Entries from July 2008 ↓

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 …

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)

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]

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.

Key Features

1. AIM Integration. Just click on a story, and choose which of your buddies to send it to.
2. Twitter Integration. Post URLs to Twitter right from Apprise.
3. Drag and drop. Easily drag and drop (or copy and paste) articles to share them via email.
4. Realtime search across all feeds.

Sharing your RSS finds

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
.

Open Source

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

levelHead v1.0, 3 cube speed-run (spoiler!) from Julian Oliver on Vimeo.

ShareThis

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).

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.)

Developers are always looking for a great grid control that is easy to use, customizable and, of course, feature-rich. Paulo Mariñas has created just that for jQuery developers. Flexigrid is an extremely flexible grid control with provides many of the features highly-desired by developers. These include:

• Resizable columns
• Resizable height and width
• Sortable column headers
• Cool theme
• Can convert an ordinary table
• Ability to connect to an ajax data source (XML and JSON[new])
• Paging
• Show/hide columns
• Toolbar
• Search
• Accessible API

Version 1.0b3, which was recently released provides:

• Fixed paging problem on multiple instances
• Mootools and Prototype noConflict() compatibility problems fixed
• New onError event on ajax interaction, (it will pass what the server said in a variable called data), allowing you to handle server problems
• New $().flexAddData method, allows you to directly add new data to the grid using your own data source.
• New preProcess API, allows you to modify or process data sent by server before passing it to Flexigrid, allowing you to use your own JSON format for example.
• Single Rows Select just use { singleSelect: true } in the options

Get more information at the Flexigrid main page.

I work on Google Code. Hearing that Radiohead was going to release data with progressive licensing and wanted to do so on Google Code was awesome.

Now we see how cool it is that the data is open. People like Jacob Seidelin are doing interesting things with it.

In this case, Jacob has created amazing visualizations of the data using JavaScript and Canvas:

I figured it would be a nice little experiment to try visualizing this data using JavaScript and Canvas so I went and did just that. The data is simply point clouds, meaning a whole bunch of points with x,y,z values (and intensity) for each frame. The data on Google Code is about 800 MB, so obviously a bit of trimming had to be done. You can’t expect 30 fps with Javascript doing with this kind of data, so I’ve only used every 5 frames giving us a framerate of 6 fps, not great but acceptable. Then the actual points, each frame has about 12,000 points. No way this will render with 6 fps in any browser, so again I’ve taken only 10% of the points. Additionally, I’ve tried to filter away the noise around Thom Yorke’s head since that took up a good deal of points. The interesting bit is him singing, anyway. In the end, we have a dataset of about 4 MB (converted to a JS array) for the one minute clip they released.

Now the data is in a more manageable state and the visualization can begin. It’s not as good as the real thing, obviously, but I think it’s ok (it’s best when you look at Thom in profile). The audio clip is as usual played via SoundManager 2 which also gives us free timing information to sync the rendering to. I’ve played around and made a few different effects that you can toggle on and off (by pressing keys 1-9). While it is playing you can also rotate around the vertical axis by moving the mouse horizontally over the video. Also try clicking/doubleclicking.

Great publicity for Radiohead too. When you are first to do something, that is often the case.

Dojo developers will be pleased to read about the recent update to the Dojo grid control. Version 1.2 of the grid control focuses primarily on improving integration with Dojo data stores, improved grid layout handling and providing advanced in-place editing capabilities. The update was fairly extensive forcing the team to rethink the design of the widget and refactor quite a bit of code. As such, the updated version of the grid has been setup as a new control allowing developers to continue to use the older version while being able to take advantage the updated features. This will ensure that applications based on the previous grid control won’t break.

The biggest benefit truly is the tighter coupling between the new DataGrid and Dojo’s existing dojo.data stores:

In order to use dojo.data stores with the grid in previous releases, you needed the dojox.grid.data.DojoData model which would bridge the gap between the grid and the store. DataGrid has been engineered to remove that bridge. Instead of using stand-alone models to store data for the grid, any dojo.data store that implements the Dojo Data read API can be used. Additionally, DataGrid can use the write and notification API’s if they are available.

For example, the following code will create a new dojo.data store based off of a JSON file from a URL and populate the new DataGrid by passing it as an option to the DataGrid constructor:

Building a solid grid control isn’t an easy task and it seems like the Dojo team have done a great job of enhancing their widget.