Nisargadatta : I Am That: "You observe the heart feeling, the mind thinking, the body acting; the very act of perceiving shows that you are not what you perceive."

-Vinod
permalink 11:49 AM 0 Comments

PubSub is a new kid on the block, and might offer some competition to google. In short, it is an amplified version of "Google Alerts" - which allowed you to track the news as it happened and send you alerts. (For example, I could track "application wiki" and get an email (or use their app) of all weblogs/news sources which will have these keywords.

So could it be a google competitor? Because ratio of searches for "existing information" to "new information" is going to reduce over the time, it could well be. PubSub has solved the tough part of matching your queries with changing information anywhere in the web. (Well, "anywhere" is probably only blogs and news sources for now, but I guess they can track changing websites as well). So storing those queries for a long-term is not a big deal. When you have enough queries that you actually find most queries are repeats, then the system is, in essence, google - without having to store all the web pages, but only the fact that they have changed. (Well, google cache is still something we love!)

Coming to sharing queries, I think that PubSub people should assign it a high priority. Stored queries introduce browses on information, and that is always good. For example "Top tutorials in XML" is a browse, whereas "Tutorials in XML" will just be a search. Obviously, the framework would also have ranking and all that, but then reputation services are going to be next big thing, right?


permalink 8:07 PM 0 Comments

At last, the gap between standard HTML programming (which is primarily REST - if you design it well) and Flash-based designs which use single URL for whole application - has finally reduced with help of techniques from RESTful Flex.

But there is a fundamental thing that developers should remember: Interacting with flash application is a local activity without round trip times. So if you are forced to introduce round trip just because you want the app to be RESTful, I think it is not a good approach. Instead the URL in the browser should dynamically change with your interaction with the application.

Let me give example. Say you selected an user from the list, and want to send the URL by email to another friend. So selecting that user might trigger a URL-click, and some interaction between user and flash should ensure that URL will change in a browser, without actually going to the backend server. In other words, it is not a real URL click, but only a simulation.

-Vinod
permalink 7:37 PM 0 Comments

Somebody had to do it: Using CSS and Javascript to create good presentations. Eric Meyer's S5 is precisely the same.

And it is right-fit for Wiki-based presentations: You edit a wiki page and use S5 markup to create a presentation text. And let wiki show the presentation by including right CSS and javascript files.

Some wiki systems do provide slideshow plugins, but it would be nice to see this all-thought off approach getting incorporated in them.

-Vinod

permalink 3:05 PM 0 Comments

The JavaScript Weblog - javascript.weblogsinc.com - tracks interesting javascript-based tools and techniques.
permalink 2:26 PM 0 Comments