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: Web Tech BlogRollin’ With Google App Engine, 80’s Style
Building a web application with Google App Engine is quick and easy, and you have the power of the google distributed content delivery network and the ‘BigTable’ database at your disposal. So what’s it good for?
When I was 14 my Dad bought a Commodore 64. I poured over the manuals, taught myself C64 BASIC, bought C64 programming magazines and created a stack of audio cassettes full of unfinished projects. It was awesome fun being able to create sounds and make things happen on screen.
Then about 2 years later I discovered girls and didn’t become interested in technology again for some years. I often wonder if I could have reached Bill Gates-like heights if only I had continued to apply myself to technology instead of fluorescent colored shirts, skinny ties, and Blue-Light discos.
Dave Winer said that because of Google App Engine, "Python is the new BASIC". And my first experience with App Engine did indeed generate that same sense of fun that C64 BASIC did way back in my embarrassing past. With zero Python experience and just the App Engine guestbook tutorial under my belt, I …
Apple’s MobileMe Misses the Mark
Thousands of developers have gathered in San Francisco for Apple’s Wordwide Developers Conference 2008. The spotlight at WWDC is on the new iPhone 3G and the iTunes App Store, which is launching in July to bring (officially) native apps to iPhone and iPod touch devices, but web developers have been eyeing MobileMe, Apple’s relaunch of the .Mac service.
For users of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Picasa Web (or any of the competitors from Yahoo! and Microsoft), MobileMe is a new contender that promises to automatically push your online changes into desktop applications like Microsoft Outlook and mobile devices like the iPhone (and vice versa). Unlike its competitors, however, MobileMe shows no signs of offering open APIs for other web applications to integrate with the service.
The other big difference between MobileMe and its competitors is that MobileMe costs $99 a year. On the one hand, you can use free services that integrate with an ever-expanding range of web apps and web-enabled desktop applications; on the other hand, you can pay for a service that only integrates seamlessly across supported devices and desktop apps.
Speaking as a card-carrying Mac fan, I’ll be sticking with my non-Apple web …
Why Yahoo’s BrowserPlus has a long way to go
Yahoo recently announced BrowserPlus, a browser-plugin based runtime that enables web applications to “break out of the browser”, and offer functionality typically reserved for desktop applications. While not entirely ready yet, a preview release of BrowserPlus demonstrates building some common applications purely in HTML/CSS/JavaScript, including an IRC client, a drag-and-drop photo uploader and a JSON AJAX request inspector.
With BrowserPlus, Yahoo wants to make web apps “break out of the browser”, bridging standard web technologies with OS APIs and bringing web apps a step closer to desktop apps. However, the approach isn’t at all new; Gears (formerly Google Gears) did the same with local storage for web applications last year, XUL has offered rich UIs for web applications for quite some time, and Adobe AIR changes the game entirely by exposing the OS through JavaScript APIs. Mozilla’s Prism can make web applications feel a little more like desktop applications. BrowserPlus simply goes a step further, by bringing potentially unlimited functionality to a standard web application through a plugin-within-plugin system. And guess what? All of these effectively have platform lock-in. (Flash and Silverlight get an honourable mention, requiring applications be built on their platform from day one.)
Yahoo, …
Goosh: Google From The Command Line
I love the command line.
Sure, the WIMP paradigm brought the personal computer out of obscurity and into the hands of less technical people. But if you ever need to find out what’s really going on, there’s only one answer — cast aside the pretty icons, dropdown menus, tabs and OK/Cancel buttons and head straight for the command line.
The power of the prompt is unparalleled, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re running Windows, Mac or UNIX/Linux. From the command line, you can monitor system processes, poke around in directories that are normally hidden from view, fix permission issues that your OS’s graphical interface screwed up. There’s a learning curve, of course. But once you’ve committed a reasonable number of useful commands to memory, the speed with which you can perform these tasks is far greater given that your fingers don’t need to leave the keyboard once.
Which is why, I suspect, that Stefan Grothkopp created Goosh, “the unofficial Google shell.”
Goosh is an Ajax-powered web application that provides a command line interface to Google, and it’s quick. A command line interface to Google is not something entirely new (YubNub and Firefox’s own keyboard shortcuts come to …
@media 2008: From Scaffolding Or From Scratch?
I was possibly a little brighter eyed than many attendees this morning as I had missed the @media party in order to take my daughter to see the musical Wicked (which was very good incidentally), so arrived at the venue in good time to get front row seats for Nate Koechley’s keynote, “Professional Front-End Engineering”. In the last couple of years I feel that we have seen a rise of the front-end developer as a specialist in their own right, and Nate discussed some of the ways in which people with this job function could improve their skills to become, “tireless trendsetters of quality”. Nate also talked about working at Yahoo! and some of the things they had discovered there, such as the fact that using @import for CSS creates a performance hit as the imported stylesheet is loaded last of all and the page isn’t loaded until it is. The effect being the same as if you had a linked stylesheet just before the closing body tag.
I stayed in the main track to listen to Jonathan Snook’s presentation, “Building on the Shoulders of Giants”. He gave a run down of some of the ways in which we …
@media 2008: Exploring The Alternative Web
The @media 2008 conference is held in the South Bank Centre which is a wonderful location for any visitor to London. We enjoyed our morning stroll along the Thames past the London Eye to get from our hotel to the venue.
The opening keynote was from Jeffrey Veen, I was pleased to actually get to his talk this year as two years ago I missed it, due to last minute preparations for the panel I was on. Veen is an accomplished speaker and always enjoyable to listen to, and I felt that I took a lot away from his talk (even as a non-designer) on “Designing our way through data”. Veen talked about how designers could make sense of bare data, adding meta data to help describe the data and then using design to make that data accessible and readable. He warned against the temptation to add decoration, something he termed as “chart junk”, asking us to “tell the story” that is in the data, not just make it look pretty.
After this the conference split into two tracks, I opted for, “For Example: BBC Home Page & Clear Left”. This was two mini presentations kicking off with Tom …
15 Million Reasons Why Twitter Sucks…
Or does it?
Throw the question “What do you think of Twitter” to a room full of geeks and you’ll soon realize that Twitter’s one of those unique creations that you either love to death or just can’t stand hearing about. There’s no fence sitting when it comes to Twitter!
Recent suggestions that they just scored $15 Million in additional VC funding got me thinking - are these Venture Capitalists crazy or is there something in this thing called Twitter?
Here’s my take on it…
Twitter is nothing more than a waste of bandwidth, and here’s why:
- You must be egotistical or insecure or both!
Get over yourself. Nobody really cares about what you’re up to, or how you’re feeling, or what brand of jeans you just bought. Your Twitter pals are too busy typing their own BS to read yours. It doesn’t make you popular, it just makes you sad. Stop typing and get some fresh air!
- It sucks you into a false sense of security!
While you might think you’re having a conversation with a close group of friends, in reality you’re shouting out to the entire world. I’ve seen too many work colleagues and friends tweet something that …
Button Up! More Photoshop Goodness…
Today we published the second part of Corrie Haffly’s current series of Photoshop tutorials, Build Beautiful Buttons In Photoshop, Part II.
As with Part I, this is an excerpt from Corrie Haffly’s book, The Photoshop Anthology, which is currently available in PDF format for FREE (that’s the complete book, not just a preview). If you like the article, you’ll love the full thing.
A huge thank you to our sponsors of this PDF giveaway, 99designs, for making it possible.
Some interesting feedback that come out of the first article in this series — while most people loved it, a few readers commented that the buttons looked a bit dated. It’s definitely true that some of the effects introduced in this series should be used sparingly or tweaked to achieve the style you’re after. One thing worth keeping in mind — this is an article about using Photoshop techniques to implement an effect. Once you’ve mastered these techniques, you can apply and tweak them to achieve all manner of trendy, sexy (or ugly — it’s up to you!) user interface elements.
If you’re looking to improve your design skills, you could do worse than check out this article on design principles. …
The Conversation Is More Important Than The Topic
In a meeting here at SitePoint HQ the other day, we were discussing blogs—what were our favourites, what makes a blog successful … Someone in the room made the comment that the conversation is more important than the topic—a statement that is certainly true for a sustained community and a sensible goal for most blogs to aim for.
Only yesterday this point was reinfoced (to an extreme, one might say) when the prolific Michael Arrington posted to his TechCrunch blog a post with a one-word title and no content in the body. The entire post consisted of this one word:
Twitter!
Because of the loyal community built around the TechCrunch blog, the context in which this word was framed resulted in Arrington’s one-liner generating over 400 comments (and counting), including a number of video comments that appreciated the humour and propagated it with their own nonsensical responses. The post made the front page of Techmeme, the New York Times and will certainly shape up to be TechCrunch’s highest performing post ever in terms of traffic per-word-count.
What exactly was that context, you may ask? Well, it was largely due to interpretation by the readers. It could have been any of the following:
- a cry of …
Adobe Flex/AIR Article Competition: And The Winners Are…
Our competition to write articles about Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR has come to a close, and we’ve selected our winners.
We were amazed at the quality of entries that we received, and deliberated for some time before choosing our winners.
Articles were judged on the following criteria:
- English: How strong a command of the English language did the author have? How well did they explain difficult concepts to the reader?
- Technical: Were the concepts and techniques described best practice? Did the sample code run successfully?
- Educational value: How useful were the concepts taught in the article for a reader? How good a foundation was laid for the user to begin developing with the technology on their own?
- Interestingness: I think Flickr might have trademarked this term, but I’m going to use it here anyway. Does the article really grab the reader and command their attention?
So without further ado, here are the winners:
Best Adobe Flex article
- Winner: Jack Herrington for his article Build 3D Configurators With Papervision and Flex.
Jack will receive a copy of Adobe CS3 Web Premium, and his article will appear on the front page of sitepoint.com. Congratulations Jack!
- An honourable mention also goes to Jamie McDaniel for his article Creating a …
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