September 4, 2007

Import Contacts… no!

Christian Decker wrote this in the late evening:

Queup

Many Web Applications nowadays have the option to import your contacts from you other accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, MSN, MySpace, you name it. It usually is a nice feature for both the users and the owners of the application, as the users can get quickly connected to their contacts, while the owner rapidly gets new users. But stop! Not all “import contacts” options are the same, there are the good guys and the bad boys:
  • The good guys don’t ask you immediately to import contacts and certainly don’t force you to. They give you the option later on or they let you skip it, maybe you’ll do it later. What they certainly don’t do is automatically invite every contact you import by sending them yet another stupid email, or send friend requests in the case of social networks. These are absolute nonos! Don’t ever do anything the user is not asking for.
  • Then there are the bad boys, their mentality is best summed up as “All your contacts are belong to us!“, no really they don’t give you the option to skip import or tell you that if you don’t do it right now you won’t be able later. On top of this thy will send an invitation to everyone on your list and keep hammering them with updates, possibly citing you as the sender. These people will get pissed and at least delete you from their contact list, if not worse.
I had this problem once in the last few months and I can’t tell you how embarrassed I was to find out that an invitation has been sent to all my work colleagues. So please, please, please web developers be nice and give me a moderate import contacts, even if an aggressive import can fastly grow the number of your users, it will piss off ten times more!

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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.

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November 8, 2006

Adobe joins forces with Mozilla

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
Adobe has just announced a huge donation to the Mozilla foundation: a high performance ECMAScript Edition 4 Virtual Machine. Don’t know what ECMAScript is? It’s the standard behind JavaScript. Off course this is great news for all Ajax developers because it allows us to rely on the most powerfull Virtual Machine ever for our applications.
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Mozilla will host a new open source project, called Tamarin, to accelerate the development of this standards-based approach for creating rich and engaging Web applications. The Tamarin project will implement the final version of the ECMAScript Edition 4 standard language, which Mozilla will use within the next generation of SpiderMonkey, the core JavaScript engine embedded in Firefox®, Mozilla’s free Web browser. As of today, developers working on SpiderMonkey will have access to the Tamarin code in the Mozilla CVS repository via the project page located at www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/ . Contributions to the code will be managed by a governing body of developers from both Adobe and Mozilla. “Adobe’s work on the new virtual machine is the largest contribution to the Mozilla Foundation since its inception,” said Brendan Eich, chief technology officer, Mozilla Corporation, and creator of JavaScript. “Now web developers have a high-performance, open source virtual machine for building and deploying interactive applications across both Adobe Flash Player and the Firefox web browser. We’re excited about joining the Adobe and Mozilla communities to advance ECMAScript.” “This is a major milestone in bringing together the broader HTML and Flash development communities around a common language, and empowering the creation of even more innovative applications in the Web 2.0 world,” said Kevin Lynch, senior vice president and chief software architect at Adobe. “By working with the open source community we are accelerating the adoption of a standard language for creating and delivering richer, more interactive experiences that work consistently across PCs and mobile devices.”
Hopefully this will have an influence on the other browsers too and push them towards powerfull and standard compliant JavaScript implementation. I just can’t wait to see it in action :)

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November 1, 2006

Google & the media

Christian Decker wrote this in the wee hours:
It’s pretty incredible what reactions Google can create by simply buying another company. If it weren’t Google, nobody would care, but hey, it is Google ^^
And the deal was only sealed a couple of hours ago, now you might expect a personal comment from me… and I won’t disappoint you:
Google is great, and I really hope that they push the boundaries of what is possible, just like they did with their (still) incredible Gmail, but I hope it stops there, being an incentive for further development from others and no monopoly situation.

Office 2.0 here we go ^^

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August 19, 2006

Ajax Charting System

Christian Decker wrote this just before lunchtime:

If you’ve been scouring the web looking for a pure Ajax charting solution, you might want to check out this offering from WebFX, a simple, free, easy to use charting system with multiple chart types included.

In web applications developed now days a lot of the logic that previously resided on the server side is now being implemented on the client side. This is especially true for information presentation, components such as trees and columnlist makes it possible for users to interact with the application, or web site if you wish, without contacting the server. However the ability to present data in a graphic rather than textual format has been quite limited, unless a plugin is used or an image is requested from the server.

That’s where this component comes in to place, it allows various forms of charts to be created, without any additional plugin, and without using images.

You can see an example of the charting in action in this demo showing line, bar, and combo graphs from generated data. There’s even documentation, usage examples and an API interface provided as well.



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