Entries from February 2009 ↓

by
Gregory Mitnick

This episode of Cool Hunting Video surveys the fashion and people at São Paulo Fasion Week's Winter 2009 shows. With commentary from designers and writers, as well as plenty of runway looks and peeks backstage, it’s a snapshot of what’s happening in Brazilian fashion now.

Hmmm. Do I want my shower rainfall style or waterfall style? I certainly hope this Aquavolo showerhead from Bossini is sturdy—because I would be flipping back and forth like an idiot. [Bossini via Trendir]

What it does

When the Internet was becoming widespread (and some time beyond that too) I recall that having a site of your own was a completely different prospect from the reality we are accustomed with now. That was to happen, really, but the tools and applications we have nowadays can but leave us old-timers a bit awed.

The Tank site is a case in point. In principle, it is a tool that will let anybody come up with a site of his own without having any kind of programming knowledge at all. This application also has the advantage of being entirely browser-based, and you can make adjustments from anywhere an Internet connection is available.

The creation process involves using a dashboard for putting the different elements together. Photos can be merged with posts, and support for pods is to be implemented sometime soon.

By way of conclusion, this solution will let you express yourself on the web as long as you have your basic building blocks at hand. If you would like to know more about this tool, and also inform yourself about pricing considerations, station your browser at www.withtank.com and proceed from there.

In their own words

“Tank is aimed at those who want to create simple, great-looking sites that work. No broken links, no cruft, no clutter. Solid sites composed of urls as clean and succinct as the xhtml it’s built upon.”

Why it might be a killer

It is an apt way to get a site together in no time at all.

Some questions

How much does this solution retail for?

Link: http://www.withtank.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/withttank-com-build-your-own-website

 

Great idea, or greatest idea? [Flickr via Neatorama]

Google is now making it easier for Websites to surface Friend Connect features with what it is calling the Social Bar. This is a toolbar that Websites can add to their homepage or any other page they wish, and then they can add links for drop-down gadgets that lets site visitors do things such as sign in via Friend Connect, see who else has signed in recently, check out comments, or site members, all from Social Bar. Here is an example.

Basically, the social bar is a small strip that webmasters can layer on top of any web page, either at the top or at the bottom. That way, website visitors are provided with a bit of information, and the bar also lets them interact with any social feature the site incorporates through drop-down gadgets. As Software Engineer Christopher Wren explains in the announcement blog post, this is a good way to save on pixel space and keep putting the actual content of the site forward first.

Here are some of the gadgets Websites can include in the Social Bar, from Google’s brand new Social Web blog:

• On the far left, visitors can join your site, see their identity, and edit their profiles and settings.
• Your visitors can also delve into your site’s activity stream to see what’s happening throughout your site. It includes links to recent posts made anywhere on your site, helping other visitors quickly find where the hottest conversations are taking place.
• The wall gadget can host a discussion for the whole site, a section of pages, or each individual page, letting your visitors easily read and leave comments.
• Lastly, visitors can see the other members of your site, check out their profiles to see how like-minded they really are, and even become friends.

The toolbar approach is both an attempt at ubiquity and invisibility at the same time. Google wants Friend Connect to be everywhere, but at the same time it doesn’t want to seem too pushy about being everywhere. Hence, the seemingly innocuous toolbar. But that toolbar expands with pop-down gadgets, which takes advantage of Google’s strengths with creating gadgets in iGoogle and elsewhere. Can a Facebook Connect toolbar be far behind?

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

By Jacob Gube

JavaScript is a powerful client-side scripting language used in many modern websites and Web applications. In the hands of a skilled Web developer, JavaScript can enhance the user’s experience of the website and provide rich interactive components and features. But even though syntactically simple in nature, JavaScript is often difficult to author because of the environment it runs in: the Web browser. JavaScript’s popularity is evident in emerging technologies, such as Adobe AIR, which use it as a supported language for creating desktop-based applications.

Below, you’ll find 50 excellent tools to help you achieve various tasks involved in authoring JavaScript code. You’ll find useful tools to speed up your coding processes, including debugging tools to hunt down places where your scripts break, unit testing and validation tools to test your scripts in various situations, security vulnerability scanners and code optimization tools to make sure your scripts are light as a feather.

You’ll also find a few new and alternative JavaScript and AJAX frameworks to help you explore options beyond the big names (i.e. MooTools, jQuery, YUI, Dojo, Prototype), in addition to useful scripts to help you accomplish a host of design and development tasks related to JavaScript.

Also, be sure to check out the following related posts:

• 75 (Really) Useful JavaScript Techniques
• 60 AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding
• jQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
• 50 Extremely Useful And Powerful CSS Tools

JavaScript/AJAX Authoring Tools

• jQuery UI
  The jQuery UI allows you to design custom user interfaces for Web applications using the jQuery library. With jQuery UI, you can reduce the amount of code you write for common rich interactive features and website widgets. Be sure to check out the jQuery UI Demo page, which showcases some of the things you can accomplish using jQuery UI.

  

• Google Web Toolkit
  The Google Web Toolkit (commonly referred to as GWT) is a framework for developing complex and fully featured AJAX-based Web applications. You write front-end code in Java that is later compiled into optimized and cross-browser-friendly JavaScript. GWT puts the focus on Web application development by reducing the need for testing and debugging JavaScript for browser quirks.
• Jx
  Jx is a JavaScript library for creating graphical user interfaces written on top of the MooTools framework. Jx is distributed with an MIT license and is well documented. Numerous examples as well as thorough and well-organized API documentation is available on the website.

  

• Freestyle Webtop Toolkit
  Freestyle aims to reduce the complexity and time involved in deploying Web-based user interfaces by eliminating the separation of client-side and server-side development. With Freestyle, you focus on programming logic and UI design, and it handles the rest (i.e. cross-browser compatibility and DHTML and AJAX development).

  

• Script#
  Script# is an AJAX and JavaScript authoring tool that allows developers to write in C#. It also allows .NET developers to leverage their existing knowledge and provides powerful tools associated with the .NET framework.

  

• Aptana Jaxer
  Aptana Jaxer is the first “AJAX server” that allows developers to use their AJAX, HTML, JavaScript and DOM knowledge to create fully featured server-side-powered Web applications. With Jaxer, you can even write database queries in JavaScript syntax. Jaxer integrates very well with popular JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, Dojo and Ext JS.
• JS Regex Generator
  JS Regex Generator helps JavaScript developers write Regular Expressions for matching strings of text. This is commonly done for text-format validation, such as when checking if inputted text has the correct date and email format.

  

• WaveMaker
  WaveMaker is open-source software for complete Web application development and deployment. You can find a host of demo applications built and deployed using WaveMaker on the Demo Applications page.

  

Documentation Tools

• JSDoc Toolkit
  JSDoc Toolkit makes code documentation a breeze. Written in JavaScript, it helps developers automatically generate templates for JavaScript comments. It’s a great tool for managing large-scale applications developed by teams of developers who have different coding styles.
• jGrouseDoc
  jGrouseDoc is an open-source project distributed through Google Code under a modified BSD license. It lets developers document and manage their code comments using a format similar to Javadoc’s.

  

JavaScript Debugging Tools

• Firebug
  Firebug is an extremely popular and well-regarded front-end debugging tool. It has all the features you’d expect from a JavaScript debugging tool, such as the ability to set breakpoints in your code so that you can step through your script. For people developing outside of Mozilla-based browsers, check out Firebug Lite, which is a JavaScript library you can include in your Web pages to access some of the features of Firebug.

  

• Venkman JavaScript Debugger
  Venkman is Mozilla’s JavaScript debugger and an add-on for Gecko-based browsers. Venkman is a robust and fully featured JavaScript debugging environment, with a host of useful features and options, such as code profiling to inspect your script’s performance.

  

• Drosera
  Drosera is an excellent debugging tool for Safari and WebKit-based browsers.

  

• Opera Dragonfly
  Opera Dragonfly is a robust debugging environment for the Opera browser. Dragonfly allows you to view and inspect errors, debug your scripts and inspect and edit the DOM and CSS on the fly.
• NitobiBug
  NitobiBug is a browser-based JavaScript object logger and inspector. It runs on numerous browsers, including IE, Safari, Opera and Firefox. It is a powerful tool in helping developers build rich interactive AJAX applications.
• DebugBar
  DebugBar is an in-browser front-end debugger for Internet Explorer. Much like its Firefox counterparts, it has a robust set of features, such as DOM, JavaScript and cookie inspection. Be sure to check out Companion JS, which is a JavaScript debugging library to be used alongside DebugBar.

  

• Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar
  Similar to Firebug, IE Developer Toolbar is an in-browser tool to help you debug front-end code in Internet Explorer. It’s especially handy as a debugging and inspection alternative to Firefox when you’re developing and testing in IE.

JavaScript Testing and Validation Tools

• Test – JavaScriptMVC
  Test is a JavaScriptMVC component for easily setting up automated unit testing for JavaScript code. It lets you effectively test for DOM events (such as a key press or form submission), thereby lessening development time, oversight and errors associated with manual testing.

  

• JsUnit
  JsUnit is a popular unit testing framework for JavaScript code. It’s a JavaScript port from another unit testing framework for Java called JUnit. JsUnit allows you to write test cases and provides tools for automated code execution.
• JSLint
  JSLint is a Web-based tool for verifying your JavaScript code for errors. It has a ton of features and settings that you can use to customize verification algorithms to suit your needs.

  

• Crosscheck
  Crosscheck is an open-source testing framework for JavaScript. Crosscheck is unique because it works independent of environment: you can run tests outside of a Web browser, which avoids discrepancies that occur when testing in various browsers.
• YUI Test
  YUI Test is a suite of testing utilities that’s part of the YUI library developed by Yahoo!. It has numerous features, such as easy creation of test cases through an intuitive syntax, advanced failure detection and the ability to organize test cases by grouping them into test suites.

  

• J3Unit
  J3Unit is an excellent object-oriented unit-testing framework for JavaScript. It gives you a host of options for writing automated test cases and has three modes: Static Mode, Local Browser Mode and Remote Browser Mode.
• Regular Expression Tool
  The Regular Expression Tool is an online utility that allows you to test your RegEx code against a sample test. It’s a handy tool to have around when you want to quickly test the efficacy of your regular expressions in a variety of example texts.

  

• JavaScript Regular Expression Tester
  This is another handy tool for testing regular expressions within the Web browser.

  

• JSLitmus
  JSLitmus is a lightweight tool for creating JavaScript benchmarks and performance tests, using an intuitive API.

  

Security Tools

• AttackAPI
  AttackAPI is a framework for writing test cases of potential JavaScript exploits and vulnerabilities.
• jsfuzzer
  jsfuzzer is a fuzzing tool to help you write (and test for) attack vectors in JavaScript.

New and Alternative JavaScript and Ajax Development Frameworks

• Clean AJAX
  Clean AJAX is an open-source framework for creating AJAX-based applications. Check out the demo page to see it in action.

  

• SAJAX
  SAJAX is an excellent toolkit for developing AJAX-based applications. It supports PHP, Perl and Python.

  

• JavaScriptMVC
  JavaScriptMVC is a Web application framework based on the MVC software architectural pattern. It speeds up Web development processes and lays down best practices, maintainability and standards as principles in a project’s development.
• qooxdoo
  qooxdoo is a simple and intuitive AJAX application framework. Be sure to check out the Demo Browser, a Web-based application that allows you to view demos of qooxdoo at work.

  

• SimpleJS
  SimpleJS is a small and lightweight JavaScript library that provides developers with useful JavaScript functions for working with AJAX.

Image Manipulation and Graphing

• Reflection.js
  Reflection.js automatically adds reflections to your images unobtrusively. Also check out instant.js, a similar script that adds an image border and tilts images on a Web page.

  

• typeface.js
  typeface.js allows you to embed custom fonts on Web pages, freeing you from having to create images for HTML text.
• CanvasGraph.js
  CanvasGraph.js is a simple JavaScript library that lets you construct bar, line and pie charts using HTML’s canvas element.

  

• flot
  flot is a JavaScript library for plotting data and has been tested to work in most modern Web browsers.

  

• JavaScript Diagram Builder
  The JavaScript Diagram Builder is a JavaScript library that consists of a variety of objects and functions for constructing diagrams.

  

• The Dojo Charting Engine
  The Dojo Charting Engine is a robust utility for creating components for data visualization, written on top of the Dojo Toolkit.

Useful Utilities and JavaScript Scripts

• Processing.js
  Processing.js is a JavaScript port of Processing, the open-source data-visualization programming language. Check out examples that use Processing.js.
• AJAX Libraries API
  Google’s AJAX Libraries API allows you to serve popular JavaScript libraries using its CDN, which reduces the server load on your website.
• DamnIT
  DamnIT is an error-reporting service that allows you to gather feedback from beta testers after they’ve encountered a JavaScript error. This is perfect for live production testing and as a monitoring tool that helps you track errors and weak spots in your Web applications.
• ie7-js
  ie7-js is a JavaScript library that forces Internet Explorer to behave like a standards-based browser (like Firefox or Opera). It automatically fixes IE browser quirks and deviations from Web standards, as in the case of its box model.
• Lazy loader
  Lazy loader is a jQuery plug-in that delays the loading of images so that text content can load first, thereby making image-heavy pages load faster.

JavaScript Code Optimization and Minification Tools

• JS Minifier
  JS Minifier is a Web-based tool for shrinking your JavaScript code to make it as lightweight as possible.

  

• JSMIN
  JSMIN is a popular JavaScript minifier that removes unneeded characters (like spaces and tabs) and comments, thus reducing your script’s file size.
• YUI Compressor
  The YUI Compressor is another well-regarded JavaScript code-optimization tool developed by Yahoo!.
• Scriptalizer
  Scriptalizer is a helpful online tool for combining JavaScript files to reduce HTTP requests.

  

• ShrinkSafe
  ShrinkSafe is a compression tool that reduces JavaScript file sizes.
• SlickSpeed Selectors Test
  SlickSpeed is a Web page for comparing the performance of the DOM object selection of various popular frameworks like MooTools and jQuery.

  

About the Author

Jacob Gube is a Web developer, designer, and founder of Six Revisions, a blog on Web development and design. If you want to connect with the author, you can follow him on Twitter.

(al)

From the Speaker of the House’s blog — a chart showing the job-losses by month in the past two recessions (red=2001, blue=1991) against the current recession (that suicidal green line plunging to its death).

Shit.

What 3.6 Million Jobs Lost Over 13 Months Looks Like

(via Isen)

30 controls for RICH INTERFACE APPLICATION design and development.\r\n

Facebook has joined the OpenID Foundation, something that many OpenID advocates have hoped would happen for some time. The two systems of logging in to distributed websites, OpenID and Facebook Connect, have been characterized as rivals – OpenID being the high-minded but socially awkward one who doesn’t get invited to parties despite being a really good person and Facebook Connect being the rich preppy popular kid from the 80’s movie who’s a bully but is good at sports.

Now they’ve joined forces, on some level. Cynics immediately said it would make no difference, that their cynicism remained unchanged, or that Facebook was likely to “pull a Microsoft” and try to destroy OpenID. We disagree. We think this is good news. Here is why.

Sponsor

Both systems, OpenID and Facebook Connect, claim to offer a number of benefits:

1. Both make it easier to participate in new websites because you don’t need to create a new account.
2. Both carry payloads of user data that can yield immediate personalization for a richer experience.
3. Both offer authentication that you really are who you say you are. That opens up a whole world of possibilities technically and culturally.

That’s what this is all about, here’s why we think tonight’s news is important.

1. ID Systems Should Be Integrated

Users shouldn’t have to choose between logging in someplace with an OpenID log-in or with Facebook Connect. We should be given both options wherever possible, including on Facebook. Facebook could allow users to associate another account with a Facebook account and just log in using that other account. No big deal. As OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina told me in a recent interview, user authentication is like a credit card. You don’t go to a restaurant because they accept credit cards, you go because they have good food. To take that analogy a step further, it is good that every restaurant lets you pay for your food with any of the major credit card vendors.

We hope that today’s announcement will be a step in that direction.

Image above: JanRain’s RPX product, as seen on over 200 Universal Music artists’ web pages.

2. OpenID’s Momentum is Incredible, Really

A lot of people complain that OpenID is moving too slowly; they see the problems with it and don’t understand why it’s taking the rest of the web to hurry up and solve those problems.

In reality, OpenID has gone from a LiveJournal technical project, to being a mailing list for freaks and dreamers to becoming a global phenomenon that huge companies are contributing their time, money and brand names in order to help develop – all in just 3 years.

In the past 18 months these companies have lined up to perform the easy part of OpenID, acting as an authentication party at other websites, and now the pressure is building for someone to break the dam and turn OpenID into a big two way phenomenon, allowing people to log in to Facebook with another OpenID, for example.

Just for context – OpenID is younger than YouTube and Facebook, neither of which have quite figured out how to monetize changing the world yet. So give OpenID a break, it’s doing really well. Getting Facebook on board the OpenID Foundation is a big win and just the latest of many recent victories.

3. The User Experience Help Will Be Invaluable

Everybody knows that the User Experience with OpenID is difficult for people unfamiliar with it, and sometimes for people who are familiar with it. Facebook is often offered as an example of how it can be done, but as a grumpy OpenID Foundation Board Member Chris Messina put it tonight – “Facebook Connect is simple because there is no choice: you click a button. Of course, that button only works for the growing subset of the web who have Facebook accounts and want to share their Facebook identity with the web site displaying the button, but that’s why their experience trumps that of OpenID’s. If you take away user choice, everything becomes simple.”

OpenID is a complicated thing. Who better to help work on the user experience, though, than Facebook? Their designers have done a great job and everyone says that the UX will be priority #1 now that Facebook is on board. Throw enough designers at the problem, from a wide variety of companies, and there should be several good solutions at least.

It’s probably not going to be that hard to fix, either. Check out this proposed solution, for example. That’s getting closer is it not?

4. Compromises Will Be Made, Both Ways

How are standards created? Through compromise, negotiation and collaboration. The legal work is one of the hardest parts and the OpenID Foundation completed most of that a year ago, ensuring that no one is going to sue anyone else over using OpenID on a website. Things might get a little more complicated with Facebook’s entry, but this capable and now larger community should be able to figure it out.

Will the option to log in with Facebook Connect have to be included on other sites that prefer OpenID? Will OpenID have to be an option on Facebook at some level? Neither of those would be the end of the world and the benefits should far outweigh the costs.

5. Facebook is Not Entirely Evil

Readers sympathetic to open standards and critical of proprietary technology may have a picture in their minds eye of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg rubbing his hands together and cackling about how the famous $1 billion offer he turned down to buy the company was not enough money. In reality, Zuckerberg is a big dork – a brilliant, lucky, too-powerful dork, but he doesn’t seem like that bad a person. There are, we’re sure, power hungry and distasteful people working in the organization – but there are lots and lots of people who are genuinely focused largely on innovation and improving the world. The OpenID Foundation assured us of that in their announcement today and that’s been our experience in dealing with Facebook as press as well. (Trust me, this author in particular generally doesn’t like almost anyone in an executive position at these huge internet companies.)

Especially among the Facebook engineers there is hope. Just like we’re very skeptical of Google’s frightening power over the world we live in but really like a lot of individual Google engineers, so too with Facebook come a lot of people who will be great to have working along side the existing OpenID community.

So, cynics, that’s why we think tonight’s announcement is good news.

Discuss

Now that we have online office suites like Google Docs, Zoho, and even Adobe’s Acrobat.com, you may not have much desire to go and check out yet another would-be Microsoft Office killer. However, Shutterborg, a new online word processor does one thing really well which makes it a unique tool in this space: it lets you open any URL on the internet and edit it like an Office document.

Sponsor

When you first visit Shutterborg, available online at http://shutterb.org, you’re presented with three options: New Document, Open from Disk (coming soon), and Open from Web. The first option – starting a new document – will take you right into Shutterborg, where you can then begin to type.

The word processor itself is rather rudimentary. There are some basic options for formatting your text, aligning it, highlighting it, etc. You can also choose to insert photos and links from the “Insert” menu or create bulleted and numbered lists. Beyond that, the tool doesn’t do much in terms of word processing. Also, at the moment, the files you create can only be saved in .HTML format. Other formats like .TXT, .ODT, and .DOC will arrive in later, says the company.

If basic word processing was all that Shutterborg did, it probably wouldn’t be worth a mention just yet. However, the “Open from Web” option that is presented to you upon launch is a pretty clever invention. Here, you can enter in any URL on the internet to open an exact replica of that web page, with the CSS and images intact. You can then edit it as you desire which could obviously lead to some humorous creations.

That feature alone makes Shutterborg worth a look simply because it's so easy to use. Although the resulting HTML file won't look like much if opened outside of the Shutterborg processor, it's easy enough to grab a screenshot of your mocked up creation while you have Shutterborg open. The potential for creating hilarious edits to well-known sites will certainly appeal to the creative types out there. We can't wait to see what they come up with. 

Shutterborg is a creation of developIT, a small business in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada whose focus is on developing web sites and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) for businesses of all sizes.

Discuss