Blogs

I was recently asked to help out Jiibe, a start up client of ours, with a fun project. They’ve created Jiibe Connection, a video contest where you try to match a job seeker to the appropriate employer. The three employers are from three actual Vancouver companies including (obviously) Nitobi.

Here’s my entire interview with Darren and Julie.

I’m not doing so well in the results, but that’s just because the jobseeker isn’t cool enough to work at Nitobi. What do you think is holding me back as an employer?
a) my beard
b) my sarcasm (notice the interviewers laughing during my interview)
c) the fact Nitobi doesn’t go bowling as company
d) none of the above

Anyway go watch the video and vote for me and Nitobi!

It’s amazing that such a substantial part of Vancouver can be without power for so long. And this is a big area:

Luckily there are a lot of good coffee shops with wifi and power outlets. We first took refuge at Trees on Granville.

But finally for yesterday afternoon and all of today we set up shop at Alexei’s place since he lives a block from the office. Of course group home offices have their perks, such as BBQs for lunch. Mind you things can get a bit out of hand sometimes. Brock had things mostly under control though…

Anyway things have been alive and well through out the outages for Nitobi since we’re all on laptops and have recently outsource our code repository to SVNRepository.com. All our projects are cruising along nicely. But for the time being please use email or call my cellphone at 778 999 9287 if you need to reach us. Apparently BC Hydro might be down until Thursday at 8pm so stick with us!

Duane stopped by the Nitobi Office earlier this year to chat with me about RIAs, what we do and where it’s all going. We also chat a bit about RobotReplay.

I wasn’t sure where it was all heading, but I guess I ended up on the first episode of Duane’s World for Adobe TV. Very cool. If you think you have a topic that would be good for Duane’s show leave me a comment and I’ll put you in touch.

I should call out that Adobe has done a great job with the content and UI of Adobe TV but has failed to provide clean URLs that are actually updated in the address bar. Thus it’s kind of a pain to find and share URLs and impossible to navigate with back button. Too bad it would be so easy to make it a great example of public facing Flex RIA. Someone _high_ and Adobe really needs to start hammering this sort of thing home if Adobe is going to successfully make the leap to Saas and web services. I guess it’s not enough to have Kevin Lynch talking about it. I also can’t resize this video, so it’s best to go to Adobe TV to watch it.

[Disclaimer Duane's a good friend and on Nitobi's Advisory Board]

BlackBerry announced a new fund to encourage mobile applicationand development.

Research In Motion (RIM) (TSX: RIM; NASDAQ: RIMM), RBC (RY: TSX; RY: NYSE) and Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI; TSX: TRI; LSE: TRIL; NASDAQ: TRIN), today announced plans to launch the BlackBerry® Partners Fund, a US$150 million venture capital fund, to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry® platform and other mobile platforms. The Fund is to be co-managed by JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners.

Agnostic to both stage and balance sheet, the BlackBerry Partners Fund will not restrict the development of mobile applications and services to any single mobile platform or any specific industry segment. The Fund will be designed to advance the industry by fostering development and driving the entrepreneurial spirit to create the most innovative mobile offerings for customers.

There’s not much more than that. The have official site with a link to the press release and an email address. I sent them a message about a cool project we’re working on here but haven’t heard anything yet.

[Update] Rick from JLA (VC involved in the fund) they will support biz plans focused on any mobile platform and they are getting a lot interest, 845 msgs to date! I’m stoked Rick’s blogging about this, it just went from a weird big co blank page plus press release shutting me out to a human on the inside with a blog talking to me.

Earlier this year I was interviewed for an article on RIAs in ComputerWorld (sorry you need an account to log in).

Here’s an excerpt:

Developer: Nitobi Software Inc., Vancouver
Project: Nitobi Complete UI is a set of nine user interface components for rich Internet applications. They’re
designed to help RIA developers save time by plugging in whichever Nitobi modules they need rather than
recreating the functions themselves. They include, for example, a spreadsheet module called Grid, a Calendar
module, and ComboBox, for completing data-entry fields by searching a database as the user types.
How it works: All the Nitobi Complete UI components are written in HTML and JavaScript. Nitobi has offered the
components since 2004, but more recently has used Adobe AIR to give them the ability to work offline as well as
online. That means users can transfer data between their desktops and the Web more seamlessly, says Andre
Charland, Nitobi’s chief executive, and they can take data such as contact lists with them even when not connected
to the Internet.
Best practices: If you take the time to understand what AIR can do, says Charland, “it’s amazing to me how close
we can get to traditional desktop software.” The key is understanding and fully exploiting its capabilities.
For instance, he says, AIR can provide native access to Flash on the desktop, and it’s possible to call Adobe’s
ActionScript directly from JavaScript.
Because AIR is still in beta, he notes, it remains a “moving target” for developers. Nitobi tries to deal with that by
being very open with its customers about ways in which things could change.

Obviously things I said didn’t come through in the translations and AIR is 1.0 now it’s more stable. Other than that it’s a nice plug.

Dave Johnson will be giving a talk on JavaScript and DOM Design Patterns at Community One.

There is a hole in the current knowledge and practice of user interface development, even though most Ajax developers confront UI development on a daily basis. Although design patterns have been around for a while, little attention has been paid to the HTML Document Object Model (DOM). This presentation uses several concrete examples to explore the need for and application of DOM design patterns.

This presentation shows why DOM patterns are consequential, given the complex and often misunderstood interplay between the DOM, DOM events, and JavaScriptâ„¢ technology-particularly event ordering, bubbling and capture, and event triggers.

In this presentation, attendees will learn how to use the JavaScript programming language to write succinct, useful libraries that address key DOM design patterns such as composite controls. They will leave with an understanding of how DOM design patterns can help speed web development and result in more-robust solutions. They will also learn about various repeatable patterns that can be applied to DOM scripting, specifically how DOM events and JavaScript technology work together.

Mark your calendars for Monday, May 5th at 11am. CommunityOne is free and you also get the first day of JavaOne for free so you’ve got no excuses!

That same day we’re going to be hanging out and participating in the RedMonk unconference track. Our areas of focus are going to be the business of RIAs and some advanced topics in Ajax development.

The RedMonk Unconference: expect a rich mix of open source, dynamic languages, development in general, Java, social media high jinks, and all of the usual things you’d expect from the industry’s first open source analyst company. This year we plan a Rich Internet Panel (with JavaFX, Adobe, Nitobi, and other folks) and a discussion about the Mylyn Eclipse personal productivity IDE, with a special appearance by Atlassian’s Mike Cannon Brooks. This is the CommunityOne unconference by you, for you, so please come along and set the agenda.

User experience you can take to the bank! VanUE » HSBC User Centered Design Group

HSBC is a global bank with over 100 million customers in 83 countries worldwide. As a global team dedicated to championing the needs of all of HSBC’s customers, HSBC User Centered Design (UCD) views the customer experience as one that has no borders. With user research and user interface design teams worldwide, UCD has the ability to meet the needs of an ever-changing world. UCD projects range from intranet designs and applications for internal staff to innovative engagements with ATMs and mobile banking. Join UCD as the team shares some of its memorable experiences setting the bar for the “World’s Local Bank.”

Sounds interesting. Some of the best talks on usability I’ve been have been from experts working directly for business or product as opposed to outside consultants (not trash talking, ’cause I’m one of em). I’m also very interested in usability and ux in the banking world since so many Nitobi customers are large financial institutions. Banks also have to deal with other issues like large data sets, privacy, security and accessibility more diligently than many businesses so it’s neat to understand how they balance everything. Incidentally many big banks were *very* early adopters of Ajax…before we even had this clever little term:)

Guy Kawasaki just posted an interesting article that contradicts conventional wisdom on which entrepreneurs are your best bet for success, old or new. Based on some of the companies and founders I’ve seen going around Web 2.0 I’d tend to agree with a bunch of his points, some seem a bit harsh and may only apply in certain situations;-)

How to Change the World: In Search of Inexperience

Superficially, it’s hard to fault this ”back the proven entrepreneur“ theory. For one thing, from a venture capitalist’s point of view, if you fund a serial entrepreneur and she succeeds, you “knew” that she was proven. If she fails, at least you backed someone for a good reason—that is, she was proven—so your limited partners shouldn’t get too bent out of shape.

That’s a lot better than backing a first-time entrepreneur who fails—then you are just stupid. (Also, if you back a first-time entrepeneur, and she’s successful, you take the credit: “It’s because of my hands-on coaching and guidance.”) But, just as Glenn wrote, if you think about it, great, world-changing companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple, eBay, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, and YouTube were zero for three according to the official venture-capitalist spec sheet: Proven team, proven technology, and proven business model.

I could see slipping into the comfort zone of pas success being one of the biggest reason’s a second time entrepreneur would work as hard and might not make it:)

We’re
running a survey this month to gather information from web
designers and developers about the tools and platforms they’re using. It’s quite focused on development of Ajax user interfaces.

If you can spare three minutes, I’d appreciate it if you href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=bpDcVkz3gpWM1sBwcNAAMg_3d_3d">completed
the survey. It’s pretty brief-14 multiple choice and short answer
questions. One person who does will win an iPod Nano. We’ll be
publishing the survey results in February. So everyone wins really:)

I’ll be giving a quick overview of developing with AIR Jan 30th at WDN 08. Should be a blast.

Web Directions North - Crash Course in AIR
There comes a time when web developers need to reach beyond the browser to allow users to go offline, use local files or get rid of the hideous browser chrome. The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is an up an coming runtime technology that allows desktop applications to be developed with HTML, JavaScript, Flash or Flex. The AIR runtime and SDK are completely free so anyone can get started immediately.

Andre Charland will will give an overview or AIR, the APIs you get access to and how to build a simple Flex and HTML application with it. From there we will explore some of the tools available to make AIR development easier and faster. We’ll finish up with a few important usability guidelines and real world case studies of AIR projects.

Oh ya there’s a ski trip included in the conference so it’s probably worth dropping everything else in life to attend:)