A List Apart Survey 2008
August 15, 2008
I took the survey!
Microformats and jQuery
June 20, 2008
I’ve been reading a book on Microformats, written by John Allsop. I’m not very far into the book yet, but so far it sounds very interesting.
I’ve read a fair bit about Microformats in many blog posts, and the microformats website itself is very informative. While I understand and appreciate that microformats are important for the greater good of the internet infrastructure, as a business owner and manager of the development team, I’ve been struggling to find a business proposition as to why we should start using them in our website development.
I assumed they would make coding more complex and perhaps increase client budgets (through development time) for no real gain for the client. I’m still tossing around the idea in my head, of how can the client really benefit from the use of microformats on their website.So I decided to play with a few microformats and dreamed up a hCard and jQuery combination (or mashup?).
Using jQuery it was really easy to dig into the body of the page and pull out address information, which is exactly what microformats are all about, creating markup that firstly humans can read and second computers can read.
Once you have the data using jQuery, your imagination is the limit really. I came up with a few trivial examples. The first example demostrates mining for the address and simply linking it to maps.google.com.au. The second example mines for the addresses and then as you click on them, plots them on a Google Map. I was amazed at how quickly and easy it was to program these examples using jQuery.
With this expirmentation I’ve found the business proposition and argument as to why we should start programming using microformats where possible; they make development easier and faster all the while increasing the infrastructure of the web!
You can download the source for the microformat and jQuery examples.
PhotoCam; My First Adobe Apollo Application
June 9, 2007
I finally found a little bit of time to try out Adobe Apollo. My first attempt was mearly just to get one Apollo application up and running, so I decided to do something simple. PhotoCam takes your webcam stream, allows you to take a ’snapshot’ and save it off to the hard drive as a JPG. You can download the source or try the application out. Besure to have the Adobe Apollo Runtime pre-installed.
I must say, I really do like Apollo. I used the Flex Builder Extensions to author with, and it was just so easy to code and get working. I was expecting a few problems, being an Alpha product, but everything just worked! And if you’re a Flex developer, than you’re in luck; apart from the Apollo specific libraries, you’re basically coding a Flex Application!
reCaptcha
June 6, 2007
Every so often you stumble across an idea which is really quite simple, but actually does some good in the world too (a WIN WIN). I’ve recently come across such a project, which is an extension of the popular captcha concept.
Most of us use captchas daily; simply put, it’s an image containing a smudged word in which you need to type and get it right before you can move forward. It’s used in blogging applications all the time (when you’re posting a comment for example) and is used to determine if the user is a human or a computer (computers struggle to decipher the word in the image correctly).
Anyway, reCaptcha is a project in which the captcha image is a word from a scanned book that the computer can’t recognise and therefore needs to be deciphered. Humans can do this, computers can’t. We’re deciphering things for the sake of security anyway, so why not put our deciphering skills to some use!
It’s an interesting read, and there’s more to it than you first think. One of the problems they had to overcome was, if the computer couldn’t read the word, how would the captcha system clarify if the user got the decipher right?
What’s even better is that it’s completely free! It’s one of the better captcha implementations I’ve seen too, as it allows for audio challenges. There’s a few platform specific implementations of it including a nice version in ColdFusion by Robin Hilliard.
technorati tags:recaptcha
goplan.org First Impressions
June 6, 2007
Although ALL my time is taken up with my business Enpresiv, I do like to have a couple of side projects going to keep my development skills up (I’m doing less development with Enpresiv these days), and so I can try out some ideas and experiment a little.
I’ve just launched a small side project, and decided I’d give goplan.org a shot to help manage the development. I’ve used Basecamp before (the leading web application in this space) on a number of personal projects, and I’ve really enjoyed the experience.
I’ve only just started to use goplan.org so these are my first impressions, I’m sure I’ll have different things to say as I keep using it. However, I’ll start on a positive note with the design. I really like the design of goplan.org, it is clean, clutter less and is very simple to use; in fact, in points it’s too simple and a little more information at times would be handy.
I think the feature set is one of it’s strongest selling points. The feature that goplan.org does better than Basecamp is bug management or tickets. Basecamp doesn’t have a direct function dedicated to bug management or tickets, and because I’m a web developer, bug/ticket handling is a really nice feature to have.
The only bad thing about goplan.org is, it’s speed! I signed up yesterday and started my first project, and I must say, it was really slow. I was even questioning continuing my trial. However, when using working with goplan.org today, it was much faster. In fact, speed was not even an issue. I’m not sure what was going on yesterday, but I hope the speed continues!
Google Maps ColdFusion Tag; now with official Google Maps API Driving Directions support
June 5, 2007
As the rather long title says, I’ve just updated my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag with support for the new official Google Maps API Driving Directions. In a previous post, I launched Driving Directions for my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag, however it didn’t use anything official from Google to achieve this. Adding support for the official API from Google will allow me to make it more feature rich and much more robust and stable.
There are a couple of other nice enhancements, including some JavaScript methods so you can update the directions on the maps, without having to reload the page. I’ve also added some more driving directions examples.
You can download the source (or a zipped 0.4 version) and check it out via subversion over at RIAForge.
tumblr.
May 31, 2007
I’ve finally done it, I signed up for tumblr today. I’ve been aware of it for a while, but at the time I thought how on earth am I going to manage this along with my blog and the millions of other social networks I belong too. But, as we got talking about tumblr in the office, I thought I might as well give it a shot.
Today is my first day of tumblring, and I have to say, so far I really like it. It has a totally different feel to blogging. It feels, almost, more informal than my blog. I don’t have to write much about anything, simply link to something or embed the video or photo right there.
I really like the media focus that tumblr brings to blogging. It feels good to drop in a YouTube video, and write something short about it and that’s that! As they say, a picture (or video in this web 2.0 world) is worth a thousand words. I also like the focus on different types of posts you can make, i.e. a link, a photo, a video or even a quote. It displays each post type in a slightly different manner. Makes for quite a nice visual experience.
I wonder if tumblring will become a word? Like googling and blogging…
Web 2.0; what’s next?
May 29, 2007
I’ve been thinking about web 2.0 a fair bit of late. I really like web 2.0 and the people-centric nature of its concept. I think it’s taking the web in a really great direction.
I wrote a post a week or so back about The Programmable Web, what I’ve been calling a byproduct of web 2.0. My post discusses the value of the web as a programmable environment itself (due to the growing number of APIs that are now available).
I think all the mashups people are creating in days (as opposed to months in traditional development) are fantastic. For me, this is one the key factors in why the web has grown so rapidly in the past 12 to 18 months.
However, many of these new breed of websites focus only on one task, for example, picnic and Snipshot focus solely on editing pictures online. In isolation, this isn’t a problem, in fact it allows developers to focus on one thing only, and make sure they do it well (as opposed to being a jack of all trades).
My question is, with so many cool, useful websites/services out there, are we missing something? What about the integration of these websites? For example, wouldn’t it be great to start building a mind map using MindMeister, then use picnik to crop an image to suit, and perhaps even cue point a video using YouTube and drop that into your mind map. At present, that’s damn hard to do!
Might this be the next version of the web? Building better integration between websites and immediately benefiting from the massive infrastructure of the web.
What about APIs?, you might say. Sure, they’re a great start, but you still need to glue the various APIs together with a programming language and a platform. I see the user interface as the major stumbling block for short term, better website integration. I think a change in the infrastructure of the web (or at least api programming) needs to take place, to allow the web to progress beyond web 2.0.
Tabber
May 28, 2007
I’ve always had problems managing my contacts. Between email programs, Address Book.app, and all the web 2.0 websites I belong too, well, it’s a pain in the ass!
Tabber to the rescue! Maybe.
I signed up for Tabber today, which is a new service aimed at managing your address book. There are other websites/applications that provide online address book management, however, Tabber is focussed on keeping you up to date on all of your friend’s movements! When they make a new post on their blog, update their myspace website, or their flickr account, you can easily find out about it! The caveat; they must belong to Tabber too.
Hopefully it won’t take long for Tabber to grow it’s user base and become a worth while tool.
Tabber is in beta, and it is very new, as such I won’t start using it straight away unfortunately. It needs a couple of new features before I’ll consider it such as importing contacts via a Group vCard file (for MAC OS X, Address Book users) and the ability to export your contacts details (so that you can easily keep your desktop applications in-sync), at the very least!
It would be great to be able to access your contacts via LDAP (so you could subscribe to the LDAP server directly from Address Book.app or Outlook). RSS Export would also be a handy feature! If Tabber is going to become the primary place to manage your contacts, ideally it should work with Desktop applications, just as well as it does with web 2.0 websites.
As Tabber doesn’t offer Group vCard as a format (which is what Address Book.app exports users as) for importing users, I used this application to export my contacts from Address Book.app into csv format, but you might find this one worthwhile also.
I really like what Tabber is trying to achieve and I’ll be keeping an eye on it, hopefully it will mature with some more features soon.
Mint Email Review
May 27, 2007
In a response to my post comparing spambox.us to meltmail.com, “John” wrote a comment about another temporary mail service, Mint Email. From what I can gather, John owns Mint Email (he does at least have a proper email address at mintemail.com).
Mint Email is a very different service to spambox.us and meltmail.com. Although it does provide you with a temporary email address, it achieves it in a very different way. Mint Email provides you with an email address with no setup whatsoever. You simply visit www.mintemail.com and you’ve got yourself a temporary email address. It works too.
I sent an email to my temporary email address, and within a few seconds, the email showed up in my web page. It’s quite a unique service, and even updates the title tag of the page so that you can see when an email has arrived when using a tabbed browser.
Which, is very important in this case, because every time you visit the page or refresh the page you’ll have a new, different email address. This is both good and bad. It is bad for longer term email addresses which you might need for a day or so (because you’ll have to keep the browser window open), but, if you know that you’ll be receiving the email in an hour or so this is definetly the service of choice. It is so simple and easy to use! You can even pick the email address yourself, which is a nice touch.
In summary, I’ll probably be using spambox.us for longer term email addresses. But, if I need an email address quick, and will only need it for an hour or so, I’d definitely use Mint Email.
