Entries from August 2008 ↓

Just a few days after the Dev Team released its jailbreak tool for the 2.0.2 firmware to Mac users, WinPwn 2.5 and the QuickPwn Tool for Mac have both appeared at about the same time, offering the ability to QuickPwn the latest iPhone and iPod Touch firmwares. In other words, not only can you jailbreak your iPhone or iPod and enjoy sweet, sweet Cydia and Installer action, but you also don’t have to go through the irritating process of building a custom firmware and carrying out a lengthy restore in iTunes.

You can download the new WinPwn at this direct link, and pick up a torrent for QuicPwn Tool for Mac here.
[WinPwn and Dev Team - Thanks, Estevan and Jason]

OpenID support continues to spread throughout the Web ecosystem and new names are added to the list of sites that support OpenID all the time. Since the release of OpenID 2.0, which includes better security features, OpenID has gained major traction as the single sign-on standard. Its biggest benefit being tremendous reduction in the number of login names and passwords that you have to manage. In addition, great time savings when registering at new sites.

Ultimately, all you will ever need is your single OpenID URL or an email address linked to it.  Here’s where you can get your own OpenID and all of the sites that support it:

Where Do you Get your own OpenID?

If you have an account at any of the following sites then you might already own an OpenID that you can use anywhere else on the Web that supports it. The format of your OpenID URL will be slightly different from site to site so pick one that’s easiest to remember.

- AOL - openid.aol.com/screenname
- Blogger - blogname.blogspot.com
- Flickr - www.flickr.com/photos/username
- LiveDoor profile.livedoor.com/username
- LiveJournal - username.livejournal.com
- Orange (France Telecom) - http://openid.orange.fr
- SmugMug - username.smugmug.com
- Technorati technorati.com/people/technorati/username
- Vox - member.vox.com
- Yahoo - http://openid.yahoo.com (Every Yahoo ID is now an OpenID 2.0 ID)
- Wikitravel provides an identifier to each registered user
- WordPress.com - username.wordpress.com

Who are OpenID Identity Providers?

If you don’t have an OpenID yet, you can create a free one at any of these 80 and counting OpenID Identity Providers. Keep in mind that these providers all offer different features when it comes to OpenID. Here’s an excellent Guide for OpenID Identity Providers that compares their diverse feature sets.

Below are just some of the most popular OpenID Identity providers:

- ClaimID - One of the most popular OpenID providers

- myOpenID Another popular provider. Hosted OpenID server by JanRain.

- VeriSign’s Personal Identity Provider - Free OpenID Provider with support for multi-factor authentication.

- myID.net - Free OpenID Provider with support for groups and Korean language.

- myVidoop - Free OpenID Provider that eliminates passwords with security features, customization, and browser integration.

- MyLID - Unique because it’s the only identity aggregator as it supports not only OpenID but also LID and Yadis. Thus, your single sign-on such as mylid.net/Paisano would work on any site that supported any of those three identity services. You can also host it yourself by downloading the code here.

Want to Run Your Own OpenID Identity Server?

For you hardcore geeks there’s always the option to host you own OpenID identity Server. Delegation is the simplest way to get up and running with OpenID because it requires nothing more than an OpenID Provider and some basic HTML. OpenID for Developers provides excellent information. You can find additional valuable information at: Plaxo OpenID Recipe and Sam Ruby’s Intertwingly

Who supports OpenID anyway?

The list of sites that support OpenID continues to grow as increasing numbers accept the fact that it’s not going away any time soon and realize that there’s a great demand for it. The good news is that even startups are coming out of the gate supporting OpenID (Blippr, Rejaw, etc.) So, how do you know if a site supports OpenID or not? Just look for the OpenID logo on any sign-up or login page. It’ll always be clearly visible and sometimes even labeled with OpenID. Here’s a sample login screen.

The other thing to check is the MyOpenID OpenID directory that the folks at MyOpenID maintain. There’s also a handy RSS feed that you can subscribe to in Google reader or whatever RSS reader you prefer that’ll let you know whenever a new site has been added to the directory. If you know of a site that is not listed in the OpenID directory then simply send the site’s URL to MyOpenID’s email address for the directory.

Here’s another OpenID directory that also tracks all of the sites that proclaim to support OpenID. This directory is a little different because it allows visitors to vote for their favorite OpenID sites so it’s like digg in that respect. Here are the top voted OpenID Providers.

Here are just some of the sites that support OpenID with many more added all the time:

- Skitch.com - A Web service that gives you 1-click uploading of images for fast image sharing.

- PBWiki - Create a free wiki using your OpenID. It’s as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich.

- LiveJournal - One of the first blogging platforms.

- Drupal - The official website of Drupal, an open source content management platform.

- Mixx - The well-known news site.

- 37Signals - Simple software to help you get organized. Basecamp, Highrise, and Backpack are all OpenID enabled.

- Foodio54 - Has a database of over half a million restaurants with reviews.

- ToodLedo - An easy to use Web-based to-do list.

- WetPaint - A popular wiki host.

- Grou.ps- Allows you to create sharing platforms for your social groups

- Jyte - Allows you to make claims about yourself and your friends, give and receive cred and manage your contacts and groups.

Conclusion

OpenID continues to gain support and acceptance. Even the big boys like Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and AOL have all made the decision to embrace and support it. One of the strongest signs of this acceptance occurred when Microsoft added OpenID support to their own Identity platform called CardSpace. Since OpenID appears to be headed towards becoming the single sign-on standard then it might make sense to give it a look to see what it’s all about.

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

SourceForge Now OpenID-Friendly
The Daily Poll: How Often Do You Use OpenID to Login?
Another Victory For OpenID: Yahoo Announces Support
Blogger’s OpenID Support Now Official
Wikispaces Adds OpenID Suport
Blogger Beta Gets OpenID Support
Wetpaint Adds OpenID Support

Everyone seems to have their own website or blog nowadays. But do you want someone else to tell you your site is down? So what do you do? Corporate IT shops can install some fancy monitoring software suite that can track hundreds of types of software, servers, ports and hardware devices. That monitoring software also normally costs hundreds of thousands for dollars. Most likely, you want to monitor your website for free, or at least cheaply.

Not surprisingly there are a wealth of free and cheap website monitoring services available. Just do a Google search for “free website monitor” and you will get plenty of services to look at. For most of the services, you only need an email address and the URL that you want to monitor. Of course, when it comes to free and cheap you have a wide range of services offered. To make your job easier, we’ve put together this list of 13 services that will help you monitor your website.

Pingdom - Has a good set of cheap packages, but alas, nothing is free. They come highly recommended by just about everyone.

LiveWatch - A German service that allows you to monitor one server free. The free notifications package contains email alerts, 10 SMS notifications, and Yahoo Messenger. The only problem with the service is that it requires a script on the server in order to monitor it.

Observu - A really, really basic service. You register, add a website monitor with the text that should appear on the page and save the monitor. There are no reports and nothing flashy. You will be emailed if there is a problem.

ServerGuard24 - The prices are not that expensive and there is a free plan. However, the free plan only polls every 40 minutes and you need a banner ad for them as well. Otherwise, it looks like a very professional service.

SiteUptime - One free and two cheap premium levels are offered. The free plan allows only one monitor, but it does have a very clean and professional user interface. The service only monitors from location but it does fall over to another location if needed.

Host Tracker - The free plan enables monitoring for two URLs in two different domains. The main issue with the service is that the navigation is hard to work with. It does use the most distributed network of monitoring servers of the services listed, as it currently monitors from over 50 nodes.

mon.itor.us - Yes, it has a cute name, but cute does not mean limited. The service is completely free with email alerting. There are basic reports for uptime and response time. The user interface may look simplistic, but the service delivers with a more complete offering than most.

InternetSeer - “My site has been down for how long!?!” The free offering monitors one URL and polling every hour. The professional plans look to have some really nice features, but the free plan is fairly limited.

WatchMouse - You have to like a service that uses a mouse as its mascot. The free plan monitors one URL every hour. Disappointingly, the premium plans are more expensive than most listed here.

ServiceUptime - They have a nice free service that monitors one URL. There are seven different sites polling every 30 minutes to determine whether your website is alive. ServiceUptime also has a decent reporting package and very reasonable premium packages.

Montastic - Montastic allows free monitoring for up to 100 URLs! Your websites are monitored by two different servers about every 10 minutes. They also have a cute colored logo you can put on your site. Sadly, there are no cute colored reports.

FreeSiteStatus - The free service has nine separate locations monitoring you servers every minute. Various additional features can be purchased for little cost, as well as a service configuration wizard to help you create your monitoring service. One cool feature FreeSiteStatus offers is the ability to create one-time or recurring maintenance windows where monitoring of the servers can be suspended.

Site24×7 - It is free to monitor two URLs that are polled every 60 minutes. This is another service that allows you to create maintenance windows for your server. The premium plans also offer reasonable prices for various levels of monitoring.

—
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Free Pingdom Accounts for Mashable Readers
Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for May 19th, 2008
Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for May 23rd, 2008
Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for May 29th, 2008
Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for June 2nd, 2008
Twitter + Uptime Monitoring = MoniTwitter
Web 2.0 Marketplace Listings for May 16th, 2008

Razor Profiler is a web-based Ajax profiling tool to help web developers understand and analyze the runtime behavior of their JavaScript code in a cross-browser environment. Razor Profiler can be access either online as a service; or be downloaded to run locally, and was created by Coach Wei who has done a lot of work for Nexaweb and Apache.

Razor Profiler Features

Razor Profiler automates JavaScript profiling:

• Automation: no application code change required. Razor Profiler automatically collects all the necessary data and presents them to web developers for analysis.
• Runs on any browser: web developers can profile any JavaScript application on any browser. There is nothing to install on the client side.
• Rich lexical analysis: Razor Profiler presents rich lexcial information about the application, such as file information (number, response status, size, mimetype, percentage, etc), tokens (size, file, percent, count), and functions (size, file, name…), etc;
• Profile scenario recording: Razor Profile enables web developers to selectively record the scenarios that they are interested in. Only recorded scenarios will be used in analysis.
• Call stack analysis: for each recorded scenario, Razor Profiler presents all the call stacks in the order of their occurence. For each call stacks, web developers can drill into it to find out the duration of the stack, all the function calls of this stack and the duration of each call.
• Function analysis: For each JavaScript function in the application, Razor Profile presents the number of times it has been invoked, the duration of each invocation, and the call stacks that invoked this function.
• Data visualization with graphing and charting: Razor Profiler presents top call stacks, top function calls of each stack, top recorded scenarios, etc. using visual charts and graphs to help web developers better understand the runtime behavior of their application. For example, each call stack is visualized as an intuitive Gantt chart.

How Does Razor Profiler Work?

Razor Profiler composes of a server component that runs inside a standard Java EE Servlet engine, and a JavaScript-based client component that runs inside any browser. Once you have Razor server started, you can profile your JavaScript application by entering the start URL of your application into Razor Profiler and run through your test scenarios. Razor Profiler will automatically record data and visualize them for your analysis. There is no client side installation, browser configuration change or application code change required. In order to achieve this, Razor Profiler goes through five different phases:

• Application retrieval: Once a web developer enters the application start URL into Razor Profiler, Razor Profiler client component (”the client”) will send this URL to Razor Profiler server component (”the server”). The server performs the actually retrieval of this URL. After additional server processing (such as lexical analysis and code injection, see below), the retrieved content is sent to the client side to be displayed in a new browser window. For the developer point of view, the application is launched and running in this new browser window.
  In this process, Razor Profiler Server is acting like a “proxy server”. But it is not really a “proxy server” and there is no need for developers to re-configure their browser proxy settings.
• Lexical analysis: Once the server retrieves the application URL, it performs lexical analysis of the returned content by identifying and analyzing JavaScript files, functions, and tokens,etc. The result is sent to the client for display.
• Code injection: Upon lexical analysis of JavaScript code, the server injects “probe” code into the application’s JavaScript sources before returning them to the client. These injected “probes” enable automatic collection of application runtime data, and saves developers from doing so manually.
• Runtime data capture: Once the application’s JavaScript code is running on the client side and as developers run through desired profile scenarios, the injected “probes” automcally collect all the necessary data to Razor Profiler Client.
• Data analysis: When the developer finishes recording scenarios and starts data analysis, Razor Profiler client performs analysis of all the collected data and presents the results.

iHologram - iPhone application from David OReilly on Vimeo.

I’ve showed this video to a couple of friends in Berlin (where I’m staying for a few days), and they all freaked out. Maybe because I left the “illusion” part out of it, I don’t know. But one thing is for sure, it’s a really cool effect. David OReilly is responsible for this hologram. He used “the Cat” from his award-winning but unfinished cartoon PSS and gave it a 3D effect with Anamorphosis, the same technique used in Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (the one with the skull).

I wonder when the holograms become reality, Starwars style. On the iPhone it would probably look a bit like this:

[Via iSmashPhone]

Yesterday we wrote about Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the Enterprise, the buyer. The conclusion was that the impact of social media on the Enterprise was very big, addressing the very “nature of the firm”. This post looks at Enterprise 2.0 from the point of view of the vendor, specifically startups. This is a 30,000 foot view, but we aim to get past the hype to insights you can use in your startup. Further posts in our recently launched Enterprise Chanel will drill into specific market segments, companies and technologies.

1. Subscriptions are the best revenue you can get. Subscription revenue is more recession proof than advertising and more predictable than traditional enterprise software licensing. As long as you don’t mess up, you will have a low churn rate. Then your new subscriptions drive your revenue growth
2. It is much easier to get subscriptions from a business than from consumers. Sure we all love the idea of consumer subscriptions, the potential is enormous. But do this reality check. How many subscriptions do you pay for? How many current subscription costs would you love to eliminate or drastically reduce? What would your really (no, really) agree to pay for every month? We are in a serious consumer recession in the developed markets that may last a while. What was always hard, just got an awful lot harder. Selling to business is much easier, if you focus hard on the next rule.
3. The other 80/20 rule. 80% of enterprise IT budgets just “keep the lights on”. Only 20% goes to new stuff. I learned this in the technology nuclear winter in 2002, when a 20% cut in IT budgets meant that no (zero, nada) new projects were approved. If you can show how to reduce that 80%, you get a better shot at the 20%. That 80% market is a replacement market. You need to know what cost you are replacing. The incumbents are looking at the 20% budget as well and they have the inside track. You have to attack the 80% to make it big.
4. “Parallel replacement” is new. The old enterprise replacement market was based on capital expenditure write offs. If the client bought a $1m license fee over 5 years ago, you had a shot at selling another license fee for something “better, faster, cheaper”. In the new enterprise world of SAAS and open source, upfront license fees are the exception rather than the rule. Buyers prefer to hold onto the old stuff a bit longer until they can see either an open source or SAAS alternative. Replacement is always very risky, leaving incumbents in control and startups banging outside the door in frustration. So you need to show that you can run in parallel with the existing solution for a period until you are established enough to be a viable, safe replacement. Step 1 is run in parallel, step 2 is replace. This is what Google Apps and Zoho are doing to Microsoft office (I use both Google Apps and MS Office. Even though I use Office less frequently I own a license, so why delete it? When I get a new laptop I will decide whether I need to buy Office). To play this new parallel replacement game you need to a) offer a free entry point (the Freemium strategy) so you get traction with a low cost of sale and b) you need to show one very clear new value proposition that will tap into that 20% budget for new stuff.
5. Have one simple new “blue ocean” value proposition that any business user can understand. You need this to access the 20% of budget going to new stuff. Being “cloudy” is not a value proposition, it is simple]y a way to deliver your value proposition. The incumbent can always launch their SAAS equivalent. Your free entry level just gets you through the door so that you get a chance to upsell to your subscription; free is not a value proposition. You have to show how you will do something really basic such as either a) increase revenue with a low cost of sale or, b) reduce cost on an existing process or c) create strategic sustainable advantage in measurable ways. Most likely you will do this by enabling better collaboration/communication, both within the enterprise but also, more critically, outside the firewall to the “extended enterprise”. For a startup, this has to be “blue ocean”, a market that has not yet been defined by the incumbents. By its very nature, this means the market size will be very hard to define and there will almost certainly not be recognized external authority that has defined the market size. Smart VC understand that Blue Ocean strategy and precise market size estimates seldom go together.
6. SaaS ++ means that Open Source is no longer a problem. Open Source has been great for buyers but it has also taken the entry level market away in most segments and that trend shows no sign of letting up. That is bad news for a startup looking to sell traditional software with a “better, faster, cheaper plus we try harder” replacement pitch. You cannot undersell Open Source. That has forced many ventures with great software and strong teams into the dead-pool. With a “SAAS ++” offering, you can use Open Source as the base, add a bit of new code and bundle it all up with hardware and service in a monthly fee. Unless buyers really want to do all that in-house, using their dwindling internal IT staff, you have a shot at it. SAAS alone however is not a barrier to entry. Anybody can replicate it. Which means (smart) VC will/should pass. You need the “++” bit as well. That is likely to be something to do with viral, communications and network effects that create a growing user base and proprietary data coming from that base. That is the “magic sauce”.
7. You need to become a very good financial and data modeler. You will need some old-fashioned face to face relationship selling to get large enterprises to understand your solution, so that the "powers that be" encourage adoption and do not seek to block it. But the business will grow one subscriber at a time and users convert to subscribers one click at a time. Modeling becomes a core competency. Modeling the costs of all the SaaS components (R&D, hardware, infrastructure software, software maintenance, system and data maintenance). Modeling the cost of subscriber acquisition using SEO, SEM, social networking, conversion from free to paid and inside telephone sales in a highly efficient funnel process that delivers the right $ per subscriber. Modeling the revenue growth with multiple what if variable assumptions. Modeling the ROI for your clients at various levels of adoption.
8. Most external market size projections do not help your business plan. Forrester Research reports that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. That is not nearly granular enough for a real business plan. You are not really in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Saying “we will get 1% of the $4.6 billion Enterprise 2.0″ market is totally meaningless and will simply get you shown the door in the VC office. You are in the market of solving a specific business problem, for a specific type of customer, competing against specific incumbents and startups. That is how you need to build a market size, from the bottom up. This is particularly true for “blue ocean” strategies where the market has not been defined by an incumbent. Building the real world, bottom up market size takes real hard work and detailed market knowledge. Look for a small enough market where you can get 20% and take that to 50% share and then leverage that market to get 10% in another market. Rinse and repeat. It is an old formula, but it works.
9. You need VC, they need you but there is a disconnect. Since 2000, most VC have sent any business plan with the word “enterprise” straight to the trash. With good reason. During the nuclear winter, the enterprise IT market was dead as a dodo. Then the big incumbents got into the consolidation game and it looked like you would count enterprise IT vendors on the fingers of one hand. The cost of entry was high, needing expensive sales teams upfront and the revenue was lumpy and unpredictable. Yech. Better to back a few inexpensive developers building a free service that some big vendor would buy and figure out how to monetize. That was a great game for a while. Most VC now view it as in its final innings at best. There is a shortage of buyers, no IPO market, we are in a cyclical downturn for advertising and in a major funk figuring out how social media can be funded by advertising. So VC need Enterprise 2.0. But they have missed the early winners. Very few of the current Enterprise 2.0 startups are venture backed. This is a disconnect. The early players always find it easier to bootstrap than later vendors. Today you need capital to fund the ramp-up and to build distance from competitors as the Enterprise 2.0 market moves from “below the radar” to “early hype” phase, thus dragging more entrants into every category.
10. Vertical is not the same as Horizontal. Classic Web 2.0 services such as Delicious, YouTube and Skype are geared at mass markets. Anything that is more niche has tended to be called “vertical”. That is confusing. Vertical means a specific industry such as banking, healthcare or manufacturing and sub-sets of those industries. Horizontal (applying to any industry) should mean a set of common and linked features used by a specific type of person in the company (e.g. accounts payable by Finance, CRM by Sales and so on). The general rule of thumb has been for vertical ventures to be bootstrapped and eventually rolled up into larger entities. VC tend to view vertical as too limited. Horizontal on the other hand is big enough.
11. Know how to deal with secrecy, structure and control needs. Social Media is about being open, loose, unstructured, informal and fun; no ties allowed. Enterprises are about secrecy, structure and control. Ties show that you are serious and fun is for after work. The ties and fun bit is just style. But secrecy, structure and control is real. If you threaten those, many forces within the enterprise will shut you out. It will be like the red blood cells attacking the foreign virus. On the other hand, if you go along with all the secrecy, structure and control rules of the enterprise you will lose the social media benefits of extended enterprise collaboration and innovation. Many people within enterprises understand this and some of them are in a policy-making position of authority. In general, the trend is towards loose, unstructured, “emergent business networks”. So “make the trend your friend”, but beware of the very strong forces of opposition and deal positively with their legitimate needs.

Conclusion

What is your position in the Enterprise 2.0 market. Do you work in IT in a large Enterprise? Do you work for a large incumbent Enterprise IT vendor? Do you work for a startup that is going to change the Enterprise world? Are you writing about this rapidly emerging market? Do you have unique insights or research to share? We would love to hear from you in the comments and maybe as a Guest Author. Email us if you’re interested in writing for ReadWriteWeb’s Enterprise Channel.

You can subscribe now to our special RSS feed for the Enterprise channel.

Tonight, Microsoft has publicly launched Photosynth, its long awaited Live Labs product that allows you to stitch your photos together to create a detailed 3D environment.  While most of the computation is done on your desktop, the images are uploaded to Microsoft's servers and Microsoft is giving all Photosynth users a total of 20GB of storage for their collections. The rendering and browsing is done with the help of Seadragon, another Live Labs product.

Windows Only

When Microsoft first publicly showed a demo of Photosynth in 2006, it almost looked too good to be true. Now, getting started with it couldn’t be easier - as long as you have a Windows machine - there is no Mac version available yet. You first have to install both a browser plug-in and a desktop application (all done through just one installer). The installation was as standard as Windows installations get and finished in less than a minute. We tested the plugin in both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 without any problems.

One interesting aspect of the uploader is that you can choose a license for your creation. You can either choose a Creative Commons license, put the pictures in public domain, or mark it as ‘All Rights Reserved.’

Desktop App

The desktop application does most of the heavy lifting for creating the ’synths’ and seemed to make good use of all available cores. You only have to pick your photos, give your collection and name and click ‘Synth.’ After it has finished, it will create a score telling you how ’synthy’ your photo collection was. Obviously, your photos need to have common areas for Photosynth to be able to stitch them together. While Photosynth does a great job making these connections, it can’t work magic and our first attempts with relatively unconnected images were futile.

The more pictures you have, the longer the process of creating your synths takes, of course, and depending on your connection, the upload to Microsoft’s servers can also take quite a while. In the end, though, your patience will be greatly rewarded.

Online Viewer

The online viewer is quite intuitive and allows you to zoom in and out, move around the picture and also go through the pictures in a 3D slide show mode. One nice feature is that you can also go full screen, which is really the best way to showcase your photos.

You can also embed a copy of your synth on any website and email a link to your friends.

The animation in Photosynth is astonishingly smooth and our screenshots really can’t do it justice. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch Microsoft’s demo of Photosynth at TED2007, which will give you a good impression of what the final product looks like.

Different Way of Shooting

It really takes a different approach to shooting pictures to make the most out of Photosynth. If you often stitch together photos, you are probably already used to this, but Photosynth also gives you more freedom, as you can zoom in and out, or walk around an object and still have Photosynth recognize the common areas.

In our tests, Photosynth performed flawlessly, but we would recommend that you have a set of at least 10 to 20 photos to create an interesting ’synth’ and the more photos you have, the more interesting it will be.

Caveats

A couple of caveats:

• All synths are public - there are no privacy controls!
• Photosynth only runs on Vista and XP so far.

Verdict

Even though we only had a short time to test Photosynth, it has already changed the way we think about taking pictures. Suddenly, you can do so much more with your photos. But besides the cool factor, we can also see a lot of other interesting applications for Photosynth. A realtor, for example, could use it to create a more immersive virtual tour of a house.

If you already have Photosynth installed already, you can see a 3D view of Venice below - otherwise, clicking on the image will take you directly to the installer.

Jeremy Keith has been doing a great job blogging An Event Apart, and his writeup of The Lessons of CSS Frameworks by Eric Meyer caught my eye.

Eric took a look at the most popular CSS frameworks (960, Blueprint, Content With Style, That Standards Guy, YAML, YUI, Elements, Tripoli, WYMStyle) and talks about choosing one…

Let’s get one question out of the way, the question “which one is right for you?” Answer… none of the above. It’s like templates. There’s nothing wrong with templates but you don’t put together your client’s site based on a template, right? They can be a good starting point for ideas but you do your own designs. If you’re going to use a framework, it should be yours; one that you’ve created. You can look at existing frameworks for ideas and hack at it. But the professionals in this room are not well served by picking up a framework and using it as-is.

Eric put together a grid of features and which frameworks support those features. Every framework does reset, colours, and fonts. The fact that every framework has a reset is evidence of the frustration we all feel with the inconsistencies between browsers. The rules for colour tend to be much more minimal. Font styling, on the other hand, is more fully-featured generally. Whereas the colour might just be set for the body element, font sizes and faces are specified throughout. Usually that font face is Helvetica. Most frameworks steer away from trying to style form elements. Almost all of them do layout, usually combinations of columns. Four of the nine frameworks included print styles. Three of the nine included hacks.

After using a framework on Google Code, I can definitely say that they add a lot, and can take some of the pain of out CSS.

reachums submits this glance at "the newest level of computer animation," intended to get past the paradoxical "uncanny valley" — that is, the way animated humans actually can appear jarring as the animation gets hyper-realistic. "This short video gives us a glimpse of what we can hope to see in the future of computer games and movies. Emily is not a real actress, but she looks like a real person, something we haven't truly seen before in computer animation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Before Gizmodo, I worked in the bowels of the broadcast industry for a number of years. I was either shooting video or cutting video every day, all day. And while Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects were both tools I used with some proficiency on a daily basis, I’ve never seen a post production demo as incredible as this clip from the University of Washington.

Essentially, you shoot some crappy, low-rez video of a still scene. You then reshoot the same scene with a digital camera (with higher resolution). Software can automagically combine these images to upconvert the video AND fix problems in the image— all while compensating for 3D space. Make sense? The remarkable demo will clarify things a bit:

What’s especially notable is that the software can fill in the nasty bits of the scene despite the videographer/photographer rotating their view (you see this as they shoot around the tree) and despite any lens differences (the software can compensate for different lens sizes/distortions).

Also, note that many details from the source video are retained (the glass reflections in the statue shot may be the best example), which means that the photograph’s information isn’t the only information we see in the composite image.

I’m not quite convinced that the entire process is quite as automatic as the students would make it, but the technology is extremely promising all the same. And at this point, it should only be a matter of time before we see the idea work its way into our favorite post production products. [Project Page via bbGadgets]