Jeroun Coumans redesigned his blog. Among the improvements? He’s switched to the mullet layout I’m always blabbing about.
Finally, I’ve taken lesson from Jonathan Boutelle and made my journal more useful (hopefully) thanks to his concept of a Mullet-style blog layout According to my referrals, there are plenty of you entering here via Google, so this should help those visitors to more easily find their way through this site.
Long live the mullet! Wear it with pride, web-folk!
Author: jonathanboutelle
Tooling comes to the AJAX World
Apache just received a proposal to bring AJAX tooling to the Eclipse IDE. The proposal is sponsored by IBM and Zimbra, and is championed by Sam Ruby. Toolkits that will be incorporated into the intial version include Zimbra AjaxTK and Rico. [via]
DesignJet 130 review
Uzanto just bought a bad-ass large-format printer for printing the data visualizations that come out of MindCanvas. When I say large-format, I mean large-format: the Designjet 130 we bought can print on paper that’s 24″ by 64″. It’s a beast! I guess I hadn’t really realized how big the printer would be until it arrived in the mail. This isn’t the kind of printer you have at your desk. This is the kind of printer that has it’s own desk.
The printer was expensive ($1300), but it’s already paid for itself in terms of results: for exploring large, interrelated data sets, there’s nothing better than a really big piece of paper that you can tack up on a wall. The visualizations that we print have thousands of datapoints and are in various colors (very Tufte, actually). Printing the deliverables using a print shop isn’t an option: it takes too long. Our goal with the MindCanvas service is to do an entire research project in 7 days, so we don’t have time to wait for proofs at Kinkos!
Using Wikis with software developers
There’s a lot of excitement lately about wikis. Wikis are an amazing tool, but the hype can lead some to think that simply installing a wiki and letting people do what they want with it will be effective. I fell for the hype and installed a wiki for my team to use. But my wiki was ignored by pretty much everyone, and fell into disuse. Recently, I relaunched the wiki concept within my team, this time successfully. What changed?
Taking the pulse of the open-source AJAX community
A recent survey by Ajaxian (writeup here, raw results here) revealed that the 40% of developers working with AJAX are not using any higher-level APIs or toolkits! This is really disturbing: trying to make javascript work across all browsers is really hard, and developers are buying themselves a great deal of pain by not standing on the shoulders of those who came before them. Why aren’t more developers using these frameworks?
Offline Game-like Elicitation Methods: Enthiosys
I went to the SDForum “Foundations of Innovation“event yesterday to find out more about Enthiosys.
Enthiosys is a consulting company in the bay area that has developed an innovative approach to doing market research by playing games.
Games! That’s what MindCanvas is all about! It was very cool to see that we weren’t the only ones who believed that traditional market research was so boring for participants that it was generating bogus data. And that a game (or something game-like) just might be the solution. Enthiosys is all about game-like experiences that you can do face-to-face with your customers. In contrast, MindCanvas is about game-like experiences that you can do remotely over the internet.
Wall-mounted LAN: the vertical LANCaddy
My home LAN is not very complex: a DSL modem, a wireless router / printserver, and an inkjet printer. But even on a simple network the connections between the devices can create a real mess!
Flash: what is it good for?
Flash gets a bad rep among programmers. The programming model is very different from typical programming languages, and the uses of the technology have typically been annoying (banner adds, skip-intro splash pages). More recently, AJAX has emerged as an extremely popular way of introducing dynamic behavior into web pages. So why do we even need Flash?
SIPA Confab: Global Opportunities in Technology Related Services
SIPA has their yearly confab tomorrow. The topic is Global Opportunities in Technology Related Services. Sounds pretty generic? They tighten it down to three panels on Vertical Search, Knowledge Process Outsourcing, and Software as a Service.
The 10:30 Software as a Service panel panel looks especially good. We’ve heard enough from salesforce.com: here are some of the other big players doing interesting things in the SaaS space.
Software as a Service:
MR Rangaswami – Co-Founder, SandHill Group (moderator).
Joe Kraus – Co-Founder & CEO, Jotspot.
Jay O’Connor – Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, NetSuite.
Umang Gupta – Chairman & CEO, Keynote Systems.
John Roberts – Co-Founder & CEO, SugarCRM.
Every one of these companies are doing very cool things right now. So if you don’t feel like giving up your whole saturday to network with desi entrepreneurs, that’s the panel to show up for. I’ll be going to that one (Mindcanvas, the service that we’ve just released, uses a SaaS software offering as the basis for a consulting service. So I have a bit of a personal interest in the topic).
The Knowledge Process outsourcing panel also looks good. I’ve heard way too much about vertical search lately, so I’ll probably skip that panel.
MindCanvas: Reimagining a software category as a Rich Internet Application
AJAX and Rich Internet Applications offer the chance to re-imagine product categories that were previously thought of as mature, finished, and mundane. The first example of this was GMail, which succeeded in re-inventing the moribund category of web mail. More recently, a number of products have re-imagined the word processor as a web application.
I think that, sooner or later, pretty much every application category is going to be rebuilt from the ground up as a rich internet application. It is in this spirit that my crew (<a href="hey guys) and I built MindCanvas. It is a web survey research service, re-imagined as a rich internet application. The process of re-imagining changes the application so much that I’m reluctant to even call what we’ve built survey software. But that’s the easiest way to explain what it is. Now that we’ve released a beta version of the system, I’m finally free to talk about it a little!
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