Jun 2, 2006 · 1 minute read
I’m afraid you’ll have to bare with me at the moment. I’m busy, moving house, have no internet outside work (except open wi-fi points) and oh, did I mention I’m busy?
I have the usual raft of ideas, inability to really finish things unless I try and a dangerous penchant for playing with ever more scripting languages (XOTcl anyone?).
Oh, the friends bit? Inspired by Molly and her incredible ability to be open about her life, I thought I’d say a huge Thank you to everyone who helped me move house this week. Much appreciated. It could have gone oh so wrong, but everyone chipping in meant everything worked out just fine.
May 28, 2006 · 2 minute read
I dont often just post links to things I find interesting. I try and warble on more about something or other that’s on my mind. However, being rather busy and coming across something that really stood out makes this here post different.
I stumbled upon DabbleDB the other day. Watched the video. Thought to my self “That’s pretty darn slick”.
DabbleDB is, pretty simply, an online database. For everyone. Ever. The blurb from the site says:
Dabble DB combines the best of group spreadsheets, custom databases, and intranet web applications into a new way to manage and share your information on the web
What does that mean? It’s basically MS Access, but better and available through a web browser. Too complicated you say? Too hard to grasp? Watch the video. Be impressed.
One claim I’m interested in getting first hand experience of is the one regarding Spreadsheets. Most people use spreadsheets as light weight (ie. flimsy) databases, rather than the number crunching powerhouses they really are. DabbleDB seems an ideal replacement to the former, but what about the latter? I remeber seeing Dean Edwards’ playing with a Javascript Spreadsheet a while back.
I have to say I haven’t used DabbleDB yet. I haven’t signed up for a one month trial because I know I wouldn’t have time to explore properly just now. Everything that I’m excited about comes from the video, the site and the attached blog. When (not if) I get round to having a proper look I’ll try and remeber to post something.
Pretty much all your common desktop apps are now available through a browser, except crazy things like image editing. Oh and the browser itself. Now their’s an idea. A meta browser. Within your browser window open up several smaller windows, maybe using different rendering engines or setups running remotely?
May 18, 2006 · 1 minute read
Tis about time for another meet up in sunny Newcastle. Pretty short notice but hey, the mailing list has called.
Thursday 25th of May it is
We are aiming for Tilly’s on Westgate road. More info over on Upcoming.org
Already a good few people coming along so, if your in the general area, why not join us? If last time is anything to go by expect lots of people who either dont know each other or only know people by domain name discussing anything vaguely (and I do mean vaguely) related to the web.
The way of recognising everyone, as always, is the carrying of a recognisable web related book. Extra points for something really geeky, or really large.
I’m hoping for some good banter and some ideas for the future. Hey maybe even making these a regular shindig? It would save us taking ages to decide when and where to meet. Though on the where bit I pretty impressed. Their seems to be a strong correlation between web people in Newcastle and proper beer. Speaking of beer, I heard a rumour that Steve was buying a round to celebrate his new design.
May 13, 2006 · 2 minute read
At work we mainly use Microsoft technologies, .NET and such like, for our development. As I mentioned previously I’m playing with Python at the moment, and getting on quite nicely. With .NET being a framework, aimed at allowing a variety of different languages to access the same class library, I though
I wonder if you can use Python with the .NET framework?
The rather large Programming Python tome alludes to it being on the cards after the implementation of Jython but no more details than that.
I came across a few dated references indicating that it was possible but, and mentioning very slow reference implementations, all of which didn’t bode too well. Then up popped IronPython from an article by Jim Hugunin. This looked like what I was looking for. But it looked unmaintained, the page not having been updated for a couple of years!
But the story continued. Jim, having moved to Microsoft, was still working on IronPython and it looks like it’s moving forwards apace. The latest beta was released on the 20th of April and it looks like 4 more betas before a 1.0 release.
This discovery makes Python appear even more interesting. A nicely designed, cross platform scripting language with full access to the might of the .NET framework and it’s own good looking web development framework in Django.
So, for anyone else looking around for similar details here’s a brief list of up to date information:
May 8, 2006 · 2 minute read
I’m quite a fan of mobile devices. I’ve got a Palm, I had a Pogo for jeepers. However, I dont really have a geek phone at the moment (long story) – I’m still using my K700i.
While watching the last day of premiership football in a suitable venue I thought I might see about going to the cinema. With my trusty phone I tried to find what was going on. I waded through pages and pages. I did searches. It sent me round in circles more than once and I gave up more than once. I found some info. I tried to buy tickets. It failed to acknowledge the existence of first the cinema, and then the film.
Someone asked me at a recent talk about how easy it was to make sites compatible with mobile devices and I said (something like) “pretty easy”. I’m not happy with that answer now, so I’m going to change the question. How easy should it be to makes compatible sites?
WML might not be sexy, but it’s still in use all over the place. Support for mobile style sheets for proper web browsing seems all over the shop, with hundreds of different browsers pulling every which way.
Their are a host of IA issues that browsing on a mobile device brings up. A vast number of slightly new challenges to look at – and importantly a whole new way of confusing the user.
It makes you think maybe we need a dominant browser in the mobile space? Something to occupy alot of the ground and for the other browsers to loath and persue endlessly?
We also need some centres of best practice. I’m sure their are some out there. I just dont know where yet. Some references. A Mobile Zen Garden. A good book or two to review. Any thoughts?
Apr 30, 2006 · 1 minute read
It’s rebooting time people. First up a shameless plug for my entry this time around. In the spirit of screenspire here’s a full length picture for those that cant be bothered to visit the site proper.
Only a couple of reviews up at the moment but we will be adding them as fast as out busy fingers can write them. Big thanks to Mathew Patterson and Nicola Dobiecka for their assists here. Otherwise you would just be listening to my blatherings (a little like here then?)
Anyway, let me know what you think. As with all such endeavours more features (and probably fixes) will see the light of day over the next few weeks and months. Once everyone else is up I’ll post my personal faves, along with everyone one else ever.
Apr 26, 2006 · 2 minute read
I do quite a bit of musing on the subject of the community. Lots of other people do similar, just a few of the groups I know about:
Conferences are massive as well. With Carson going down a storm, @media looking to rock the summer again and some people spoke highly of SXSW, but then I wasn’t there (this year).
We all know each other. Think about it?
We are like footballers. We are the Premiership. We hang out in the trendy bars (conferences), we do everything we can to get mentioned in the papers (A-list blogs, A List Apart) and we get multi million pound book deals (DOM Scripting).
But theirs a difference. Youth players (students), the lower leagues (Z-list) and amateurs watch football every week. They read about it every day online and in the papers. Everyone knows who the best players are, whether they like football or not. Even then thats before you get to scouts from the big clubs getting along to youth and lower league games to find the next big thing, or the World Cup. Web design still seems spit between those in the know (probably you) and those not, for whatever reason.
So my question, if their is one, is – is football simply more mature? Do we need scouting systems? World Cups and better training facilities? Or alternatively have I taken this football analogy way too far?
Apr 23, 2006 · 2 minute read
Google just announced GData, which is apparently a:
...simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web.
It is basically an amalgamation of Atom, RSS and bits and pieces of Goodle juice. It piqued my interest for a couple of reasons:
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What was termed Optimistic Concurrency
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A promise of Authentication
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REST based
The former relates to a simple solution to the problem of concurrent updates. Say I grab a file and make a change, but in between another individual grabs the same file, and after I submit my changes, they also try top submit changes all my changes could be lost. GData specifies a solution to this by introducing version numbers, only if the version you are modifying has the latest version number will it be accepted. The version number is simply provided in the edit URI in the feed. Nice.
I wont ramble too much about REST, safe to say if you like URLs then it makes perfect sense and you can just get on with it. Lots of other posts about why if you missed the (ongoing) debate. It’s a bit like Microformats and the Semantic Web. The bariers to entry for microformats are the the same as those for building web pages.
I say the promise of Authentication above because it turns out that part of the system is not in place yet. The other part of that I’m sceptical about is, from my reading, a complete reliance on Google to provide the authentication. For some applications that’s fine, for others you probably dont want Google in charge of the keys.
It also has simple proscribed methods of dealing with categories and search queries, including Opensearch integration.
I was thinking about playing with a PHP based client/server for GData, or at least having a look, but I think I’ll wait until I know more about the authentication side.
I have a feeling Microsoft will do something like this as well, take existing open standards and republish them with a few bells and whistles. And again the developers, ie. us, are left supporting multiple slight variations on a theme. Maybe I’m just suspicious. Time will tell.
Apr 20, 2006 · 2 minute read
I’ve become something of a Gmail convert over the last good few months. Moving everything online has made my life oh so much easier. I’d done the same with my feed collection a good while back with Newsgator. Storing all my calendar related info was something that was on my perenial todo list. Well, Google finally got round to releasing their own calendar after months of “will they get on with it already”. First impressions are pretty good. It’s simple. It’s obvious (at least for a geek like me) and using Gmail already I quite like the styling.
One of the features I really like, but which will only mature with age, is the shared calendars. It makes publishing your itinerary to the entire world very easy. The more people use it the more useful it gets.
As a case in point I decided to enter the shedule for the upcoming @media conference and share the calendar – to be honest to see how it all worked. Of course, about 24 hours after I did this the lovely folks at Vivabit completely revised the initial schedule. Ok, so I was only momentarily annoyed considering the conference just got a whole lot better – though they did drop the CSS3 discussion panel which I though would have been interesting.
A little rejigging and the shared calendar is up to date again:
Feel free to subscibe, either via your own Google calendar or any iCal compatible application.
Apr 16, 2006 · 3 minute read
Well, it’s nearly 6 months since I launched the new design on here and entered into the 2005 Fall reboot with minimal acclaim but lots of nice comments and some traffic. That means it’s nearly time for the Spring event! I still like this design, which is something of a first for a pet project, so made a descision early to do something different.
I like the reboot. It’s a deadline for a start, with all the good and bad things that that entails. And as I’ve mentioned to a few people recently the 6 month release schedule seems just about right.
My new pet project aims to fill a gap that I’ve noticed when scouring the web for knowledge. I’ve mentioned before on here about being a fan of books, and have something of a stash of web, design and software related titles that I plough through pretty much constantly. But knowing what to buy, and what to read next, is never easy – even when I consider myself in the know. I’ve still got a fair few titles from when I started out which, in hindsight, were not the best starting point for a budding web designer.
So along comes Webdesignbookshelf.com
The domain is sorted. The design is nearly sorted (but subject to change a bit). The backend I did a while back (more on some of that later). I’ve no idea what happens to it in IE yet, but you cant have everything. One think I do need to sort however is content.
What I’m aiming for is good quality reviews. For the start I’m not looking to have a percentage score, or a star rating system, or similar. In my experience these tend to cheapen the end result, and become the be all and end all of the review. Books deserve more. Alot of it depends on context as well. The recent Javascript Anthology is a good book and worth the admission price, but I skipped most of it as it covered things from quite a basic point of view to begin with, something I wasn’t expecting. It really kicked into action later on, especially the accessibility chapter and the section on obect orientation. I would have liked to know all that before I bought it.
With so much information available online, and new sites popping up all the time, I still think books have a place. Especially with lots of talk of self publishing at the moment maybe we’ll see more books bypassing the old publishing processes. This could include books bypassing any kind of editorial process as well, good quality reviews can help act as a filter, a helping hand if you will.
Anyway, if anyone reading this far fancies contributing a review or two please let me know. I cant promise wealth, or fame and fortune just yet. But you should get a warm feeling that your helping a community, and you name up in lights if you like that sort of thing. And watch out for the May 1st launch over at the reboot, should be another good one.