Blogs

• Leah Culver’s Stupid Blog » Blog Archive » Pownce!
  Wanna a bit more about Pownce and where it came from. Kinda of a fun start for such a cool app.
  (tags: pownce development webdev web2.0 leahculver air django)

• Yahoo Sponsored Search Login
• Screenshot and upload to Flickr – Grabbr
  Nice little app to do screenshots and upload to Flickr. Handy for UI and design folks.
  (tags: flickr screenshot upload grabbr tool software windows)
• SourceForge.net: iPhoney
  iPhone Browser Simulator provides an iPhone sized web view with which to test your iPhone targetted apps, all in a pretty iPhone-inspired package.
  (tags: iphone safari webkit development tool testing)

• Optimize your Ajax Site for Google
  (tags: seo google pagerank ajax dhtml)

We’ve been doing a lot more consumer facing Ajax development work of late.  There a bunch of interesting challenges and risks, and since so many of of us live and die by our Google juice I thought I’d pass this bit of information along.

How to: Get Google and AJAX to Play Nice by Rich McIver

Here are some of the key points, which he explains in much more detail.

1. Design your site with degradable AJAX, that way users with JavaScript disabled can view a working version of your website along with JavaScript enabled visitors.
2. After you’ve established a non-AJAX working version of your website, go back and include an alternative AJAX enhancements where you desire.
3. When designing, make sure to check your website with JavaScript disabled as well as through the eyes of a text only browser such as Lynx or SEO-Browser.
4. Perform a browser check to make sure the user has JavaScript enabled, that way you’re only serving AJAX pages to users that can view them.

Rich’s article gets you off to a great start for building Google “friendly” sites. In our upcoming book Enterprise Ajax we show two very important techniques (with code samples) they are how to fix the back button and bookmarking (or deep linking).  These techniques will help you keep your site interactive and top of the heap in Google.

Technorati Tags: seo, google, pagerank, ajax, dhtml

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• iPhone Development – Key Facts Leaked
  (tags: iphone ajax development programming api webkit safari html javascript)

There’s a lot of hype and questions about Apple’s new toy.  I’m interested in what and how we can develop apps for the iPhone.  Ed Burnette has the scoop over at ZDNet on little secrets you may interested in.  I pulled some of the highlights here:

• Will run a version of the Safari browser (419.3, based on the open source WebKit engine
• Resolution is 320×396 for the web viewing area in portrait mode
• no Java/no Flash (YouTube is recoding they’re vids form quicktime)
• 10MB max html size for the web page
• Javascript: 5 seconds of run time and 10MB heap allocation limits
• maximum of 8 documents viewed at once (in tabs)
• iPhone User Agent will be “Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3″ – initially anyway
• The iPhone will have built-in support for viewing PDF, MS Word (.doc), and MS Excel (.xls) format files.
• Telephone-specific urls will, for example, allow the user to click on a link and make a phone call. These include “sms:”, “tel:”, and “mailto:”
• Stylesheet device width: 480px
• There are no scroll bars or resize knobs. The iPhone will automatically expand the content.

I’m still curious if us Ajax developers will get access to features like the camera, GPS, call logs, address book etc… And how that’s even possible while the Safari sandbox.

The thing that’s really burning me up is the physical UI though.  How are web apps going work with a multi-touch screen?  I think we’re going to do more than just change the screen size;-)  And maybe this is going to usher some very cool very big innovations in browser (Ajax) UIs.  More on that later though.

Thanks Alexei for the heads up.

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• Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates With Web Page and Website Testing – Optimost
  Andy Edmonds pointed me at these guys to look for ideas for robotreplay.
  (tags: optimization marketing testing analytics webanalytics statistics conversion tools)
• Mike’s Blog » Blog Archive » It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times
  Nitobi ComboBox and Grid now work in standards mode. A boon, hopefully, for our standards compliant customers. It’s been a long time coming!
  (tags: ajax nitobi grid standardsmode combobox)
• AIR Tour – I’m on the bus!
  (tags: air bus tour apollo adobe ajax dreamweaver nitobi)

I’m joining the AIR team from Adobe on bus tour to promote this new platform. I’ll be chatting about Ajax (HTML/JS) development in AIR and demoing a couple cool new apps we’ve been working on.  Don’t tell anyone but I’m also going to be building Ajax/AIR apps using Nitobi‘s new Dreamweaver components!

Our first stop is July 10th in Seattle, there’s 18 stops in total so check the schedule.

The bus is totally decked out complete with a Wii, GPS and webcam.  For updates you can follow the blog, twitter and flickr.

Get in, shut up and hold on! It’s gonna be a crazy ride:)

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• What’s hot in User Experience?
  (tags: usability ux ui userexperience books topics zeitgeist)
• What’s next for Yahoo?
  (tags: yahoo business web ceo jerryyang web2.0)
• Jake@Nitobi » Blog Archive » XSLT: as basic as AIR
  Jake is working on Webkit support for Nitobi. “As it stands I’m looking at the only current-version browser not to support XSLT. The XSLTProcessor code from WebKit is sitting in the AIR perforce repo, so there is some chance that 1.0 will ship with a w
  (tags: air webkit xslt xsl safari ajax browser)
• BarCamp / BarCampVancouver2007
  Sign up and present! I’ll be there with a gang of Nitobians.
  (tags: barcamp technology vancouver blog nitobi)

Big changes that’s for sure! Fred, A VC, asks “Is Jerry Yang The Next Steve Jobs?”

“…if Jerry really wants to do a Steve Jobs and turn Yahoo! around and build something much bigger, I think he can do it. But that’s going to require making some hard decisions that won’t be easy to execute.”

That would be awesome! I think we need another big player in the web app/web property space. Microsoft and Live certainly seem to be flailing there. With stuff like Flickr, the YUI Library, Flex based maps, newish Yahoo Search Marketing and Brickhouse Yahoo is well poised to do it. Seems like it might be about putting it all together and running hard.

Learn a bit more about the incubator concept from Brickhouse:

Technorati Tags: yahoo, business, web, ceo, jerryyang, web2.0