Blogs

I am moving most of my blogging activities over to nullisnotanobject.com but it will still be syndicated here anyhow so you might not even notice! Though there have been a few new posts that are not up here.

As a way to procrastinate from more important things at the moment, I thought that I would compile my own numbers about the recently published web’s most 20 visible Vancouverites. Note that they got David Eby’s web address wrong and seem to think that Flickr is a microblogging site. I digress.

It all seems to have created a little Vancity controversy. So I figured that rather than using some secret equation as NowPublic is using I would just list some of the stats for different people from different web sites such as Google, Twitter, Flickr and so on and readers can draw their own conclusions.

Take it with as many grains of salt as you like. It is interesting that some of the people were not that easily discoverable on many of the sites that I checked yet are still considered visible… let along checking Jaiku, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Delicious, Meetup, Upcoming, Dopplr etc

I also decided to check on how Andre and myself fit into those numbers.

Clearly I am out of my league when it comes to incoming blog links but I hold my own on the Twitter front and at least have some amount of content on each of the sites listed (and more of course). On the other hand, Andre seems to be in the top 25% in each category aside from lagging in the bottom 25% for incoming links to his blog.

Anyhow, food for thought. Damn web socialites

Disclaimer: Darren does online marketing for Nitobi (so I guess it’s partly his fault we don’t have more incoming links ). I also couldn’t sleep last night and therefore produced this piece of garbage.

Some big changes are coming in the Q4 release of Complete UI. Big!

Of course there is a slew of JavaScript bug fixes for all the components with Grid receiving the most attention for IE 8, Safari 3, Firefox 3 and Chrome.

There are a bunch of changes to the Java side of Complete UI with more great JSP and JSF code to make it even easier to use Complete UI in your Java project.

Finally, we have also made huge changes to the ASP.NET Grid and Combo code - and are working on the rest of the components as I am writing this! I think that anyone using ASP.NET will be very happy with the new direction of the ASP.NET code

We are shooting for an on time Oct 1 release but there is so much we are trying to fit in it might be a bit late - but it will be well worth waiting for!

Get it while it’s hot! It looks like the Enterprise Ajax Live Lessons are now available on either Safari or Amazon.

if you want to learn about Ajax in a format that is bit more easily digestible than reading a boring book then be sure to pick up the Live Lessons where we step you through all the pitfalls of building an Enterprise Ajax application. Topics covered include a framework review, testing, security and usability.

Go get it!

Despite it occurring on one of the nicest days of the year so far in Vancity, sixteen people came over to the Nitobi offices and hacked the day away. The beer arrived early so those of us who’s projects made a turn for the worse were getting sauced already by two or three - just after the pizza lunch.

When everything was said and done, Yohei came out on top with a Papervision3D version of the Nitobi office! It was pretty damn cool and you can play with it below.

Alexei also showed his NitobiBug tool that is a cross-browser Ajax debugging tool similar to FireBug.

Thanks to everyone for coming out despite the amazing weather (which you can see out the windows of the model of the office below) and the opening of the new Vancouver Apple store

We will be having the next one some time in the fall I think.

So far so good.

My talk at CommunityOne went off without a hitch and was possibly even well received. After which Andre and I went on to check out the RedMonk track at CommunityOne, which was inciteful as one would expect. We participated in a few discussions around cloud computing, twitter and, of course, RIA. I think from the discussion about RIAs I pretty much decided the only thing that makes an RIA is when an online application does not use page refreshes (too much). Flash, Silverlight and Ajax all share this one common thread. It was a good time and got even better at the house of shields after (between which was dinner with Dion, Ben, Chet, James and Andre).

At any rate, there have been lots of good conversations with all sorts of different people and the creative juices are flowing. Can’t wait to find time to get some code written

Tomorrow is the Anchor Steam tour that Mike Chambers has organized - needless to say I can’t wait!

The next Nitobi Hack Day has been scheduled for May 24 - put it in your calendar.

Check the details at Upcoming or on the Wiki.

Last time was wicked awesome and by awesome I mean totally sweet. Lots of hacking got done and the beer was cold.

And if you missed it last time we also have another Ajax and Scotch event the thursday before so that people can plan their exploits.

We managed to finally pull things together and get the release out despite some attempts by .NET build tools to sabotage the entire release!

With this release we now support Safari 3, have added a bunch of new themes to help you make your apps look hot, some new Dreamweaver extensions that mean there is no JavaScript to write to make master-detail grid or combo applications, and most importantly Mike did an awesome job on getting the new TreeGrid component done!

There are some exciting things in the works as well for next week - including screencasts and even some JavaServer Faces love!

We are almost a month behind now on the Q2 release of Complete UI but Mike and I are in the final throws of polishing. We are shooting for releasing today and if that fails tomorrow at the latest. As people will know from the beta we are releasing support for Safari 3, new Dreamweaver Extensions, new themes and, most importantly, a new component called TreeGrid for displaying hierarchical data. I have a can of Red Bull in hand and one last Safari Combo bug to fix before the building will commence!

So I have been accepted to give a presentation at CommunityOne, which occurs the day before JavaOne on May 5. I am going to talk about JavaScript + DOM patterns. I was going to focus on the JavaScript and DOM details around some common Ajax patterns such as those covered conceptually by Michael and Bill. Any ideas would be more than welcome!

Andre and I are also going to take part in the RedMonk CommunityOne festivities as much as possible as well which should certainly be a blast.

This is a bit of a digression but what a sweet picture. Ryan looks badass and Cote is all choked up!