November 12, 2007

Why am I blogging?

Christian Decker wrote this in the early morning:
This blog has been live for the last 2 years (it’s actually turning 2 next week) and I’ve been more or less active, posting new articles, trying to keep up with new events and trends and sometimes sprinkling in some personal posts. The blog has had it’s up and downs and sometimes I was successful with my publishings, especially in the more technical corner: And I think I can be pretty proud of most of them. Then again others weren’t as successful as I thought they might be… The problem is that after two years I’m starting to ask myself what the point in this is, take it as a mid life crisis for bloggers, blogging takes a lot of time, especially when you focus on technical articles and tutorials like I prefer to do, and I don’t have that time anymore. Maybe it will get better after the current semester, but the question is do I really want to go on and blog? Blogging has become some sort of obbligation, something I have to force myself into, it’s supposed to be fun, but as it is right now it isn’t. It’s more of a work.

*
* 2 Comments

September 11, 2007

Hacking iUI

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:
Joe Hewitt’s iUI is just great. As long as you do standard stuff…

I’ve been working on a small application based on the iUI Framework for some time now, and I hope to release it soon. So far iUI was working fine for me and I managed to squeeze everything into the limited functionality it provided me. But now, just like the iUI Author, I’m getting a bit bored by the “standard iPhone look” so I’m trying to find new, innovative, ways of adding functionality. Sliding from left to right and from right to left is cool, as long as you don’t have to see it over and over again, it’s time for some cool new stuff, that might not already exist in iPhone-land. I’m currently experimenting with scriptaculous to add some effects and I’m also trying to get some inplace editing to run smoothly.

Callbacks from iUI
iUI dictates some default behaviour when clicking on something, be it a link or a form button, even adding additional callbacks won’t prevent iUI from reacting. Wouldn’t it be nice to add callbacks directly into iUI, in a declarative way, so we don’t have to hack around too much?

Edit in place
Many have already forgotten about this nice thing: you have something displayed somewhere, you click on it, and can edit it, without having to load an extra page, maybe loosing the context. With the above mentioned callbacks this shouldn’t be too hard to realize.

iUI for everybody
Maybe it’s just me but limiting my application to the iPhone is a bit… restrictive, isn’t it? I noticed that iUI applications actually are great for start pages, such as iGoogle, Netvibes and similar. By making a Netvibes module you even allow users to add it to the Mac OS X Dashboard or the Vista Widget engine. So making iUI compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox would be a source for new users (well ok Firefox already works with some minor bugs, not much to do here…)

Well these are just a few ideas I had while developing with iUI, what about you?

*
No Comments

September 4, 2007

Ajax, CSS, DOM and JS-related resources

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:
Ajaxian today has a feature about the most useful information sources on Ajax, CSS, DOM and JavaScript (or as many will know them: the basis on which the whole Web 2.0 is built :) ), so I’ve skimmed through my del.icio.us account looking for stuff to add and here are my favorites: So that’s it from my side, if you have more resources you’d like to share with the rest of the world post them on the original article.
70-442, certification exams are valuable in providing knowledge and skills of designing and optimizing data access with the usage of Microsoft SQL Server 2005. 642-652, Wide Area Application Services for Field Engineers exam (WAASFE) is very beneficial for IT engineers and technicians to promote their skills. 642-445 certification exams are also associated with Cisco IP Communications Support Specialist certifications to promote IP telephony networking system. 642-565 cisco exams are designed to assess the abilities of candidates how to tackle cisco security products with the use of latest technology. 642-176 certification exams enable the candidates to get job successfully as SMB engineer. 640-816 stands for Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 2 (ICND2), having direct association with Cisco Certified Network certification exams. 156-310 exams are designed for the assessment of professional and technical abilities of the candidates.

*
* 1 Comment

July 11, 2007

What the iPhone means to WebDev

Christian Decker wrote this at around evening time:

iPhone
Now that the hype around the iPhone starts to subside, the real value is starting to shine through. For the development of web applications it means that a whole new breed of applications now have a market (think of widget that act as a fully fledged application). More and more web applications start to surface that are specifically tailored to portable devices (with small screens). So what I think the iPhone started (and other phones such as OpenMoko will continue) is the era of small, really specialised, applications, pushing Ajax with it.

The other great thing is that OpenID (my other favorite topic :D) will also start being used more extensivel, because we all know that writing on small devices is a real pain. There’s a great post over at FactorCity on OpenID & iPhone, which I think says it all.

*
No Comments

June 6, 2007

Google Gears, my two cents

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:

I know it’s a bit late to unveil the news that Google has published yet another great tool to you, since you’ll probably already heard it about ten times until now (2 days too late and it’s old news, I sometimes hate the internet…). Now all of you (probably no one at all) will be waiting for my personal point of view in this matter. At first I was pretty excited (hell I even made about 10 screenshots just to show them in my next blog post), and even more when I found out that Google Gears is already used in a bunch on non-Google applications too (RememberTheMilk being my personal favorite for now). But the excitement soon wore off, sure taking my stuff offline and being able to manipulate my wonderful Ajaxified applications is a great proof of concept, but when will I ever use it? What I mean by this is that, yes you can take the data offline, but you can’t yet take the interface offline, so you have to open the application, synchronize your data to use it offline, then switch to offline mode (which basically means you put your Notebook in suspend mode, and then resume when you don’t have network (think Plane), don’t ever even think about closing your browser because you won’t be able to get back! And what’s even worse you can’t access linked information either, which is bad since I really enjoy having some flick(r) through my Flickr-Feeds and look what my friends and contacts did last weekend.

My verdict: really impressive stuff, but please make something similar to load pages/interfaces from the cache.

*
No Comments