixar University crest bears the Latin inscription, Alienus Non Diutius. Translation: alone no longer. “It’s the heart of our model,” Randy Nelson says, “giving people opportunities to fail together and to recover from mistakes together.”

Nice to see that creative courses aren’t limited to “creatives.”And here’s a great quote from Nelson on why the company eschews the industry’s standard practices (which favor one-time contracts over long-term affiliation).

“Contracts allow you to be irresponsible as a company. You don’t need to worry about keeping people happy and fulfilled. What we have created here — an incredible workspace, opportunities to learn and grow, and, most of all, great co-workers — is better than any contract.”

You can try to outspend the competition. Or you can try to outculture them. Create a place that makes employees feel special. A place that makes them feel like they’re part of a bigger whole. A place where they continually get to learn and evolve. A place where everyone actually likes each other.

If you create a culture like that, who would want to leave? Plus, you’ll get the best minds out there knocking on your door to get in.

Related: The human side of Pixar’s robot [SvN]

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1127-pixars-tightknit-culture-is-its-edge

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Basecamp
ProofHQ and Basecamp: Offer your project team richer review and approval tools
“ProofHQ integration with Basecamp” explains how to add ProofHQ proofs to your Basecamp projects. (ProofHQ is a web-based design collaboration, proofing and approval tool for brands, agencies, designers, print and production.)

Backpack
One of our favorite uses for Backpack: “How to” pages
One way we love to use Backpack is for “how to” pages that guide us through confusing tech waters. These tutorial pages mean we don’t have to waste time relearning processes from scratch.

CSS tip for customizing the appearance of Backpack pages
“If you use Backpack, the organizing web tool and intranet from 37signals, you may sometimes wish you could modify the text on a page to fit a little more information on it. I have a page where I collect code snippets and terminal commands and the default font seems a bit large with so much content. Turns out there’s an easy solution to this: simply add a small amount of CSS to the page in the form of a note and you can change the formatting to meet your needs.”

Highrise
Web consultant touts forwarding email into Highrise
“With Highrise, you blind-carbon copy a special drop box, something like dropbox@999999997.rkg.highrisehq.com. The app does all the hard work, determining who you are from the dropbox subdomain, parsing the email to determine where to file it it the CRM system, and associating the message with the right people and companies and dates.”

Getting Real
Getting Real reader now “living in passion and designing a product that is actually useful”
“I decided start my own software company with a friend from college. The idea we have is great (I think) and I’m finally having fun writing software again, because I’m writing it under constraints—the constraints of my day job, and of real life. Gone are my class diagrams, design documents, and long-winded e-mails. I have arrived at a happy place of producing features and code, living in passion, and designing a product that is actually useful (or will be, I hope)!”

Subscribe to the Product Blog RSS feed.

Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1124-product-blog-update-backpack-how-to-pages-proofhq-integration-with-basecamp-etc

Ever had a situation where you’ve desperately needed to get API information for your favorite toolkit only to find that the site is offline for some reason? The Dojo Toolbox aims to tackle this through the use of Adobe’s AIR runtime. Built using the Dojo framework, the Dojo Toolbox allows for offline viewing of Dojo’s API making it easy to have immediate access to the information, internet connection or not.

From search to easy navigation and cross-referencing, the Dojo Toolkit source code documentation can now be viewed everywhere you go. When future versions of the Dojo Toolkit are released, you will have the power to view multiple versions of the API within the Dojo Toolbox. We’re also working on allowing you to view documentation for your own source code in a future release!

In addition, the Dojo Toolbox allows you to do custom builds of the Dojo framework as well as get a comprehensive list of learning resources all within the same application. This is a “must-have” for Dojo developers.

Source: Ajaxian » Front Page
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/329915653/offline-access-to-dojo-resources

Darrell Meyer has announced Ext GWT 1.0. This is the first fully stable release of the product and it includes a lot of goodies including:

• Documentation: new screencasts of the various steps
• GWT 1.5 support: “Ext GWT is a 100% native GWT application written in Java. Ext GWT does not wrap any 3rd party JavaScript and does not use any external JavaScript files. Ext GWT fully leverages the GWT API including the widget lifecylce, events, listeners, messaging, and RPC.”
• “Performance was a high priority item for the Ext GWT 1.0 release. Many changes were made since the first beta releases. Initial rendering times are quicker and the new layout code reacts quicker to window resizing. Improvements can easily be seen in the Explorer demo.”
• Advanced Form Layouts
• Improved Data Loading, Store, Binder, and Field API

Looks like a very solid release indeed. Congrats to the team.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/329806354/ext-gwt-10-gwt-15-support-new-apis-performance-and-docs

What if that code was part of an HTML standard? Would that make you feel better about Comet-style applications? Well, Michael Carter has pointed us to the HTML 5 discussions that give us WebSocket:

The HTML5 specification now offers WebSocket, a full-duplex communications channel that operates over a single socket. I have been listening closely, and in some cases contributing, to the process of ensuring that WebSocket will:

• Seamlessly traverse firewalls and routers
• Allow duly authorized cross-domain communication
• Integrate well with cookie-based authentication
• Integrate with existing HTTP load balancers
• Be compatible with binary data

He goes on to discuss how WebSocket is not the same as a TCP socket itself, and what that means as we develop real-time applications.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/329722506/legitimizing-comet-with-html-5-websocket

José Jeria pointed us to a great looking XUL application that allows you to sketch GUI’s and then export them to PNG:

With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package.

Pencil will always be free and can run on virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 supports.

Always good to see people using the power of XUL that still has features that I hope to see HTML get.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/329714177/the-pencil-project

1938 Media’s distribution deal with Verizon, announced just a week ago, is history.

Yesterday a group of “civil rights activists” protested the deal and threatened to boycott Verizon. The reason? A 2007 video that Feldman created called “TechNigga” that the groups say is racist.

The video was not included on Verizon, and television reports that Verizon financed the video are incorrect. But Feldman confirmed to me that all 1938 Media videos were removed by Verizon yesterday and that they terminated the relationship today.

There is almost certainly a back story to this that may unwind over the coming days. Feldman has been in the spotlight recently for a set of puppet videos that originally mocked new media consultant Shel Israel (and later others including me, Loic LeMeur and Dave Winer). A lot of people were angry with Feldman over the parodies (and I drew criticism for covering the story) - and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone helped organize the early stages of this protest.

So what’s your opinion? Is the video racist? Should Verizon have stood by Feldman? Tell us in the comments.

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/~3/329533291/

Michael Mahemoff has a nice little post on the rebranding of JavaScript. It kicked off when he was listening to Steve Yegge on rebranding:

He talks about how languages are branded, e.g. “Java” is enterprise. One of his main points is that brands are “const identifiers”, i.e. it takes an entire generation to change brand perception, so it’s often more effective to simply re-brand. e.g. GTE had a poor brand, so they tried a self-deprecating ad campaign, which backfired, and subsequently re-branded to Verizon.

He then mentions Javascript has a branding problem, because it represents “browser” and “toy language” and “damnit, I gotta learn Javascript” and it’s the language no-one wants to use. He also notes the name itself isn’t great either, nor the rhino imagery. (I’m not sure why Steve assumed many programmers would associate Javascript with rhinos; the Rhino product and O’Reilly cover weren’t really promiment enough to do that; rhino ain’t camel!).

But, wait a minute, didn’t we already have a rebranding?

Javascript has already been rebranded. In fact, I’d go so far as to say “Ajax” was one of the most successful rebrandings in software history.

Although technically Ajax != JavaScript, and the rebranding is really DHTML, he is right. Ajax rebranded the Web, and we have all benefited from it.

I also think that this is just the beginning, and we haven’t seen the best of the Ajax revolution yet.

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/ajaxian/~3/329512658/javascript-rebranded-check

Apple’s online store just went down, a definitive sign that they will be launching a new product overnight. It could be the iPhone App Store, which will launch sometime this week (developers had to submit their apps by noon today to be considered for the launch), or it could be a rumored new Macbook/Macbook Pro product.

Apple loves to launch products on Tuesdays. Expect whatever it is to go up around midnight PST. Our guess is this is not the new App Store, because there’s no obvious reason to take the store down to launch new software. A new computer? Definitely.

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

Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/329485275/

With only four days to go until the launch of Apple’s App Store, which will feature 3D games that push the iPhone to its limits, most developers would consider releasing a browser-based iPhone game a bad idea. Throwing common sense to the wind, ad agency Hello Viking has just released Viking Smackdown, a Safari-based iPhone game that manages to take advantage of the phone’s built-in accelerometer. You can access the game by visiting VikingSmackdown.com from your iPhone’s browser.

The game itself is very simple: your goal is to make a cartoony-looking viking throw his axe as far as possible. Tilt your phone to the side and you are presented with a meter that indicates how forcefully you’ll throw your mighty blade. Then, once the meter is full, tilt the phone right-side up to send the axe flying. The farther it goes, the better.

While there have been a number of motion-sensing apps made for “jailbroken” (i.e. hacked) iPhones, few Apple sanctioned web-apps can make use of the phone’s accelerometer. Using some clever scripting, Viking Smackdown takes advantage of the web browser’s orientation detection to create this simple (but surprisingly fun) game. It’s a shame it will be totally obsolete in less than a week.

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/~3/329418344/