Entries Tagged 'web20' ↓

Yesterday, the New York Times blog announced the initial release of the New York Times Article Search API [nytimes.com]. This makes it possible to explore the first occurrence of the term “data visualization”, or identify articles that appeared on the front page and mentioned “blog”. The New York Times now has several APIs available, including (searchable) articles, best sellers (books), campaign finance, community (comments), congress (vote data), movie reviews and dictionaries (will there be a infographic / “interactive media” category, or is this already part of “articles”?).

The Article Search API is meant to make way to find, discover, explore, have fun and build new “things” based on the rich content available on the New York Times. The database contains over 2.8 million articles from 1981 until today (updated hourly). Each article comprises about 35 searchable metadata fields, from title and byline to thumbnail image and geographic region. A few applications seem already to exist, such as some I did not know before like Who’s on First. Surely more will follow?

See also the New York Times Visualization Lab.

More information at the forthcoming Times Open event. Any attendee wants to guest blog the experience?

When it comes to Web design and development, one thing trumps the latest technology and cool features: usability. Why? Because all of the features and functions in the world are completely worthless if a human user is unable to figure out how to use them. But testing against human factors, creating use cases, and observing focus groups can prove to be a costly endeavor for even the largest of companies.

Now, there’s a cost-effective means of seeing how usable your pages are: Userfly, a simple way to test your site’s usability for free – with one line of code.

Sponsor

Simply add the Userfly code to your site, and you’ll soon be a fly-on-the-wall as users walk through your pages. That one line of code allows Userfly to record a screencast of your users’ behavior, providing some very interesting feedback on how they are interacting with your site, from simple mouse tracking to complex interactions with AJAX elements.

The user behavior is recorded for the entire site visit, following the user from page to page. Once the user leaves the site, the capture ends.

Reviewing the walkthroughs is just as easy. Userfly provides information on the user’s browser, each page visited, and time spent on each page. Clicking on a particular page plays back the interaction, showing where the user moved his or her mouse and where he or she clicked. Once you’re finished watching, you’re prompted to rate the usefulness of the capture. Then, you can decide to keep it or discard it.

Even during a short test, I found Userfly incredibly helpful – given that a number of users stopped by as I was testing the app. In fact, the only complaint I had was that the walkthrough fails to automatically pan as the user scrolls. Meaning? Meaning you have to manually scroll to keep up with the mouse movements – which I found to be nearly impossible on lengthy posts.

When the user didn’t scroll, however, I found myself replaying the walkthroughs over and over. It was invaluable to see how other users see and use the pages that I find so familiar. Suffice it to say, I immediately noticed areas for improvement.

Userfly will allow you to record 10 users per hour, monitoring basic events for free. Those who are interested in more users per hour and more advanced events can contact Userfly for a quote.

How are people using your site? Wouldn’t you like to know? Grab the code at Userfly and take a look at your site through someone else’s eyes.

Discuss

Amazon finished private beta testing and has entered into public unlimited beta of its cloud database service named SimpleDB. SimpleDB is meant to be a simple to be accessed database in the cloud, and Amazon is offering limited access to it for free. By Abel Avram

Damian Wielgosik has created Drawter, a web based tool to layout pages:

Drawter is a tool written in JavaScript and based on jQuery library. It provides you the possibility to literally draw your website’s code. It runs on every single web-browser which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn.

Currently Drawter is available in Pro version, which means that it is intended for webmasters use only – knowledge of HTML and CSS is required.

Drawter is not a tool for laymen, for the time being, but the whole team behind the project is putting every effort to launch a new version called “Amateur”. Soon you will be able to draw your websites without any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Launching soon, really soon.

He has a detailed screencast of the tool in action where you see how you can flip between draw and edit modes to build up your page. Nicely done!

The most exciting part of Adobe MAX last week was a service that was announced by Paul Gubbay at the “Sneaks” session that shows cool tech that Adobe folk are working on. His (very early stage) service is called Meer Meer and it is genuinely useful.

You can plugin a URL and the system will render that page on a server farm (many browsers, cross OS) and show you the results. It can visually layer these results so you can see the differences. It was awesome.

I pinged Paul and had a nice conversation with him about the project:

Can you explain what Meer Meer is, and where you got the inspiration?

Meer Meer is the code name for a new hosted service that allows Web Pros to view their content on a variety of different browsers and operating systems without requiring them to install anything other than the standard Flash Player. The inspiration is easy. We spend a lot of time with our customers and cross-browser compatibility consistently comes up as the #1 issue unprompted. It’s a real pain and we wanted to help solve it.

What browsers and OSes are supported? This means I don’t have to kick up VMWare to test in IE 6 now right? ;)

IE6 is covered :) We haven’t finalized the complete set yet but we’re committed to supporting the top browsers for Windows and Mac. We expect that mix to change over time as new browsers/versions gain market share.

What are the various views and features?

We’ve really focused on how users tweak/debug their CSS today and engineered the service to fit into that workflow. One of the unique features for Meer Meer is that it can work directly with your local content if you are using Dreamweaver. This is a big benefit as users can tweak CSS and hit the refresh button to get an immediate representation of the page on their target browsers. No need to save, publish to a public location and then view. In addition, we’ve focused on several views (1-up, side by side and onion skin).

Onion skin is the most interesting as it overlays two browser shots over each other and provides the user with complete control over the transparency. This view typically gets the big oohs and aahs :)

Can you talk about the high level implementation? I assume you have a server farm on the back end and you are rendering and sending back images of the rendered image?

That’s correct. In addition we’re using a Flex application as the client. This makes the application feel very snappy and respond like a desktop application without the need to install anything. The team has also done some great work to establish a local connection with Dreamweaver to work with local content. When you make a change to your code and switch back to Meer Meer it knows you’ve made a change and prompts you to refresh. You can choose to refresh from within Dreamweaver and a panel will update and show you the status of the screenshot retrieval in real time.

In Dreamweaver CS4 you showed taking an Ajax app, clicking around to change state, freezing the page and then sending it to Meer Meer. Can you talk more about the freezing feature and other things that you can do?

I’m really proud to be associated with this release of DW CS4. We’ve definitely pushed the envelope. Our new Live View leverages the WebKit rendering engine to provide users with a true browser experience directly within the product. This means that you can see and interact with dynamic content such as Ajax UI widgets. Furthermore, we’ve included the ability to see the Live Code that the browser generates as you interact with the page. Users can freeze JavaScript to get the page into different states and then use the new Code Navigator to jump directly to the CSS that effects the element they select. This is an added bonus for Meer Meer because we can place the page into different states, such as selecting the second pane of an Accordion widget, and then view the page in that state within Meer Meer. Other browser compatibility services simply can’t do this.

Any final thoughts on Meer Meer or other Web Pro services coming from Adobe?

We’re really excited about the future of desktop + services at Adobe. Meer Meer is a great example of what we can accomplish when we take a holistic view to solving a user challenge. We’re also very interested in extending the capabilities of our users by providing them with turn-key hosted solutions that allow them to grow their business. Content maintenance follows very closely on the heels of browser compatibility as a top challenge that our users face today. Our new InContext Editing service that is now in free preview on Adobe labs allows Web Pros to provide content editing capabilities directly within the browser to their end user. No programming required.

We look forward to hearing feedback from the community on these services to help guide our future direction.

This is an exciting server from Adobe, and shows that focusing on the Flash issue isn’t the entire story. They have a lot to offer the Open Web if we look to the right places and we can continue to fight for more too :) If we support projects like Meer Meer we can make our voice heard.

Of course, this is just the beginning. I would love to see an API to the service which would allow any developer tools to mashup nicely with the service. You can also imagine actively analyzing the code to not only point out the diff in the image, but the issue in the code. When we get there, we will be in a very good place indeed :)

There were some other cool things from MAX that showed up in Labs:

• Alchemy: A research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code into ActionScript libraries (AVM2).
• Durango: Mashup tool for AIR

And for more in-browser tools, check out this nice roundup on
15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools.

In November 2007, we listed 10 Semantic apps to watch and yesterday we published an update on what each had achieved over the past year. All of them are still alive and well – a couple are thriving, some are experimenting and a few are still finding their way.

Now we’re going to list 10 more Semantic apps to watch. These are all apps that have gotten onto our radar over 2008. We’ve reviewed all but one of them, so click through to the individual reviews for more detail. It should go without saying, but this is by no means an exhaustive list – so if we haven’t mentioned your favorite, please add it in the comments.

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BooRah

BooRah is a restaurant review site that we first reviewed earlier this year. One of BooRah’s most interesting aspects is that it uses semantic analysis and natural language processing to aggregate reviews from food blogs. Because of this, BooRah can recognize praise and criticism in these reviews and then rates restaurants accordingly. BooRah also gathers reviews from Citysearch, Tripadvisor and other large review sites.

BooRah also announced last month the availability of an API that will allow other web sites and businesses to offer online reviews and ratings from BooRah to their customers. The API will surface most of BooRah’s data about a given restaurant, including ratings, menus, discounts, and coupons.

Swotti

Swotti is a semantic search engine that aggregates opinions about products to help you make purchasing decisions. We reviewed the product back in March. Swotti aggregates opinions about products from product review sites, forums and discussion boards, web sites and blogs, and then categorizes those reviews as to what feature or aspect of the product is being reviewed, tagging it accordingly, and then rating the review on as positive or negative.

Dapper MashupAds

Earlier this month we wrote about the recent improvement in Dapper MashupAds, a product we first spotted over a year ago. The idea is that publishers can tell Dapper: this is the place on my web page where the title of a movie will appear, now serve up a banner ad that’s related to whatever movie this page happens to be about. That could be movies, books, travel destinations – anything. We remarked that the UI for this has grown much more sophisticated in the past year.

How this works: in the back end, Dapper will be analyzing the fields that publishers identify and will apply a layer of semantic classification on top of them. The company believes that its new ad network will provide monetary incentive for publishers to have their websites marked up semantically. Dapper also has a product called Semantify, for SEO – see our review of that.

For more on Semantic advertising, see our write-up of a panel on this topic from the Web 3.0 Conference.

Inform.com

Inform.com analyzes content from online publishers and inserts links from a publisher’s own content archives, affiliated sites, or the web at large, to augment content being published. We reviewed it in January, when at the time the company had more than 100 clients – including CNN.com, WashingtonPost.com and the Economist.

Inform says its technology determines the semantic meaning of key words in millions of news stories around the web every day in order to recommend related content. The theory is that by automating the process of relevant link discovery and inclusion, Inform can easily add substantial value to a publisher’s content. Inform also builds out automatic topic pages, something you can see around WashingtonPost and CNN.com.

Siri

We have met our share of secretive startups over the years, but few have been as secretive about their plans as Siri, which was founded in December 2007 and did not even have an official name until October this year. Siri was spun out of SRI International and its core technology is based on the highly ambitious CALO artificial intelligence project.

In our October post on Siri, we discovered that Siri is working on a "personalized assistant that learns." We expect Siri to have a strong information management aspect, combined with some novel interface ideas. Based on our discussion with founders Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer in October, we think that there will be a strong mobile aspect to Siri's product and at least some emphasis on location awareness. Siri plans to launch in the first half of 2009.

Evri

Evri is a Paul Allen (of Microsoft fame) backed semantic search engine that launched into a limited beta in June. Evri is a search engine, though it adds a very sophisticated semantic layer on top of its results that emphasizes the relationships between different search terms. It especially prides itself for having developed a system that can distinguish between grammatical objects such subjects, verbs, and objects to create these connections. You can check out a tour of Evri here.

UpTake

Semantic search startup UpTake (formerly Kango) aims to make the process of booking travel online easier. In our review in May, we explained that UpTake is a vertical search engine that has assembled what it says is the largest database of US hotels and activities – over 400,000 of them – from more than 1,000 different travel sites. Using a top-down approach, UpTake looks at its database of over 20 million reviews, opinions, and descriptions of hotels and activities in the US and semantically extracts information about those destinations.

Imindi

Imindi is essentially a mind mapping tool, although it markets itself as a "Thought Engine". Imindi was recommended to us in the comments to our previous post by Yihong Ding, who called it "an untraditional Semantic Web service". Yihong said that traditionally Semantic Web services employ machines to understand humans, however Imindi's approach is to encourage humans to better understand each other via machines.

Imindi has met with a fair amount of skepticism so far – and indeed it appears to be reaching big with its AI associations. However we think it’s worth watching, if for no other reason than to see if it can live up to the description on its About page: "By capturing the free form associations of user's logic and intuition, IMINDI is building a global mind index which is an entirely new resource for building collective intelligence and leveraging human creativity and subjectivity on the web."

See also: Thinkbase: Mapping the World’s Brain

Juice

We’ve all been there. You started reading something on the Web, saw something interesting in the article, searched for it, wound up somewhere else, and after about 12 hops you’ve forgotten exactly what it was you were looking for. If only there were some way to select that topic midstream and have the information automagically appear for you, without disrupting your workflow or sending you traipsing off into the wilds of the Web.

If that sounds familiar, you may need a shot of Juice, a new Firefox 3 add-in currently in public beta from Linkool Labs, that makes researching Web content as easy as click-and-drag. In our review of Juice, we concluded that it avoids some of the more traditional stumbling blocks of Semantic apps by taking a very top-down approach focused on a distinct data set.

Faviki

Faviki is a new social bookmarking tool which we reviewed back in May. It offers something that services like Ma.gnolia, del.icio.us and Diigo do not – semantic tagging capabilities. What this means is that instead of having users haphazardly entering in tags to describe the links they save, Faviki will suggest tags to be used instead. However, unlike other services, Faviki’s suggestions don’t just come from a community of users and their tagging history, but from structured information extracted straight out of the Wikipedia database.

Because Faviki uses structured tagging, there is more that can be learned about a particular tag, its properties, and its connections to other tags. The system will automatically know what tags belong together and how they relate to others.

Conclusion

The Semantic Web continues to inch closer to reality, by being used in products such as BooRah, Inform.com and Juice. Let us know your thoughts on the above 10 products, and of course any that we missed this time round.

Discuss

There are many useful Web development tools that integrate in your browser. These in-browser tools are commonly known as add-ons or extensions. Though add-ons and extensions aren’t just for Web development, many of them out there are designed specifically for Web developers. In-browser tools vary greatly in the jobs they perform; for example, some of them help you diagnose issues with CSS, HTML and JavaScript, while others evaluate the accessibility of your website.

In this article, we explore some of the most popular and useful in-browser Web development tools. You’ll find tools for popular Web browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer. Whether you need to debug and inspect your HTML, inspect HTTP headers, access FTP source files, evaluate accessibility or just figure out what color a Web page element is, you may find a variety of tools discussed here useful.

Firebug

Firebug is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser that allows you to debug and inspect HTML, CSS, the Document Object Model (DOM) and JavaScript. Though it has many strong features, it’s most known for revolutionizing the way developers debug and profile JavaScript code.

For example, before Firebug, many developers would use the alert() function to see what a variable contains or to find what line the code breaks. With Firebug enabled, you’re told specifically what the error is and which line it comes from. Firebug is an excellent tool for AJAX application developers because it lets you explore and perform on-the-fly edits on the DOM to see what happens when you manipulate Web page elements after a user action.

Aside from its popular JavaScript and DOM functionalities, Firebug can also log network activity to allow you to see detailed results of HTTP connections, inspect and edit HTML on the fly and debug and visualize your CSS.

Further Reading

• Debug and tune applications on the fly with Firebug
• An In-Depth Look At The Future of JavaScript Debugging With Firebug
• Build Better Pages with Firebug

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension (for the Firefox, Flock and SeaMonkey Web browsers) is an add-on that adds a tool bar with a menu of options for debugging and inspecting Web pages. It has a ton of features, my favorite being the View CSS Information option (CSS >> View Style Information, or Control + Shift + Y on Windows) which makes a page element clickable and shows you CSS selectors that affect that particular page element. It’s helpful for exploring and understanding large CSS files and projects that you’re unfamiliar with (such as a new open-source content management system).

It has built-in options for syntax validation for popular Web services, such as W3C’s CSS Validator and HiSoftware’s Web Content Accessibility Report, for your convenience. It has many other useful features, such as disable options for CSS, JavaScript and images, to test for degradation and progressive enhancement; a Forms menu with options for working with Web forms; Display Div Order and Display Block Size options to help you visualize the layout; and so much more.

YSlow

YSlow is a Firefox extension created by Yahoo! developers that integrates with Firebug (therefore you need to have Firebug enabled for it to work). YSlow analyzes a Web page for front-end performance and, in its simplest usage, gives you a letter grade (A being the best and F being the poorest) for each of the best practices for speeding up  your website.

YSlow also allows you to inspect in detail things that are essential for a high-performance website. For example, the Stats view gives you the total size of a Web page and a summary of items that are loaded when the Web page is requested (i.e. style sheets, JavaScript files, Flash objects and images), so that you can hunt down the bottlenecks that cause a Web page to load slowly.

The Components view outlines every single component of a Web page in tabular format and allows you to inspect it to see attributes such as size, expiration date (for cached files), whether it uses server-side compression (Gzip) and response time (how long the component took to load).

Further Reading

• What the 80/20 Rule Tells Us about Reducing HTTP Requests
• Maximizing Parallel Downloads in the Carpool Lane
• AJAX performance analysis
• Yahoo’s Problems Are Not Your Problems: counter-arguments for some of the rules developed by Yahoo!, such as penalizing you for not having a Content Delivery Network.

Internet Explorer Web Developer Toolbar

If you need similar functionality to that of Firebug and Web Developer for Firefox, but want to debug, inspect and tune your Web pages and applications on the Internet Explorer browser, check out the Internet Explorer Web Developer Toolbar. The IE Web Developer Toolbar, when enabled, opens a toggle-able pane located at the bottom of the Web browser, giving you access to many helpful options for exploring Web page components.

For example, you can experiment to see how page elements work by editing the Web page’s DOM and HTML directly in the browser, allowing you to quickly change and edit DOM elements to see what happens when you perform certain actions or modify certain parts of the code. You can also debug, test and inspect JavaScript with the IE Web Developer Toolbar, giving you options for setting breakpoints, seeing the call stack and exploring variable attributes.

It has a ton of other helpful features, such as selectively disabling IE settings (to see how your Web pages degrade in IE); the ability to view the HTML and CSS source of any Web page with syntax-highlighting; and an in-browser ruler to help you measure things on a Web page.

Further Reading

• 15 Seconds: An Introduction to the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Fiddler Web Debugger

Fiddler is an Internet Explorer extension that analyzes and profiles a Web page’s HTTP traffic. If you’ve ever wanted to know exactly what happens when a client requests a Web page, Fiddler is the tool that’ll help you do the job. The HTTP Statistics view exposes all components and files required to generate a particular page, giving you details such as the total number of HTTP requests, total page weight, HTTP response headers and cache expiration.

Fiddler permits you to set up breakpoints, allowing you to step through and edit HTTP traffic (to see how it would affect your Web page), a useful feature for analyzing AJAX-based interaction and potential security flaws in a Web application. Perhaps what makes Fiddler so powerful is its extensibility, allowing you to create your own scripts (or import other developers’ scripts) to perform certain tasks or make interface modifications to the extension itself.

Further Reading

• Fiddler PowerToy – Part 1: HTTP Debugging
• The Fiddler User Interface
• Fiddler Demonstration Videos
• Using Fiddler with non-Internet Explorer Browsers

DebugBar

DebugBar is a debugging in-browser extension for the Internet Explorer browser. It has many helpful features, such as the ability to send a Web page screenshot via email, a color picker, the ability to view both the original and interpreted code (i.e. if you use JavaScript to manipulate the styles of a DOM object, then you can see the interpreted HTML source code of that manipulation) and a Console API (after installing Companion.JS) to help you gain information through a command-line interface about particular components of a Web page.

DebugBar is free for personal and educational use, but you are required to buy a license if you use it for commercial purposes.

HttpWatch

HttpWatch is another HTTP traffic viewer and debugger for Firefox and Internet Explorer that is similar to Fiddler. It has many unique features and a more intuitive, less intimidating interface than Fiddler. Some notable features are the ability to generate request-level time charts (useful for documentation and presentation purposes); decryption of HTTPS traffic to help you debug, inspect and tweak your secure SSL-based connections; and the ability to export captured data to XML and CSV formats for importing into spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel or Google Spreadsheets.

HTTPWatch has a Basic edition, which is free, and a Professional edition, which has more options. Check out the comparison table between the two editions to see the exact differences.

Live HTTP Headers

Live HTTP Headers is a Firefox extension that allows you to inspect HTTP request and response headers. Exploring HTTP headers allows you to debug Web applications, glean some information about the website’s server and inspect cookies sent to the client requesting the page.

For example, the Server response header gives you a website’s HTTP server type (Apache, IIS, nginx, etc.), the HTTP server version and the operating system (though server administrators can remove or limit the information you see for security purposes).

Web Accessibility Toolbar

The Web Accessibility Toolbar is a freeware extension for Internet Explorer and Opera that gives you a slew of options for quickly evaluating and analyzing your Web content’s accessibility. It has validation options for submitting your URL to content accessibility web services such as Juicy Studio tools, a grayscale converter to simulate the user experience of individuals with color-blindness and poor eyesight, and a search function for particular page structures (e.g. finding list objects and unordered lists).

Other useful tools released by Vision Australia are the Colour Contrast Analyser, which analyzes the contrast of foreground and background colors for readability, and the Complex Table Mark-Up (or Com Tab) Toolbar, which can help you understand (and construct) complex tables that are usable by non-traditional Web browsers (such as screen readers).

Further Reading

• WebAIM: Using the AIS Web Accessibility Toolbar
• The Web Accessibility Toolbar and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

Fangs

Fangs is an in-browser tool for Firefox that emulates what a screen reader “sees” when visiting a Web page. Its function is simple: to output a transcript of what a screen reader will read out to a user when a Web page is visited. It’s a helpful tool for quickly analyzing if you’ve structured your content effectively so that it’s understandable and usable by vision-impaired individuals, without forcing you to learn to use (and purchase) a screen-reader application such as JAWS or Windows Eyes.

Further Reading

• Bringing Accessibility into the Development Process
• Search Accessibility Guidelines for Websites

Venkman JavaScript Debugger

Venkman is the codename for Mozilla’s very own JavaScript debugging environment. It is available as an add-on that can be used to extend browsers such as Firefox, Netscape, and SeaMonkey. It is a robust environment for doing complex JavaScript debugging and troubleshooting. The Console view gives you a command-line interface for interacting with the debugger. It has an excellent Stack view feature that allows you to step through active functions when it reaches breakpoints.

Further Reading

• Venkman Walkthrough
• Debugging JavaScript Using Venkman, Part 1
• Venkman 0.9.x Frequently Asked Questions

ColorZilla

ColorZilla is an incredibly simple — but very useful — extension for Firefox. If you’ve ever wanted to determine what colors are used on a Web page, ColorZilla is the tool for the job. It adds an eyedropper icon to the bottom-left corner of Firefox.

Clicking on the eyedropper icon makes objects on the Web page clickable, and upon clicking a particular section of a Web page, it outputs the hexadecimal, RGB and hue/saturation values of that area . Before ColorZilla, you might have pasted a screen capture of a Web page into a graphics editor like Photoshop and then used the eyedropper tool in the editor to sample colors. ColorZilla saves you time and streamlines color-sampling processes.

FireShot

FireShot is an in-browser tool for Firefox and Internet Explorer that allows you to take screenshots and then annotate, edit, organize and export them. Screen-grabbing is a common activity for Web developers to document previews of Web application prototypes and share them with clients, and FireShot gives you a feature-packed in-browser option to manage and streamline your screenshot needs.

Web Inspector

Web Inspector is part of the Webkit open-source browser engine project. It’s an ultra-sleek tool for inspecting the DOM hierarchy in a separate, compact HUD-style window. You can easily search the DOM, explore the DOM tree (hierarchy) and have a useful interface for isolating DOM sub-trees and nodes so that you can focus on particular sections of a Web page. The Web Inspector also provides you with a Style pane to explore CSS rules applied to particular page elements.

FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, cross-platform Firefox extension for FTP’ing files. It offers several advantages to stand-alone FTP applications, such as its operating system-independent requirements. What’s exceptional about FireFTP is that even though it is an in-browser (and free!) application, it has all the features you would expect from a standalone FTP application, such as support for secure (SSL, TLS, SFTP) protocols, a synchronization feature to sync up local and remote files, and directory comparison to help you see what files are missing or different between two directories and much more.

What’s your favorite in-browser tool?

There is an overwhelming amount of in-browser tools for Web development out there. Some are specific to particular Web technologies and set-ups (such as FirePHP for PHP developers, SQLite Manager for developers using SQLite databases, and Opera Dragonfly for developers who prefer using the Opera browser). If your favorite tool isn’t on the list, let us know in the comments section why it’s your favorite and why we should check it out.

About the Author

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

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As someone who spends a great deal of time developing web based products, one of the first steps we take is to launch Skitch to draft out some ideas for how things could work and the general concept as a whole. Once all that is done, we’re ready to move ahead. We need to get some specifics working and make sure that the user flows of particular areas are well thought out and as we want them. Normally we’d go straight to Omni Graffle for this phase, but that may be about to change…

Product Planner is new site brought to you by the guys at Kissmetrics, a simple & elegant tool which allows designers & UI specialists to quickly create a user flow. Each flow is organised by type  such as well as the kind of web product it’s designed for, such as social networking, photo sharing, etc. Product Planner gives you the option to privatise your ‘flows’ however you are encouraged to share with other visitors/users of the site to allow other users to learn and benefit.

With Product Planner the userflow process should become an awful lot slicker & smoother. The tools provided make putting together a solid user flow easy and fast. You’re then able to share it with the community and get the feedback you’ll need to make sure the finished product is as it should be and inevitably you end up with a happy community of your own. Once the site has expanded and more people have heard about it, you’ll be able to find the best user flows from across the site ensuring that your new site or product flows to perfection :)

Here’s an example of a user flow from the site:

Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system used in dynamic web applications to alleviate database load. Bela Ban at JBoss recently wrote a JGroups-based implementation of memcached which allows Java clients to access it directly. The new implementation also provides few advantages over memcached such as failover and monitoring. By Srini Penchikala

Note-taking and Optical Character Recognition service Evernote may not have a whole lot of users yet, but the users it does have absolutely love it. There’s a whole lot more to love, and more reasons to use Evernote, with a slew of announcements the company made today.

Freshly announced were support for automation through scripting, full XML data imports and exports and the much anticipated Application Programming Interface (API) that will let 3rd parties integrate Evernote into their applications.

Sponsor

To be honest, I don’t personally care for Evernote’s core product, I’ve found its Optical Character Recognition to be weak. The company has told me that I should put data in, use it as a blunt instrument for remembering things and someday their continually improving algorithm will be able to read text in notes and images better than it can now. I don’t really buy that. That said, thousands of other people are absolutely gaga over the service and no one can deny that their announcements today are very cool.

Evernote already works on the desktop, on the iPhone and on the web. Now we’ll see all kinds of other applications support Evernote as well. The company points to a Salesforce integration in the works and jokes that even a Rock Band tie-in could happen. The API uses standards based authentication protocol OAuth, which is fabulous. That means that if you as a developer want to tie in to Evernote, or today’s newly launched Netflix API or any of the Google Data APIs, then you’ve got one standard form of API to plug in to. That’s a big time saver.

Even more exciting is full XML data export. Nervous about dedicating a whole lot of time to import business cards, notes and other information into Evernote? Now you don’t have to be, because the company allows easy export of all that data in a standard format you can take elsewhere. This kind of data portability allows users to feel comfortable investing time and data in a service. It’s something that too many other similar services don’t allow.

For coverage of the Evernote news by someone who likes Evernote far more, check out Rafe Needleman’s post at Webware. If the entire service can perform as well as the company has in making the moves it announced today, then Evernote should be well worth your time.

Discuss