Does it annoy anyone else that Web 2.0 apps like Basecamp no longer have login forms? I understand that you need to login at a specific URL http://nitobi.myapp.com but would it be so difficult to actually just have a login form that transfers you to your server rather than making people remember the server name?
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!
Way back in May of this year (I have been thinking about this post for a while now!) Andre and I were down at JavaOne to give a presentation and also had the chance to take part in the always interesting (at least two years in a row now) RedMonk CommunityOne session. It was good to take part in the cloud computing, twitter and open source discussions - one great take away was “don’t drink and tweet”. I digress.
Of most interest to me was the round table discussion about “what is an RIA?“. There were various opinions on this that I will not repeat here and let you read over on RedMonk.
What didn’t come through on the RedMonk review was what I thought, arrived at through the great discussion, was really the defining characteristic of Rich Internet Applications. In the end it was not about flashy graphics or animations. The one defining characteristic of an RIA is that there is no page refresh.
That’s it. That is all there is to RIA. If you have an application running over the network that does not have a page refresh then that is an RIA - be it using Flash, Ajax or a Java Applet. The discussion went back and forth until Jeremiah Stone from SAP finally talked some sense (afterwards we had a very interesting discussion and I really need to follow up with him) saying that good design is dependent on the context of the problem being solved. Now this is a really important idea since if you are used to working with a keyboard accessible green screen application, a visual mouse driven GUI will probably be far less usable. It is all context dependent. I may take longer to learn the green screen application but it will likely pay dividends in productivity down the road.
At any rate, long story short, the one common theme that people presented was that an RIA is defined by an application that has no page refresh, whether it is made for a user of a terminal or a new web 2.0 application.
I had my epiphany at the very end of the session and was pretty much lost on deaf ears of people who were about ready for a cold one (aside from Duane who was thoroughly liquored already ;)) . However, I felt somewhat vindicated when I was reading James’ post about the session when I noticed that there was a comment from David Mendels of Adobe, who was possibly responsible for defining the term while at Macromedia in the early 2000’s. Indeed David suggested that the original definition of an RIA was an application with no page refresh.
Based on that I think that the case of the meaning of RIA can be considered closed.
RIA == No page refresh
QED
It seems like drop down menus are moving back towards having down arrows on them.
It seems like in the early days of Web 1.0 people would do all they could to get away from the select box and use all sorts of fancy DHTML menus (remember dynamicdrive.com anyone?). However, these days we are seeing most applications that have drop down menus - while not using the HTML select element - are reverting back to the down arrow visual affordance.
For example, GMail, Zazzle, LinkedIn and Amazon are all using the down arrow on their drop down menus nowadays. This simplification of user interfaces becoming a common theme in the latest web based applications.
One of the more interesting things I came across in my blog reading this weekend was the release of the second generation Openmoko phone. The Openmoko phone is the phone for the FOSS community with even the CAD files for building the phone available under a Creative Commons license and a price just shy of $400 USD.
The question that I have is how many open source developers and evangelists out there that are building their applications on free and open source software like Linux, Apache and Ruby on Rails or that work for open source organizations like the Mozilla Foundation or that are evangelizing open standards like OpenID are going to get on board with the most open mobile device available? How many of them are going to trade in their fancy closed source IPhone - for which Apple has applied for more than 200 patents - for an Openmoko phone? I would wager that very few will.
I would expect that all open source proponents who refuse Microsoft software because of their closed, software patenting ways would likewise refuse a proprietary hardware device form Apple in favour of an open alternative and yet people are still probably more than happy to stick with their favourite pomaceous fruit designed in California.
So who swears by open source and is going to keep their IPhone or other smart phone?
I just saw an advert for Google Analytics in my GMail the other day that mentioned something about a new industry benchmarking feature. I knew immediately what it was.
The idea is that you take the analytics information from all the sites using Google Analytics and generate some benchmarking data by industry and apply it to your stats. That way people who use Google Analytics can see if they have an unusually high bounce rate compared to their peers or if they have a really low pages per visit stat. Right now when people look at their Google Analytics information - aside from their past experiences - they haven’t really got much to go on in terms of what a good bounce rate or pages per visit value might be. This way one can actually compare with others and then prioritize what needs to get fixed based on what is most out of whack compared to others in their industry.
In the case of Google Analytics, I think that this sort of feature could really change analytics from being a private sort of thing to becoming something that, dare I say, a social network could build around - who wouldn’t want to be featured on the Google Analytics homepage for having the best web stats?
I had this idea a while back and I think it can be applied to a lot of different industries outside of web analytics - sort of like PayScale is doing with salary reporting - but of course an idea is nothing unless you can execute 
Hopefully we can apply the same sort of idea to RobotReplay in the future.
We are almost ready to start building for our planned July 1 release of Complete UI Q3 - it is looking like we will be on schedule even! It is too bad we didn’t get everything in that we wanted but there are still a few nice new features.
The most notable updates aside from various bug fixes are Firefox 3 support, a new and improved Calendar and Datepicker component, and JSF versions of all the components!
I am really excited to see what sort of adoption we get for the JSF versions of our components and I think that people will be pretty happy with the new and Calendar functionality.
Time to get back to work as it will probably be a pretty tireless last week and a half.
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.
This morning I remembered why I never use the Vancouver Ontario Street cycle route - it is littered with death traps. No not the type that you may have seen in the recent Jones movie, I am talking about the invasive species introduced from the UK called the North American roundabout. It can generally by discerned by the motorists driving through it at break neck speeds; one may also identify it by the pieces of broken bicycles and / or cyclists strewn about in various states of disrepair.
If you use the Ontario Street bike route you must have a death wish. I think that Main Street - though you do have to be wary of door prizes in certain areas - is actually far safer for cyclists. I for one feel that rather than being segregated to the back of the bus, in the name of safety cyclists should be using the proper road ways, pissing of the car driving, climate changing commuters.
At any rate, one can see in the lovely animated gif, care of the Wikipedia article, that vehicles entering the roundabout yield to those already in the roundabout - be them cars, bikes or hover boards. What that means here in North America is that when entering the roundabout you give the right of way to those on the left unlike a regular stop sign.
Maybe we just need more magic roundabouts?
In case you have not heard of our upcoming Nitobi events - Ajax and Scotch as well as Hack Day - then where the hell have you been???
Come out on Thursday night (May 22) at the Shebeen Room for some lovely scotch - my current favourite is Auchentoshan - and of course Ajax discussions, which as we all know means pretty much anything these days.
If that doesn’t turn your crank or if you drink so much scotch that you are still lying in a pool of your own filth in the middle of Blood Alley by Saturday morning then at least come out to Nitobi Hack Day (this links to the wiki which no one is using anyways except for Brock who always keeps it real and I don’t even know what the hell Chuck is!) this Saturday (May 24) at the Nitobi world head quarters. There will be a beautiful keg of Storm Scottish Ale and hopefully some fun hacking antics like Booze’n'foos. Be there at 9:30 or 10 when things kick off.
