For the spillover
July 30th, 2008 — mac
Pete Kazanjy / Team Fusion:
Safer, Stronger, and More Seamless: VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 Now Available — The VMware Fusion team is proud to announce VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 2. — This latest public beta, a free download, builds on VMware Fusion 2.0 Beta 1, adding the Unity 2.0 suite of Mac-Windows integration features …
July 30th, 2008 — cool
In October, Esquire will publish its 75th anniversary issue with a cover made from eInk’s electronic paper. Over at Boing Boing Gadgets, Joel interviews deputy editor Peter Griffin about the tech and its hackability. (Seen here, not the actual magazine but a BBG mock-up.) Esquire to geeks: hack our e-ink magazine cover (BB Gadgets)
July 30th, 2008 — ajax
Betaworks, a type of incubator program based in New York, has just released the public beta of a simply integrated chat tool for site owners, called Firefly. The simplicity comes by way of no download requirements for end users. If they happen to be on a Firefly-enabled site, then they can start the chat option and just start typing. Click anywhere on the webpage and you can type there. The result is a collaborative pop-up chat conversation that can get pretty overwhelming if there are too many people chatting at once.
There is color differentiation for different chat users, so you can better follow any conversations that are going on, but if you’d like to make yourself stand out, there is the ability to choose an avatar or upload an existing avatar from another website. There’s also Twitter integration, so if you’d like your chat comments to become part of your Twitter stream, Firefly has included the ability to sync the two accounts. For Firefly chatters that are more apt to hold conversations on multiple Firefly-enabled sites, the Twitter integration is probably an attractive option.
When you’re chatting with multiple people at one time, a chat history is absolutely vital. There are two ways in which to access a Firefly chat history–on the current website where the Firefly menu shows the progression of the ongoing chat (think a video-player time bar), and on Firefly’s site where the full chat history is archived.
Though the interaction for Firefly chats are rather limited and the shelf life of any shared content here is short-lived, the basic offerings for fleeting conversations that Firefly allows can be fun and entertaining. Given Firefly’s current support for things like semi-customization and Twitter integration, it’s also clear that the company is thinking of practical ways in which users can leverage their participation in a given conversation, moving beyond the mere act of chatting online.
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July 30th, 2008 — gear
The Gadget: The ViDock Gfx, a box with an ATI 2600XT inside that allows you to add two DVI displays to your ExpressCard Laptop (e.g. MacBook Pro). It doesn’t affect your current display setup, which might already have an external monitor being driven by the on-board DVI port, which means you can have a total of three external displays plus your MacBook Pro’s going at the same time. Mac and Windows versions are available in both 128MB and 256MB flavors, running at up to 2560×1600 resolution.
The Price: Still TBD
The Verdict: Multitasking bliss. We were able to add two 19-inch, 1280×1024 monitors to our 15-inch MacBook Pro without breaking a sweat. The two extra monitors (we were already running a 30-inch Dell off the internal DVI port) had very little slowdown while being powered through our ExpressCard port, and handled HD video like the Watchmen trailer without any signs of tears or imminent exploding.
What we did notice was that the unit was LOUD. In our pre-production unit, the fan ran started quietly on boot, but ramped up to 100% after a minute or two. It was loud enough to give us AND our unborn children a migraine. The people at Villagetronic said their release units would be softer, but note that the ATI 2600XT throws out a lot of heat. To us this means that you probably shouldn’t expect this to be too much softer. Just something to watch out for if you need to use this in a quiet production environment. The other annoyance we’ve found is that the ExpressCard connection can’t be hot-plugged on OS X, so you have to shut down your machine every time you want to swap in or out of the multi-monitor setup or else you’ll get that curtain of death. Villagetronic tells us that it’s a bug that Apple will fix in the future.
Is this great for multitasking? Oh sweet jeebus yes. You can have all your applications open at the same time, spread eagled across your four displays like Stalin planning to push the Nazis back into Germany (apologies for that undoubtedly historically inaccurate statement). Is it worth the as-of-yet-undetermined cost? Hard to say. Something like this won’t be cheap, but if you’re like us and value every pixel of your screen as if it’s the last chopper out of Saigon (sorry again!), you’ll look long and hard at the ViDock Gfx. [Villagetronic]
July 29th, 2008 — rss
Rss is still getting more important for many bloggers, as co-blogger Boris update our blog for RSS last May:
“Well, if it turns out that most of your readers don’t actually visit the site but just read your posts in their RSS reader than it might be time to start optimizing for that.”
Since the updates, subscribers on thenextweb have been increasing tremendously! (subscribe here if you haven’t done allready) Here at TheNextWeb office we have been trying out different programs to read the feeds of other sites, and today I found one on Techcrunch with a new time saving approach:
Open source program Apprise allows users to not only read, but also share news directly from your RSS reader. The project is developed by Christina Cantrell, an Adobe Employee and editor on WatchReport.
The reader is based on Adobe Air, users can simply add and aggregate feeds. Its not world changing, but I believe this is the first RSS reader that can share your articles this easy.
How often do you copy and paste URLs from your news reader or browser into your IM or Twitter client in order to share stories with friends? Apprise created a simple way to share articles from your RSS feed. Simply add your twitter and AIM credentials in the preferences, and the icons will light up. Tap the button will send the article to it respective destination
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The free Apprise reader is opensource, so integration with other services can be expected if the project picks up! We are hoping for integration in more social websites like Wordpress, Tumblr and Stumbleupon.
Try it out on Apprisereader and add our feed: Thenextweb
July 25th, 2008 — ui
Squarespace, the Web publishing platform that offers a variety of tools from design templates to hosting and data reporting, is launching Squarespace V5 today, with a handful of new customization options and partnerships with Oracle and Peer1 to offer extended features to its customers.
As a publishing platform, Squarespace is also looking to change the very concepts surrounding website publishing, hoping to allow users to create sites with a process that’s more aligned with the human thought process, which, according to Squarespace, is semi-structured publishing. That allows a great deal of room for customization, merging many of the existing models already in use by other website publishing tools such as WYSIWYG editors and template designs with the structured back-end CMS for building a fully functional website.
Squarespace V5 expands on the custom options made available through the company’s fluid approach to website creation, with a live editing interface, pluggable features that work for all aspects of Squarespace’s site building, including search and data collection. There are more than 60 new style templates to choose from, all of which are fully customizable by users.
A couple of new partnerships grant back-end grid architecture powered by Oracle Coherence and hosted by Peer1 Network for improved support for a wider variety of sites, regardless of size. To see how Squarespace can be implemented, you can check out the video here, or stick around for Kevin Rose’s announcement in the coming hours, as his diggnation show on Revision3 will be taking advantage of Squarespace’s site creation capabilities.
The aim with Squarespace’s tools are to offer a platform for simplified design options that are available to all user types, despite technical knowledge. As platforms such as Squarespace and Secondbrain create a more accessible process for site creation, the need for easy, all-inclusive services are being met with continued development coming from the platform space.
Everything from advertising and analytics to redistribution and application creation will eventually become part of this one-stop shop concept that these services are approaching, targeting those website publishers that don’t have a strong technical background but would still like highly customizable and easily implemented options for their online presence.
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July 25th, 2008 — amazing, video
July 23rd, 2008 — openSocial
Facebook has announced the official launch of its Facebook Connect offering, which will allow users to port their profile data to third-party Web sites. The company is announcing 24 launch partners, including Digg, Six Apart, and CitySearch, who are demoing their implementations on stage at F8 this afternoon.
Facebook describes the following features of Facebook Connect:
- Trusted Authentication – easily authenticate into partner sites using their Facebook account
- Real Identity – leverage their real identity across the Web in a trusted environment
- Friend Linking – take their friends with them wherever they go, enabling trusted social context anywhere on the Web
- Dynamic Privacy – assurance that the same privacy settings users have set up on Facebook will follow them wherever they decide to login throughout the Web
- Social Distribution – share actions on partner sites with their friends back on Facebook through feeds
The news follows yesterday’s launch of MySpace Data Availability, the rival social network’s product for porting profile data, on Flixster and Eventful.
Facebook has announced that the following partners will be participating in Facebook Connect: Amiando, CBS.com, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Plaxo, Radar, Red Bull, Seesmic, Socialthing!, StumbleUpon, The Insider, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo and Xobni.
None of the implementations are live yet, but Zuckerberg said in his keynote that developer keys will be available today so applications can start being built that leverage Facebook Connect.
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Live: F8 Keynote with Mark Zuckerberg
July 23rd, 2008 — ajax
We have written about using window.name as a transport and Kris Zyp has just posted about how Dojo has created a new dojox.io.windowName module.
The window.name transport is a new technique for secure cross-domain browser based data transfer, and can be utilized for creating secure mashups with untrusted sources. window.name is implemented in Dojo in the new dojox.io.windowName module, and it is very easy to make web services available through the window.name protocol. window.name works by loading a cross-domain HTML file in an iframe. The HTML file then sets its window.name to the string content that should be delivered to the requester. The requester can then retrieve the window.name value as the response. The requested resource never has access to the requester’s environment (JavaScript variables, cookies, and DOM).
You can access it in a simple way:
Kris then goes on to show how to use this with Web services and other scenarios, and explains why you may be interested:
This technique has several advantages over other cross-domain transports:
- It is secure, JSONP is not. That is, it is as secure as other frame based secure transports like fragment identifier messaging (FIM), and Subspace. (I)Frames also have their own security issues because frames can change other frames locations, but that is quite a different security exploit, and generally far less serious.
- It is much faster than FIM, because it doesn’t have to deal with small packet size of a fragment identifier, and it doesn’t have as many “machine gun” sound effects on IE. It is also faster than Subspace. Subspace requires two iframes and two local HTML files to be loaded to do a request. window.name only requires one iframe and one local file.
- It is simpler and more secure than Subspace and FIM. FIM is somewhat complicated, and Subspace is very complicated. Subspace also has a number of extra restrictions and setup requirements, like declaring all of the target hosts in advance and having DNS entries for a number of different particular hosts. window.name is very simple and easy to use.
- It does not require any plugins (like Flash) or alternate technologies (like Java).
July 21st, 2008 — ajax
Edward Tufte has long had a following of fans in the field of information visualizations. Among his interesting taxonomy of visualization types is the “Sparkline“, which he describes as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”.
While Tufte originally suggested that computer displays are too low-resolution to effectively make use of Sparklines (vs. printed page), James Dempster pointed us to some work the folks at Splunk have done to join a long line of folks who have given it a go anyway.
The resulting jQuery plug-in is really nice. Now if only they had the ability to overlay two line graphs over the same area using a transparent fill… ;-)
(Oh, and there’s also a simple Sparkline generator for Google Charts over at style.org.)