Planet Nitobi

Yohei Shimomae: Optimization test AS3 - Tween library performances 1

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 19:56:36 +0000

Today’s topic is Tweening library for ActionScript3. I did a comparison between Tweener (v1.31.71), TweenLite (v8.15) and gTween (Beta2). Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know all of these 3 libraries share the same basic functionality such as easing, on complete function caller, delay, time, etc. I also tried to include GoASAP in this comparison, but decided to exclude it because this one is not meant to work right out of box. It has a lot of customizable properties, but just to get a simple tweening working I would have to write about 10 lines of code (as opposed to 1 or 2) with it’s own update function, which wouldn’t be a fair comparison with the rest. In another word, the performance of GoASAP strongly depends on how the user writes its code. Enough intro, let’s get into action.

I tested the performance by placing N numbers boxes and applying looped linear Tweening on coordinates (x, y) and scaling, simultaneously. Let’s start with file size compareson.

Compiled file size (my code + Tween library)
Base file size without Tween Library: 2.8kb
Tweener: 17.4kb (+14.6kb)
TweenLite: 7.4kb (+4.6kb)
gTween: 9.4kb (+6.6kb)

Here you can see that TweenLite and gTween are significantly smaller than Tweener. Next up is performance.

Average frames per second (500 boxes)
Tweener: 19.8fps (+0)
TweenLite: 25.35fps (+5.55fps)
gTween: 20.9fps (+1.1fps)

Average frames per second (1000 boxes)
Tweener: 8.6fps (+0)
TweenLite: 13.2fps (+4.6fps)
gTween: 10.5fps (+1.9fps)

Once again, TweenLite tops with average of +5fps compared to Tweener. Tweener used to be my favorite tweening library but now is the time is to switch over to TweenLite. gTween also came pretty close and is significantly better than Tweener. Mind you, it is still in beta2 stage so there is still a lot potential for improvements. You can view the test app I made below. Click on “switch” button at top left to switch through tweening libraries.

Warning: this may be memory/CPU intensive for some computers. It has a potential to crash your browser/computer on slower machines.

If you have any other libraries that you suggest for comparison, please let me know as a comment to this post.

Dave Johnson: AIR Support

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:23:02 +0000

When Andre went on the final leg of the Adobe AIR tour back in the spring I needed to build a nice Ajax + AIR demo for him. Ultimately I had to drop the project and Andre went without. The main reason that I decided not to build the application was due to frustrations with building HTML / Ajax apps in AIR - though I had previously built several successful HTML / Ajax AIR apps in the beta versions of the AIR runtime.

This was the first real application that I had tried to build since the Beta 1 and of course there were some API changes - as can be expected between beta versions and a release - but more importantly the security restrictions in Ajax AIR applications make it almost unusable for certain use cases. At least for my HTML apps.

There are two main problems that I found exceedingly annoying and that ultimately led to the shelving of the project.

The first problem was that you cannot use innerHTML to insert HTML that contains event handler code such as <div onclick=”foo()”>Bar</div> when you are in the Application Sandbox. This is of course to prevent people from inserting malicious code on HTML events - which is equivalent to doing an eval if the user somehow triggers that event or the event is triggered manually through JavaScript.

That meant that I had to put most of my code in the Network Sandbox to get around the security restrictions. Fair enough I thought until Murphy reared his ugly head.

It just so happens that you cannot pass complex objects across the Sandbox bridge since they become of type “Object” on the other side. So for example I wanted to pass an XML document from the Network Sandbox where my application UI is residing into the Application Sandbox so that I can do some cross domain requests with it and / or save it to disk for use later when offline - essentially to do anything interesting it needs to be in the Application Sandbox. So to do this I had to write my own code to serialize and deserialize any custom objects that I wanted to pass around, essentially converting my XMLDocuments and so on to strings on one side and then loading them into XML documents again on the other. Pain. In. The. Arse.

A second, and maybe more important result of not being able to pass complex objects across the bridge is that it pretty much means that if you want your UI to be in the Network Sandbox you cannot do file drag and drop unless you have a special place that is in the Application Sandbox where the user can drop onto. This may not seem like such a big deal, however, it poses other problems with the UI layout since the best way to layout the UI in an HTML AIR app is to have the custom chrome in the Application sandbox using the CSS border-image (which is awesome) and then have the rest of the UI in a 100% width and 100% height IFrame with some margin to take into account the custom chrome edges. In that case there is not really any opportunity to have a special drop area in the Application Sandbox to accept dragged information from the desktop.

So to make a long story short, building AIR apps that use dynamic UI generation and some of the APIs that make AIR awesome, like drag and drop, means that HTML / Ajax AIR apps are simply not feasible due to the security restrictions.

Joe Bowser: will_paginate and Ajax pagination

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:12:33 +0000

One thing that I’ve been using a lot is will_paginate and it’s derivatives, such as merb_paginate, ultraminx and ultrasphinx. One problem that I noticed with merb_paginate was that it didn’t want to use the restful paths in the merb app that I was using. This was rather annoying, since I was trying to make my merb app almost entirely restful, except for the home controller. So, instead of using paginator, I decided that I wanted to add ajax pagination.

The first step that needs to be done is to create a create and delete js view. This is extremely basic. I have some code that does this in one of my github repositories. Namely, the sparty_server code.

In the controller, uncomment this line as usual. We are going to be sending back json:
provides :xml, :yaml, :js

Then create the following *.js.erb files:

index.js.erb
var events = “”; %= partial "widgets", :with => @widgets %> %= partial "shared/paginate", :items => @widgets %> $jQ(”#main_eventlist”).empty(); $jQ(”#main_eventlist”).append(events); $jQ(”.pagination”).empty(); $jQ(”.pagination”).append(navigation);

Note that you should really make this so that it uses your jQuery variable. Here, we’re not using noConflict. noConflict should almost always be used, since you most likely will be using a non-jQuery item with your software. We also created two partials, namely one that just lists the lists. This could be used for anything that will update inside a div. The other thing that we created is a pagination partial, which just updates the pagination, here’s the code for this:

var navigation = ”

“;

  % if items.offset == 0 %>

navigation += ”

“;

  % else %>

navigation += ”
%= items.first.class.to_s.downcase %>_%= items.current_page.to_s %>\” title=\”previous\” alt=\”previous\” onclick=\”prevPaginate(this.id);\” >%= items.first.class.to_s.downcase %>_%= items.current_page.to_s %>\” >
“;

  % end %>

navigation += ”
Page %= items.current_page.to_s %> of %= last_page(items) %>
“;

  % if final_page(items)%>

navigation += ”

“;

  % else %>

navigation += ”
%= items.first.class.to_s.downcase %>_%= items.current_page.to_s %>\” title=\”next\” alt=\”next\” onclick=\”nextPaginate(this.id);\”>%= items.first.class.to_s.downcase %>_%= items.current_page.to_s %>\” >&nbsp
“;

  % end %>

navigation += “


“;

This is pretty obvious. This just uses the methods present in all will_paginate derived objects to determine which page is present. One thing that we found is that we don’t always have access to all the methods and attributes, which is why it looks rather odd.

Here’s the javascript code that does the pagination:
var prevPaginate = function(id) { items = id.split(’_')[1]; current_page = id.split(’_')[2]; next_page = parseInt(current_page) - 1; next_page_key = “#page_” + next_page; uri = parseMerbUri(window.location.href); good_uri = window.location.href.split(”#”)[0]; next_page_key = good_uri + next_page_key; hist.add(next_page_key);

query_string = uri + “?page=” + next_page;
if(next_page > 0)
{
jQuery.get(query_string, function(data){eval(data);});
return false;
}
}

var nextPaginate = function(id)
{
items = id.split(’_')[1];
current_page = id.split(’_')[2];
next_page = parseInt(current_page) + 1;
uri = parseMerbUri(window.location.href);
good_uri = window.location.href.split(”#”)[0];
next_page_key = good_uri + “#page_” + current_page;
hist.add(next_page_key);

query_string = uri + “?page=” + next_page;
jQuery.get(query_string, function(data){eval(data);});
return false;
}

Of course, we have a method that parses the URI so that we are going to the right resource. This is important for nested resources to do this, since we want to display the correct results. We also use the Nitobi history in this case because we want the back button to use the pagination, and not go back to the previous page in the history.

I’m going to make this more generic in the next couple of weeks and post the code to the blog, however this should be rather trivial for anyone to do once they know how will_paginate works and how to use the json data that it sends back.

Joe Bowser: Merb, jQuery and Nitobi

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 19:00:59 +0000

Recently, we reached a milestone with our first Merb project. The project was interesting, since it was the largest Merb app that we had to deal with. The good thing about Merb was the fact that it’s lightweight, and gives you a sense of what you’re actually using as opposed to Rails, which is full of methods that I just don’t use. I also like the way file uploads are just handled in Merb, as opposed to the Rails way, which is far more cryptic.

The fact that whenever you post data, it just goes to the following parameter:

params[:file][:tempfile]

Is extremely handy, since this doesn’t have to be handled like the good old ruby way of handling blob data through your app. You still have to move the file, but you aren’t just being handed some weird data in memory and expected to use something to process it. This is why people use plugins like attachment_fu and things like that. The less your web app is handling that sort of data, the more requests that it can handle, and the more things it can get done.

Of course, that’s the whole point of Merb. Admittedly, we don’t take advantage of this as much as we could have in this project. We have Rails projects that handle hundreds of uploads that would probably be more suited for Merb, but of course hindsight is almost always 20/20 and it’s time to move on to talk about jQuery and Nitobi Toolkit.

Since this was an experimental project of sorts, I decided to try out jQuery to see what all the hype was about. jQuery is a nice little framework that makes doing simple things like Ajax requests easy. Attaching events to classes is handy, and that is the fundamental strength of the framework. Also, using jQuery UI was interesting as well. While making things appear and disappear was easy, some of the components tended to be ugly, and lacked functionality, so we decided to use Nitobi Calendar instead of the jQuery calendar early on.

This brought us into bringing in Nitobi Toolkit and Nitobi Calendar and making it play nice with jQuery. We learned the number one thing about jQuery, which is that you should always use noConflict if you believe that you are going to use more than one framework. In our case, we use both the Calendar and the Nitobi History object, simply because of the lack of examples of the jQuery.history object, and the fact that it relied on Anchor tags in the examples. It wasn’t clear if we could custom define the URI behind the scenes, and use that instead of something defined in the markup, which is exactly what we wanted to do.

Therefore, we used Toolkit’s history method, and it worked rather well. I may check out jQuery’s History add-on library, but the Nitobi history comes standard in Complete UI and is rather easy to use. There will be some tweaks to it in the next version of CUI.

In short, it was an interesting expeirence working on the project, and being able to work with Merb. I’m definitely going to move towards Merb, and it should be good when Merb 1.0 comes out at MerbCamp in San Diego. Unfortunately, it’s at the same time as Canadian Thanksgiving, but there may be at least one person from Nitobi present.

There may not necessarily be a MerbDog soon, but It’s definitely my first choice for any new personal web projects that I do.

Andre Charland: Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Released

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:01:12 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Yesterday Microsoft released IE 8 Beta 2. It’s likely the most anticipated release of the browser to date, for developers anyway. This is because they’ve done a lot to support CSS 2.1 and HTML 5 standards, which is everyone agrees is a good thing. It might not be perfect yet but they seem to be making good progress.

Andre Charland: Video Based Enterprise Ajax Training

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:01:12 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Dave Johnson, Alexei White and I have finally completed our video training series on Ajax development for high performance and large scale Ajax UIs. We took the book, Enterprise Ajax, we wrote last year and then recorded just over 8hrs worth of Ajax training. Hopefully it’s a bit easier for folks to swallow than the 500 page book;-)

Andre Charland: Flex 4, Thermo, Flash 10 and Degrafa at 360 Flex

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 15:01:12 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Ted Patrick just posted a screencast from Mark Anders where he gives a great overview of the roadmap for Flex 4 aka Gumbo , Flash Player 10, Degrafa and Thermo at 360 Flex.

Andre Charland: Google Provides Location to web and mobile apps

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 11:01:09 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Google announced 2 new ways to make your apps location aware yesterday. One’s a web service that any web can take advantage the second is built into Google Gears, and runs on the mobile version of this plugin.

Alexei White: Firefox 3.1 Borrows Ideas from Flash VM

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:28:04 +0000

When I saw this I breathed a huge sigh of relief. It looks like an upcoming version of Firefox will have run-time byte-code compilation of script, giving near-native code performance to some JavaScript. What does this mean? basically 5 to 6x improvements in performance for many JavaScript-intensive applications.

Read all about it here.

Andre Charland: Designer Resources for iPhone App Development

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:01:13 +0000

From InsideRIA:
It might be debatable whether a native app written Objective-C is an RIA, but most of the are internet connected at least part of the time and lots of the coolest iPhone apps I’m using run right in Safari on the iPhone. It’s not however debatable whether or not iPhone has raised the bar for slick and aesthetically pleasing UIs and if you’re going to develop a web app or native app for the iPhone you need to meet that bar to succeed. On that note here are a couple resources to make your iPhone apps look like Apple’s very own apps!

Joe Bowser: Introducing VHS

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:39:31 +0000

Recently, I’ve been talking about VHS. VHS is an acronym, which now stands for Vancouver Hacker Space.

The Vancouver Hacker Space is a project that I’ve been working on for a while. It was started with the FreeTheNet.ca people at The Vault, which was in the BC Electric Building. However, we didn’t quite have critical mass, since people were still uber-psyched about FreeTheNet (note: VONIC is still around, I’m just taking a break from it). However, after I went to The Last HOPE in NYC and met up with the people at NYC Resistor and HacDC, among other Hackerspaces, I decided that Vancouver really needs a hackerspace.

Now, Hackerspaces aren’t anything new, in fact Germany has had them for years. In fact, Andre has been to c-base, which is one of the older Hackerspaces in Germany that double as a nightclub. The hackerspaces are all over Germany and they are run by the CCC, who are a damn cool group, with a really interesting history.

Anyway, this is interesting because there will finally be a place where people can collaborate and see different hack projects. For example, I had a multitouch interface that worked, but the problem was getting it out of the apartment to Nitobi Hack Days. With the new hackspace, interested hackers can go check out the thing in action, and the public can see it. (And as much as I like people, I don’t want them coming into my apartment randomly). We’ll also be working on Arduino hacking, and Robots, and LED Throwies and all sorts of other cool stuff.

The first public meeting is tonight at the hackerspace. The meeting will be at 6:30 PM. If you’re interested in getting more info, please let me know.

Yohei Shimomae: Optimization test AS3 - BlurFilter

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:05:07 +0000

var blur:BlurFilter = new BlurFilter(blurX, blurY, quality); displayObject.filters = [blur];

Let’s start with the basics. When you create a new BlurFilter object, it has 3 properties. First one is horizontal blur strength, second is vertical blur strength, and the third is quality. Blur strength needs to be above 1 and quality above 0 for BlurFilter to take effect. The second line of code is used to actually apply the filter onto an existing object. Filters are not update itself, so whenever you make a change to the filter properties, you will need to reapply the filter on objects.

Strength VS Quality

Almost identical blur effect can be achieved by balancing the strength and quality. Lowering the quality is the key to better performance. As shown in above images, the difference in FPS is significant.

Area VS Quantity

These examples show the difference in FPS as a result of where you applied the effect. On the top image, it’s significant that applying the filter on individual object increases the FPS. However, this is only the case if you have low number of child objects. In the second example, applying the effect on the sprite containing all the child objects have slightly higher FPS.

Dave Johnson: Login Forms

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:15:42 +0000

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?

Mike Han: Calendar Tutorials

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 21:05:32 +0000

I just put up some Calendar tutorials at support.nitobi.com for all you keeners out there.

Implementing Date Ranges
Localizing the Calendar
Standalone Calendar/DateInput
Validation
Date Masking Syntax

Enjoy!

Dave Johnson: Enterprise Ajax Live Lessons

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 16:48:23 +0000

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!

Andre Charland: links for 2008-08-12 [delicious.com]

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 01:28:56 +0000

What is an RIA?

Simple: no page refresh. I like it!

(tags: ria ajax nitobilikes definition nitobi davejohnson)

Dave Johnson: What is RIA?

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:55:01 +0000

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

Yohei Shimomae: Random 3D stuff

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:06:49 +0000

I don’t know what this is going to turn into, but I created some cube visualizer with random grid texture. The pattern is random so it will look slightly different everytime. It’s not interactive at the moment, but I will see that this could turn into.

You can see the real thing here: http://www.yoheishimomae.com/demo/cubething

Yohei Shimomae: Falsehood of Airport Express

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:31:29 +0000

Ok, so I just bought Airport Express yesterday and I have to say this is by far one of the worst Apple products that I got. Seriously, my NETGEAR router from 3 years ago was 100 times easier to set up than this.

Basically Airport Utility can not search for my Airport Express whenever it scans for devices. I tried on my iMac, MacBook and PowerBook G4. I tried reseting the device, rewiring the cables, none works. Null. About every 10 reviewers on the apple store site for this product seems to be facing the same problem as well. People who had this problem had their Airport Express exchanged but they are still facing the same issue so it is not a hardware defect. These people also got help from Apple care support and after couple hours of configuring it still doesn’t work. Apple doesn’t even have a solution for this problem. Some guy came up with a conclusion that it just does not work!

Apparently the best solution by far is to just use your Airport Express as a paper weight. It just seems to me like Apple is releasing broken products just because they can and people will still buy them. I mean, if you use iTunes and need remote speakers, there really are no alternatives.

Chris Stone: Facebook takes a turn for the usable

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 22:58:56 +0000

With the new enhancements and layout changes to Facebook I figure it’s high time for me to take some time and get back to ye ol’ blog on UXD here at Nitobi

I must admit that upon a sub-surface evaluation of Layout, Navigation and Interaction Elements, I’m quite impressed with the changes to “The New Facebook”. I do have a few complaints but they’re far outnumbered by worthy improvements and advantages gained so here we go…

» Global NAV «

1. Removal of arrows for drop down menus

Perhaps they were just ready for a change but I can’t agree with the decision to remove a) the navigation functionality previously made available through the old nav and b) the visual cue suggesting to the user that there is more information hidden under the arrow should they click on it.

The look/feel is cleaner but I see several clear disadvantages:

removed the ability to select from multiple friend options in drop-down menu

removed the ability to navigate directly to specific “Inbox” options such as Notifications. If I’m not on the home page, how do I get to them?

I’m sure there is a reason behind this decision and it’s up for debate until one of you out there feels compelled to clear it up for me.

2. Addition of “Applications”

Seems like a logical addition but referencing the applications as “bookmarks” the “Status” container on the home page can be a bit unclear at first. Sure, I can easily figure out what they’re inferring with the icons but some a labeling change to “Application bookmarks” would clear this up greatly. With the previous observation negligible in scale, the major oversight here is that there’s no link in the Applications menu to “Find more applications”.

3. Changed “Profile” to “user.name”

Personally I liked it how it was before because it creeps me out a bit to see my name all over the place. I wonder what the meeting must have been like to justify that change?

» Home Page «

1. Layout

The first change I noticed was obvious in that they’ve increased the overall content container width to 964 pixels, a significant increase of 20% from the previous 799 pixel container.

This has gave them a nice advantage to condense the home landing page information vertically and in this case, contrary to my comparison of profile page footprints coming later, they actually increased my home page height, albeit by a negligible amount (134 pixels).

2. Visual changes

It’s nice to have the vertical bounding box removed. The content blocks now “float” in space and IMHO give the entire site a slightly lighter visual feel.

3. News Feed navigation

Having the newly added ability to browse through your News Feed by facet (Top Stories/Status Updates/Photos/Posted Items) is a welcome addition. This feature alone gives them arguably a 4x increase in information density by footprint w/o having to increase total page height. Nice work indeed in terms of IA and UX.

4. Inline Preferences/Editing for content chunks

I love this addition!! Incredibly useful and powerful for the user that will take advantage of it (of course).

. Wall: Edit posts
. News Feed: Set Preferences for a particular Friend being displayed
. Info, Apps, Friends all now have inline preferences found under the “Edit” box

AWESOME enhancement!! I love inline preferences. Incredibly useful.

» Profile Page «

1. Introduction of new profile navigation

Another addition that I am diggin’ on for various reasons. First and foremost by reworking this page and implementing a sub navigation they effectively reduced the height of my home page by 45.3%!!! (3487px » 1907px = 45.3% reduction in Eye Miles to view content). Those numbers are tough to argue with, especially in light of the fact that I now have more information at my disposal than before!

With the sub-nav now enabling inline viewing of Wall, Info, Photos and Boxes users, much like the new nav introduced on the home page for News Feeds, users can now browse 4x the info previously unavailable to access within the old layout. The best feature of this new profile navigation is the sub nav (Share Link - Add Photos - Give Gift - Fun Wall). I specifically like the Photos component that now allows users to create photo albums, post photos and take a photo directly within their profile page. IMHO this is one of the best small changes that they could have made in light of the fact that they have brought users one giant step closer to a core element of sharing experiences through social networking applications, PHOTOS!

Without going into every point in detail here’s my general list of advantages and disadvantages of the new profile navigation:

Advantage(s):
- Profile page is significantly shorter in height (3487px » 1907px = 45.3% reduction)
- Increased customization of profile view
- Greater IA priority and separation given to Photos
- New quick add interaction for creating albums/adding photos gets users that much closer to a core element of sharing experiences through social networking applications

Disavantage(s):
- Unnecessarily disruptive layout changes for navigating to Photos and Boxes.
- Photos page: No interaction element displayed for adding photos, only can Create and Album. They should consider including that interaction element as a component of the “Photos” sub nav which would help maintain the layout consistency and alleviate the disruptive layout change noted above.
The remaining items that I jotted down for the profile page alterations were….

- Wall and Mini Feed have been merged into one stream under “Wall”
- The additional tab in the profile NAV noting a “+” for adding a new tab to the mini-nav. I can infer that I’m able to add something via that interaction element but there’s no hover state indicating what it is until you select it. Small quirk, but easily addressed.

» Summary «

To sum things up I think the Facebook usability crew made some great decisions in the changes that they made to the new version. I’m quite interested to see how they address some of the dangling UI issues I have mentioned and any other once that surface over time as people make the switch. If you made it this far thanks for reading through my comments! Feel free to share yours or debate what I have to say.
Cheers, Chris.

Alexei White: The easiest way to learn to code like a JavaScript Ninja

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:41:46 +0000

Today our video Live-Lessons came out featuring over 8 hours of video instruction with complete code samples covering topics in JavaScript and general Ajax development. We’re really proud of this package and think that many of our customers would probably enjoy this material. If you are interested in honing your JavaScript skills, understanding more about the language fundamentals, or techniques in debugging - you’ve got to check this out.

Get it here!

Here is the complete lesson plan:

8+ Hours of Video Instruction

1. Introduction to AJAX Learning Objectives 7:06

2. JavaScript Basics Learning Objectives 82:15

3. Ajax Debugging Learning Objectives 25:20

4. The XMLHttpRequest Object and Data Learning Objectives 29:15

5. Introduction to Ajax Frameworks Learning Objectives 127:45

6. Test-Driven Ajax Development Learning Objectives 49:40

7. Offline Ajax Learning Objectives 47:45

8. Ajax Security Learning Objectives 41:39

9. Ajax Usability Learning Objectives 36:44

10. Ajax User Interface Patterns Learning Objectives 38:51

Yohei Shimomae: Page flipping physics

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 23:46:59 +0000

I spent couple of hours today creating paper flipping physics from scratch. It wasn’t as easy as I expected and the image above shows some of the battles that I had to go through. Below is an Actionscript 3 implementation of this equation. Good ol’ sohcatoa.

(Click on the paper to flip back and forth)

Andre Charland: iPhoneDevCamp II is underway!

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:01:09 +0000

From InsideRIA:
The second annual iPhoneDevCamp has just started here at the Adobe offices in San Franciso. There’s about 300 people and I think most of them are planning to build an app or at least hack a little bit. The even runs from Friday night until Sunday night. The highlight of the even is certainly going to be the Hackathon where developers and designers will be splitting off into teams and trying to build an iPhone by Sunday afternoon for the grand demo. This year’s event has 60 sponsors as well!

Andre Charland: Ribbit is Acquired by British Telecom

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 12:01:12 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Big news for one of the shining lights in the VOIP, Flex and AIR world this morning. Ribbit was acquired by BT.

Ribbit has been acquired by BT one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services. This marks the most important day yet in Ribbit’s history. As part of BT will be able to more quickly extend our vision beyond Silicon Valley and bring our products and technology to the entire world. We couldn’t be more excited than to announce this new partnership.

Alexei White: How cool is Cuil? [Empathy URL not found].

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:03:55 +0000

There has been a LOT of buzz about Cuil (pronounced ‘cool’) - a brand new search engine. Unlike MSN / Yahoo / AskJeeves etc, it does not share any of the underlying technology with other search engines, and maintains entirely its own database of webpages. Apparently their database is multiples larger than Googles, and in fact, several of the key employees are from Google.

The media has been blasting Cuil as fizzling out on its launch day. Technical problems plagued the results pages - often replying with ‘No results found’ (which 99% of the time is rediculous). I can certainly forgive this type of problem on launch day as they figure out how to scale properly to the load. What is less forgivable are the lack of relevance in search results. Google has become quite good at filtering out the spammers and link-hoarders from SERPS. When I searched for ‘ajax grid‘ I got mostly shareware download sites (wrong!) all forwarding to the same 2 products.

A secondary issue is how the URL’s for search results are quite small and out of the way. I usually focus my attention on the URL as opposed to the page title - mainly because it helps me filter out the junk from the gems quickly.

I’m always willing to try something new, and I’ll definitely come back to Cuil after a few months - but they definitely need to address relevance in their SERPS. The good thing about search engines is that switching costs are ziltch so there are opportunities out there for people who want to compete - like Cuil. They would, however, join a long list of utter failures when it comes to the search space.

I was also thinking, one way for them to get a foothold maybe in the search space would be to sell a Google-appliance like device that competes favourably on features for enterprise search. My experience there tells me there are opportunities if they can compete on features and price - even if their SERPS’s are still being improved.

Alexei White: Whats all this about a DNS exploit?

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:58:44 +0000

If you follow IT news you might have heard something about a ‘DNS exploit’ squirreling its way around the Internet. It’s true, there is one and its a doozy. Something like 52% of all DNS servers on the Internet are vulnerable. There’s a fix, but it’s not easy to implement and its not a ’silver bullet’ either. For an easy-to-understand english language explanation, check out this post. The summary is as follows:

Whatâ€™s new is that the bad guy doesnâ€™t actually have to wait [for a DNS request]. DNS is actually more of a relay race than a sprint. Remember, you send a request to a server, and you might get a reply that says â€œwww.foobar.com? Sure, hereâ€™s the IP address to use.â€? Or, you might get a message that says, â€œwww.foobar.com? I donâ€™t know, ask ns1.foobar.com, hereâ€™s its address.â€? Thatâ€™s recursion. Itâ€™s not a bug, or a rarely used feature. DNS is always sending you to different servers to find a record â€” this is how the servers that run .com work.

And so, the attack. If someoneâ€™s trying to attack www.foobar.com, he doesnâ€™t pull out the starter pistol for that particular name. After all, the server might not be willing to go out looking for www.foobar.com for hours. No, he declares races for 1.foobar.com, 2.foobar.com, 3.foobar.com, and so on.

Alexei White: Need Screenshotting on MacOS?

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 00:46:25 +0000

I recently installed Skitch for doing mac screenshotting after I switched to Mac from Windows. I found it to be cumbersome and not exactly intuitive. Then I discovered a really handy screenshotting tool that comes as a Dashboard Widget. Check this out (Screenshot Plus).

Andre Charland: Open Source Code Licenses Review

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:01:10 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Grant Skinner has been thinking about and researching open sources licenses. I think this is timely blog post that everyone involved in software should take a look to get a quick high level understanding of the most popular open source licenses.

Mike Han: Calendar Screencast!

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:02:28 +0000

Forgot to include this screencast in my last post where I go through the new features. What you can’t see in the video is all my nervous sweating, which is a good thing.

Mike Han: Calendar 2.0!

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:53:25 +0000

Included in the 2008 Q3 release of CUI is a brand spankin’ new version of Calendar! We’ve put in loads of new features to really improve the usefulness of the component. I’ll go over some of my favourite features.

Multi Month
Using the new monthrows and monthcolumns attributes, you can render as many months you want!

Quick Nav
Another useful feature is the quick nav panel which allows you to jump to any month/year without having to go month to month. To activate the quick nav panel, you just need to click on the title of the calendar.

Natural Language Dates
For the attributes that require you to specify a date (selecteddate, mindate, maxdate, etc.), you can use some natural language dates. The following are accepted:

today
yesterday
tomorrow
last week
next week
last month
next month
last year
next year

Databound Events
Another neat new feature is the ability to define event information for a date. You can define a url that will return event information for a date as an xml document. You can use our server side libraries to help you with this (just like with Grid). You can also define custom disabled dates in this way.

Themes
Our designer extraordinaire, Yohei Shimomae, has put together some sweet new themes for the Calendar. Loads of ‘em too!

And that’s just a small taste! There are a total of 14 new themes!

Ok, so that’s just a few of the new features. Q3 will be available to download July 17, 2008. Live samples of the new Calendar will be up then as well.

Andre Charland: Nitobi Client Jiibe #12 in Canada’s Web 2.0

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 18:42:06 +0000

Congrats to Greg Scott and the Jiibe team for taking the 12th spot in this years PICK 20 list. It’s list put together by public selection and the final 20 are ranked by a panel of judges which comprised a group of experts in technology and business. PICK 20 is put on by Backbone Magazine and KPMG.

12. Jiibe
www.jiibe.com

For people considering a career move, Jiibe promises to help them “make better decisions for a happier life.

“I liked this one a lot, Moffitt said. “A fortune is spent recruiting talent. Here, companies and recruits can both benefit through the use of user-generated content and personality testing. Shuttleworth summed it up as “Monster meets Match.com with a dash of LinkedIn, but Geist was more cautious: “It’s an interesting site but I’m skeptical about its ability to deliver.

Nitobi helped Jiibe take their concept from idea to reality, and they aren’t finished yet. Expect more cutting corporate apps company from this start up in the coming months.

A big shout out to some of our other friends like Avi and the crew from DabbleDB, Nick Bouton the one man army behind Protagonize (Nick was also the lead developer on ThoughtFarmer), Weston from SomethingSimpler ,and Coleen from MovieSet! Go Cannucks!

Congrats again guys and keep up the good work!

Andre Charland: Power Outage at Nitobi, Gastown and Vancouver

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 22:49:47 +0000

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!

Andre Charland: Flex 4 (Gumbo) Available for Download

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:01:12 +0000

From InsideRIA:
The Flex 4 SDK, code named Gumbo, is up for download now. This is an exciting time for Flex, it’s now 2 full versions beyond Flex 2 which was really the first version of Flex that gained mainstream adoption. Adobe is really working hard to get ready for the release of Flash 10 and Thermo.

Dave Johnson: Drop Down Menu Affordances

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:41:45 +0000

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.

Andre Charland: Are there 10 Commandments of Web Design?

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:01:11 +0000

From InsideRIA:
I always find it interesting when the web design practice gets a little more attention from the broader business industry. And that’s exactly what BusinessWeek has done, they’ve interviewed a group of web design luminaries to come up with a list of the top 10 rules web designers should follow. They’ve also compiled a slideshow of best of the web which is composed of 25 top picks from the design gurus they interviewed.

Alexei White: Some thoughts on Apple’s MobileMe

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:52:49 +0000

MobileMe is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Exchange with some additional features that look a lot like that Microsoft is offering with their new Live Workspace service. Essentially it gives you a unified way to handle eMail, Files, Photos, Calendar, and Address Book between all your machines including your PC, Mac, iPhone (iTouch), and AppleTV. For a marketing overview, check out the video over at apple.com. Its main advantage for business users is probably the way it provides similar functionality to Blackberry with the Push-Email Push-Contacts and Push-Calendar features. This means that the very moment an email is sent to you, you are notified with an audible noise from your iPhone without having to wait for it to page the server. Pretty cool indeed, and I bet RIM is shaking in their boots.

The Good

Email. The web based eMail application seems top notch. Clearly mirrored on Microsoft Outlook, it provides a clean, fast UI with seamless integration to the other MobileMe services. The push-email to mobile devices such as iPhone and iPod Touch make this feature an excellent choice for business users. Also, the Ajax-y goodness baked right into the Sproutcore platform makes this a really competitive webmail solution - right up there with Yahoo Mail and Gmail.

Online Storage with iDisk. This is something that has really been missing all-in-one suites. Some way is needed to move large files about the web between devices that doesn’t feel so ‘tacked on’. I was really impressed with the way Microsoft is solving this problem with Live Workspace, and it looks like Apple is following suit with 20GB of storage.

Calendar. This feature is well executed. The calendaring synchronization between devices is perfect, and the UI for the calendar interface on the web is as good as Outlook’s.

The Bad

No Chat. Integrated chat is conspicuously missing from this package. While I can do texting-yes, I cannot see those conversations in the web view if I am away from my phone or don’t want to use my phone. I’ve really gotten used to this feature with Google Apps.

Browser Support. It’s odd that a solution targeting PC users does not support IE6 and only has limited support for IE7. As a rich-ui web developer I know that it’s far easier to build a web app that supports these browsers from the beginning than to go back and fix it later.

Price. Apple is asking for $99 for an individual account (per year). If you buy an iPhone or Mac you can get it for $69. To me this is steep. If I fork out the $2200 commitment for a new iPhone (with 3 year contract in Canada) why are they asking for $70 more bucks just so I can have the same level of communications Blackberry offers me all-inclusive? Also just generally what I expect these days for $99 is quite a lot when it comes to online services. Microsoft will sell me an entire office suite for $170 - I feel like I’m getting ripped off by paying $100 to Apple to make their own devices talk to one another. If I had to pick a price that would make sense for me.. I’d go closer to $49 for the Individual account, and no more than $20 if I buy a new computer or iPhone and sign up within 30 days.

Data Migration. I have so far seen very little on how they are going to help me move my data from Blackberry/Exchange/Google Apps to MobileMe. This is huge for winning converts and my biggest objection so far.

The Verdict

Apple has bitten off a lot for the first release appears to have chosen well for the baseline featureset. As always, I am wary about jumping on new Apple products right when they come out because I usually get burned (either with unanticipated price drops soon after launch, or hardware/software failures). However, my main objection to mobileme is that I am a committed Google Apps user and would have a hard time migrating all my data - as well as my email address. I will certainly keep my eye on this because I would love to get this level of integration with my devices, and like a lot of what Apple does, it looks oh-so-sweet.

Andre Charland: Top Ajax Frameworks for High Traffic Sites

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:41:24 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Web monitoring company, Pingdom, decided the to look into the most popular Ajax frameworks.

“The websites were collected from the Alexa US Top 100 and the Webware Top 100 Web Apps. The frameworks we looked for were Prototype, JQuery, MooTools, Yahoo! UI Library, Dojo, ExtJS and MochiKit.

We quickly saw that Dojo, ExtJS and MochiKit were not used at all by these sites, which lead us to focus on the other four in this article.”

Andre Charland: Podcast: YUI with Nate Koechley

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:41:23 +0000

From InsideRIA:
In this episode I get an overview of the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI ) from Nate Koechley. We cover topics including how Nate got started there, the various elements in YUI, why Yahoo builds and maintains this library. We also touched on some of the more unique elements of Yahoo’s offering for JavaScript developers including their integration with Flash, the Yahoo Pattern Library and how Yahoo plans to get more open source with their code.

Andre Charland: Google Hosting Ajax and App Engine Update

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:41:23 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Last month while on the On AIR Tour in Europe, Dion managed do a quick video chat in Munich. In this interview Dion and I chat about the new things happening in App Engine including opening it up and pricing. The Dion tells us about Google has started hosting the JavaScript files for certain Ajax libraries.

Brock Whitten: Hello world!

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:42:15 +0000

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Brian Leroux: Ajax and Scotch, Patio edition

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 22:19:28 +0000

Nothing beats a cool beer (or perhaps a delicious scotch) on the patio in the summertime. Come join the Nitobi hackers on the patio between Shebeen room and the Irish Heather this Thursday (July 10, 2008). We’ll be up to our usual tricks: discussing the latest technology with a fresh perspective.

Dave Johnson: Open Source Optional

Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:25:36 +0000

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?

Alexei White: Book Review: Oreilly’s “Making Things Happen” by Scott Berkun

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:03:05 +0000

I stumbled onto a copy of Making Things Happen (Second Edition) a few weeks ago here at Nitobi and I’ve finally had a chance to give it a good going-over when I was at the lake this weekend. This is a good book - let me say right off. I liked both the style of writing (very straightforward, employing limited amounts of jargon), and the methodical experience-based approach to explaining project management. Its definitely written from a software-development perspective (the author having worked on projects like Windows and Internet Explorer for Microsoft) but the insights contained would pretty much apply to any team-based project situation.

The author speaks from a place of experience. The book is littered with insights one could only gain from years of ground-level project management - probably with the same types of quirky software developers you and I deal with all the time (ourselves included, no doubt).

Topics covered include:

How to make things happen
How to make good decisions
Specifications and requirements
Where ideas come from
How to manage ideas
How not to annoy people
Leadership and trust
Midgame / endgame strategy
The truth about making dates
What to do when things go wrong
Power and politics
Team communication & relationships
Visions and plans

These items above are the broad strokes (lifted from the author’s website). Getting into it, I also encountered such gems as:

What to do when there are no winning choices
How to use research as ammunition
What to do if there is no time for project planning
How to come up with new ideas
Managing the chaos of idea generation
How to know when specs are ‘complete’
Why projects run long
Managing difficult team members
How to write diplomatic emails!
Run meetings that don’t annoy people
What to do when everything goes to hell
How pressure affects the project and productivity
All about the ‘Hero Complex’ (this is a good one)
Basic tools for getting things done (prioritized lists and such)
All about the politics of teams and projects

He caps each chapter off with some exercises, making this a useful resource for teaching a course on project management, although I rarely did more than just glance at them.

Rotten-tomatoes style I give this a rating of 90%. The only substantial criticism I would give is that sometimes it does seem a bit rambling, but those digressions were usually quite entertaining so its hardly a reason not to go pick up a copy of your own. BTW you can buy it right now from Amazon by clicking here: Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly))

Dave Johnson: Analytics Benchmarking

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 02:17:08 +0000

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.

Andre Charland: NitobiBug - Cross Browser Ajax Debugging

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:59:20 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Alexei White just released NitobiBug, it’s a handy little cross browser logging and object inspector. Think of FireBug but cross browser.

Andre Charland: AIR Tour: Prague, Munich and Milan

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:59:20 +0000

From InsideRIA:
The final leg of the On AIR European Tour took us through Prague, Munich and Milan here are my thoughts. On this stage of the tour we were joined by Adrian Ludwig from AIR Marketing, Andrew Shorten an Adobe Evangelist from London and again by Dion Almaer from Google.

Andre Charland: Which Analytics Matter in RIAs?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:59:19 +0000

From InsideRIA:
Robert Hoekman Jr is dispelling some common myths in the world of web analytics. The first part of the article regarding hits vs page view vs visitors will likely be old news to most readers of this blog and RIA developers in general. This is still very valuable for most folks out there and worth the read. Towards the end of the article Robert makes a great point that page views for RIAs have become almost irrelevant.

Dave Johnson: Complete UI Q3

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 22:54:35 +0000

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.

Brian Leroux: Rogers Wireless Customer Service Failure

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:13 +0000

My wallet and phone were stolen from the YWCA gym right out of my locker. The thief must have used bolt cutters when nobody was around. It was a real disappointment but the staff where helpful and after hours on various automated systems I had a police case number, my credit cards canceled and my phone locked so nobody could make long distance calls.

The bank was helpful and sympathetic. The credit card companies took it upon themselves to call me and the police to follow up about fraudulent charge attempts.

However, Rogers Wireless left me feeling like shit.

I called Rogers Wireless that night and they assured me the phone was locked so no calls could be made and to just go to a store the next day and they would help me get a new phone and SIM card. When I arrived at the store they told me I had to purchase the new phone and renew (thus extend) my contact. ‘This was not the impression the agent on the phone gave me.’, I said and they responded, ‘Those guys are retards. We only their sell phones. We’re like a car dealership.’. I’m not kidding you. That is what a retailer, with the Rogers sign and exclusively Rogers products told me. Those guys are retards? They had the good nature to call customer service on my behalf and things degraded to, ‘Its your own fault your phone was stolen SIR, not ours’. I felt like I was being scolded for even thinking they were going to help. I bought a new SIM card deciding I’d find a phone on my own and the agent hesitantly informed me, ‘uuuhhh, your phone was never locked’. I called customer service again and the agent sneered ‘those retailer people don’t know what they’re talking about.’ No long distance calls on my phone, at least.

I walked out tired, angry and disappointed. Negative and poisonous.

This incident represents an epic failure of a brand experience. The people in the store and on the phone represented a confidence destroying lack of professionalism and complete disregard for my misfortune. As a customer I, perhaps naively, expected to be treated better than that.

With complex pyramid scheme like plans, disparate messaging, disregard for the customer and belligerent employee hubris I doubt Rogers Wireless can continue to be a success as more companies enter into the wireless space. As a human being first and a consumer second I am now actively seeking better options.

Joe Bowser: Nitobi Grid on Firefox 3

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:40:48 +0000

Support for Firefox 3 will hopefully be in the next release of Complete UI. This is a screenshot of the grid shortly after I got it rendering properly in Firefox 3 RC3 on Linux. There are still changes with backwards compatibility with Firefox 2, however the adoption rate for Firefox appears to be a lot higher, and with the Guiness Book of Records PR Campagin that Mozilla is doing, there may be hope that things will get a lot faster.

Alexei White: I love Versions - SVN repo browser for MacOS

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:28:55 +0000

I recently became aware of a beta version of a new SVN client for MacOS called Versions. I downloaded the beta to try it out.

Let me say this is probably the new de-facto SVN client for Mac users. Not only is it a powerful and full-featured client (along the lines of TortoiseSVN but with more features), but its intuitive and easy to use. I love the TRAC integration (although I havent got into it yet). I highly recommend giving it a try. Here are some screenshots:

Dave Johnson: Hack Day Results

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 03:59:53 +0000

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.

Dave Johnson: Roundabouts 101

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:34:08 +0000

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?

Alexei White: Ever need to clear your ASP.NET Cache?

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:42:28 +0000

It’s odd there is no global Clear() method on the HttpContext cache. Anyway, this is how you do it:

private static void DeleteAllCacheItems() { HttpContext ctx = HttpContext.Current; IDictionaryEnumerator d = ctx.Cache.GetEnumerator(); while(d.MoveNext()) { ctx.Cache.Remove(d.Key.ToString()); } }

Alexei White: My Canadian AppleTV Rental Experience

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 16:12:41 +0000

I was excited to get home last night to finally rent a movie on my AppleTV. Apple just recently announced that rentals were now available in Canada. Here are my notes:

The Bad:

There don’t seem to be all that many movies for rent. Also, you cant see which ones are available until you click on it - which is time consuming if you are just browsing. I expect this will improve over time though. One thing that really frustrated me was I could not browse for rentals from my AppleTV initially. I had to go through the process of renting one through iTunes before the menu options would appear in my AppleTV.. and they still didn’t all appear after I did. The system of ‘activating’ an AppleTV for movie rentals and encouraging users to try it out needs to be improved, or people just will not discover the feature.

The Good:

I rented a non-HD quality version of I Am Legend (starring Will Smith) for $4.99. The movie downloaded almost right away (it took about 22 minutes) and I was able to quickly sync it to my AppleTV (with some trouble.. the first time syncing it quit with no error message). Watching it on the AppleTV was simple and the video quality was excellent. All in all I was happy with this. I did not appreciate, however, only having 1 day to watch the movie after I started it.. I would be running really close to the wire if I decided to start watching it after work one day, and then finish it off the next.

All in all, the system worked well enough that I will do it again, but I wish they would improve the experience of actually renting the movie from AppleTV, and that they would tell us if a movie is available for rent without having to select it first.

Yohei Shimomae: Random rant - Flex

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:25:04 +0000

When I started using Flex I was lovin it. Now that I’ve used it in depth, I have to say there are lots of things that could be improved. For instance, its comboBox component has no image support. For a xmpp client I’ve worked on recently, I need to make a country picker drop down combo, and it needed to contain country flag image along with the label. Seems like a simple task on the surface, in the backend it’s like flipping the world around. Ok… maybe that’s saying too much. Anyhow, here goes.

ComboBox is works pretty well and serves its primary purpose, but there isn’t much space left in terms of expansion, which I find similar with many of other Flex standard components. For this particular country picker, I ended up making a completely new class component composed of button and floating canvas which served as the drop down list. Once I did that, I had control over what to display on the combo and its list items, which were composed of image and label components. In terms of functionality, the only difference between my combo and Flex’s comboBox was one has small icon image with label for its list items and the other only has label. It’s these small tweaks that Flex isn’t so “flexible” with.

Joe Bowser: Passenger - When you have to use Apache!

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 22:05:29 +0000

Recently, someone gave me some server space and root. I could do what I wanted to the server, as long as I kept the PHP and Drupal configurations working. While I at first was somewhat annoyed with it, being a fan of nginx and mongrel, I tried to install an Apache + Mongrel configuration, similar to what we deploy on other severs over and over again. The problem is that this was an Ubuntu server, therefore mod_php needs apache2-mpm-prefork to work, while mod_proxy needs apache2-mpm-worker. This will probably explain the oh-so-misleading error log:
[Mon Jun 02 18:01:26 2008] [warn] proxy: No protocol handler was valid for the URL /. If you are using a DSO version of mod_proxy, make sure the proxy submodules are included in the configuration using LoadModule.
and the even worse
[Mon Jun 02 18:08:44 2008] [error] proxy: BALANCER: (balancer://mongrel_cluster). All workers are in error state

Of course, Google has told me that I wasn’t running the right modules, while Ubuntu’s documentation told me that I needed apache2-mpm-worker. After apt-getting the stuff, and realizing that the two are mutually exclusive, I decided to give passenger a try.

The setup is way simpler, but there are definitely some downsides to it. It appears that mod_rails is about as fast as mongrel so far (although I am not using it on a live environment), but when things go wrong, going through the trace stack is definitely a lot more painful. Also, another thing that I noticed is that with every deploy change, that I have to restart Apache now, which disrupts the other apps on the server. This is probably more of the case of getting your own box, but of course if I had my own box to play with, I wouldn’t be using Apache.

Overall, if you are stuck sharing a box with some Drupal users, Passenger is your friend, since you won’t have to explain why their PHP is now using FastCGI. It’s clearly the path of least resistance as far as some Rails deployments go. This also means though that things like Capistrano will have to change to reflect this. I guess this is my assignment to lazyweb. Go find Cap scripts that deploy to Passenger. :P

Joe Bowser: w00t, The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk has a wiki

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:20:04 +0000

In my spare time, I like to mess around with things such as Arduino hacking, SpokePOVs and other small electronics projects. I may have commented in the past about a couple of them such as the failed attempt to build a touch screen interface. I also have accumulated stuff from the FreeTheNet Community Wifi project as well.

Well, Evil Mad Scientist Labs has created this project called “The Great Internet Migratory Box of Electronics Junk”. This is where a box of electronic parts gets mailed from place to place and it gets picked through, parts get added and removed and the box moves on to its next destination. I put my name on the wiki to get a box, but if you want it, you really should check their wiki out and put your name down. I seem to be the first Canadian link, so I’m pretty pumped about that, even if I don’t get the box. :)

It’s definitely very cool, and I recommend you check it out!

Alexei White: New iPhone imminent?

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:35:36 +0000

According to Forbes, Apple “has been quietly positioning millions of units of a mysterious new product–almost certainly the new iPhone–in key markets since March.” Despite this, there has been no public announcement or images released of this new device.

It will almost certainly support 3G - a faster mobile internet system (so you’ll finally be able to actually watch those YouTube flicks while on the bus). Probably the storage capacity of the device will be increased too. If we’re lucky they’ll have done something about battery life too - although that seems doubtful with the demands of the 3G circuitry and any additional storage they intend to cram on there.

Alexei White: iPhones of the Future - Solar powered?

Tue, 27 May 2008 18:47:04 +0000

Mobile devices from Apple in the future may have the ability to draw power from the sun for longer battery lives. This revelation came to light today as people at Trade the News (a better article is here) noticed that recent patent applications from Apple included technology to harness sunlight.

While it may be a ways off in the future - photovoltaic cells beneath the touch-screen could add hours to battery lives - making devices like the iPhone much more practical for business users - who have been complaining about the limitations of the small battery for users who are constantly on the go. This is one of the major reasons consumers won’t be leaving Blackberry anytime soon for business communication.

Of course the bigger story here is that with solar energy and using other types of micro-energy devices we could one-day take our mobile devices completely off-grid. It has some appeal, if you can get over the idea that you’ll never again have the excuse ’sorry my iPhone battery was dead.. wasnt receiving any calls’.