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SourceForge New Site On Line!

Roberto Galoppini — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:44:11 GMT

SourceForge few days ago served its 4 billionth download and today launched the new website. The new UI is the answer to inputs from project administrators asking for an easier path for users to download their software.

I asked Jon Sobel, SourceForge Inc. Group President, his opinion about this change:

This is a significant change for the SourceForge site. In addition to a more engaging visual experience for both developers and consumers, at a deeper technology level, we now have a modern, flexible platform to serve our community. We are looking forward to realizing its full potential in the months ahead.

SourceForge new User Interface

With the new UI newbies may find open source software running on Windows at first glance. I am looking forward to ear end users’ first impressions, kudos to the SourceForge crew keeping innovating.

[Disclosure: I am advisor to SourceForge]

Designers, Developers and QA: FP needs you!

Tom Hume — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:09:10 GMT

So, it's that time again. We're exceptionally busy and have won a few new projects and clients in the last month or two - with no sign of business slowing. So we're on the look-out for staff again. We're after a few different souls:

Developers, ideally with some commercial experience of mobile (J2ME, Android or iPhone), and familiarity with or experience working in an agile environment (if you read this blog you'll know we're a quite formal Scrum shop). You'll have a strong appreciation for the role user experience plays in the software development process. You'll obviously be excellent.
Mid- to senior-level designers; we'd be open to considering someone without commercial mobile experience, but you'll definitely need a strong background in digital media and a genuine enthusiasm for mobile. We're after someone with a mix of visual and interaction skills - we think the line between the two is blurred, and we like it that way. You'll have to be willing to get your hands dirty and learn a little about how your designs are actually implemented. Strong communication skills will be vital.
QA - and specifically, someone interested in QA as a career path in its own right, rather than seeing it as a stepping stone to a development job. Over the last couple of years we've developed a huge appreciation for thorough, pedantic, devious, downright cruel QA folks who can find obscure bugs with which to taunt our developers, all in the nicest possible way of course. Someone with experience of both manual and automated testing would be a bonus; double points if you've worked in an agile environment before.

For all roles, you'll be working from our offices in central Brighton, and be very comfortable working in a cross-disciplinary team. You can have a look at our site to get a feel for what we do if you like, though I'll warn you that it's horrendously out of date and gives only a vague feel for where we're headed... We offer good salaries and an opportunity to work on *huuuge* software products which touch the lives of literally millions of people, for a global client base. We like to travel - earlier this year most of the company spent 2 weeks camped out in Shenzhen, China, kicking off a project for Microsoft - but it's not in any way compulsory. We also make a point of allowing time for personal development and R&D, and do some reasonably off-the-wall projects: birdwatching, ghost hunting, and location-based gaming have all decorated our portfolio. Drop an email to recruitment@futureplatforms.com if you're interested, and we'll have a chat. Unless you're a recruitment agency of course, in which case stop reading right now and please avoid the temptation to get in touch, even if you're completely unlike all the other agencies and incredibly special in a way that you can't quite describe without sound like just another bloody recruitment agency. Honestly - every time I post a job advert and politely say "no agencies please" I'm assaulted by a tidal wave of dull phone calls from recruiters who seem to think that by ignoring me completely they'll somehow persuade me to pay them fees, and it's all gotten a bit boring.

Free vs Freely Distributed

markcuban — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:21:29 GMT

With the publication of Chris Anderson’s new book Free, the discussion about the role of free, today and in the future has expanded. Articles from Malcom Gladwell in New Yorker, and Seth Godin discuss the various merits and challenges of Free. Is Free inevitable ? Is Free the beginning of the end ? Let me answer the question.

First of all, what we are experiencing right now is “Better Than Free”. The videos on Youtube, magazine articles, newspapers reports, anything that used to be analog that now is digital have a perceived value that is based on their legacy delivery. We value all those TV shows on Hulu highly because we assign a value to what we pay for cable or satellite. We assign a high perceived value to newspaper and magazine reports based on the years we spent paying for them. Anything that we paid for as recently as last year, that we now get free, of course we assign a value of more than free. That makes it worth the effort to find it for free. Because the effort is worth your time. You are getting something for nothing, who doesnt want that ?

Of course that is a challenge for those industries. Not only do they face the challenge of their former customers wanting their content for nothing, but they have the problem that their costs are based upon their ability to sell their content.

There in lies the problem for the free movement. The subsidies of pro content producers from the newspaper and magazine industries will disappear as those businesses contract significantly. What happens then ?

You get the music industry. Anyone can create any song for no cost, and they do. The problem of course is getting your music to stand out among the millions of songs available at any given moment. Its expensive. Very, very expensive. (If it werent for groupies, would the number of musical artists contract 90pct ? )

The future of content outside of the music industry is exactly what you are now seeing inside the music industry. The music industry uses what they have learned from more than 10 years of competing with free. First they cut the size of their organizations to the bone, keeping just those they hope and pray will know best how to guide them through the world of free.

Those survivors have learned or are learning how to identify the music and artists that best fit the new world of free. They learn how to work with the artists and those willing to pay for music in some form, whether CD, Download, Licensing or in concert, and do their best to maximize the return on their investment. They use free as a weapon. They use free as an asset. They use it anywhere they can leverage it into something more. Something hopefully profitable.

What they music industry realizes that they have to offer quite a bit of music for free. What they have learned however, is that they dont have to allow it to be freely distributed. They can and do control where its delivered. You can have it for free, if thats how you want it, but you have to come get it where we want you to get it. On our websites. On websites we co produce with Youtube or Hulu or whoever. If you want it for free, you have to go through the exhausting effort of clicking to our website and giving us something in value in return. It may be your attention. It may be your interest. It may be a referral or your email address. We give you something free, you give us something that costs you nothing.

The music is often free, but it is NEVER freely distributed.

The TV and Movie business are realizing this is the case. Hence TV Anywhere. They will give you access to content for free if you are already a customer of their distributors. And before you IT ALL HAS TO BE FREE BIGOTS EXPLODE, even google requires you have internet access of some kind, which costs you in subscription fees , taxes or coffee.

Newspapers are catching flack for saying there should be copyrights on their news reports and the summaries. They are right. Their work, their ability to control it. They should have the right to control where it appears. If, as Chris Anderson and others suggest, there will be plenty of content creators and the quality of the work is sufficient for consumers of that content, then there will be plenty of open source content and it shouldnt matter what the newspapers request for protection. The market will decide.

Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont want their content openly distributed. On this point, they are correct again. They should have complete control over where it is distributed. They should have the ability to choose where it is offered for free.

Not only should they have this control, taking back this control is the exact right business move. Im not saying it will save newspapers or magazines, it wont. But it will make their website offerings stronger in the long run. If Im them, I take the risk that the “printed” content business follows the path of the music industry.

In other words, you take on the role of identifying the best in breed for your business and use your resources to help those talented people figure out how to make money for themselves and for you. You provide your resources and knowledge to make them smarter and then you go and compete against the masses.

In the long run, printed content producers should have a brand, and use their institutional knowledge, their core competencies and ability to procure, improve and market to maximize the value of their brands and the perceived value of their content. Whether its on a central website, a co produced website, in print or on a hologram in the evening sky, I should go to the NY Times because they have demonstrated to me that they have the very best articles on the subjects I am looking for. That they are the best source for breaking news about the topics I care about. THEY NEED TO MAKE SURE I DONT HAVE THE CHOICE OF GETTING IT ANYWHERE ELSE BUT WHERE THEY DICTATE. If they cant make their content stand out from the open source masses and convince enough people to transact with them in a way that makes them money they dont deserve to exist.

They should distribute their content for Free where they believe it maximizes return, but should do everything possible to keep it from being distributed Freely.

ShareThis

WebKit destined to get its own content sniffer

Michael(tm)Smith (mike@w3.org) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:54:46 GMT

Web/browser-security maven and coder Adam Barth has been working on implementing a content sniffer in WebKit, based on a content-sniffing algorithm that was originally specified in the HTML5 draft, but that’s now specified as a separate IETF draft that Adam is editing and that’s titled, Content-Type Processing Model.

WebKit applications/ports for particular platforms all currently need to rely on platform-specific content-sniffer code outside of WebKit. There are some reasons why it’s a good idea to do things that way — but there are also some good reasons not to; as Adam notes, doing things that way runs the risk of creating compatibility and security differences among various WebKit ports. So implementing a content-sniffer in WebKit itself will eliminate those differences.

[…Continued…]

WebKit: Facilitating alternative/experimental implementations of existing features vs. discouraging unnecessary duplication of efforts

Michael(tm)Smith (mike@w3.org) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 20:57:12 GMT

On the webkit-dev mailing list back in April, there was an interesting thread that Michael Nordman from the Google Chrome team started with a message titled, “AppCache functionality provided by the embedder of webkit” (related to the offline-Web-applications feature in HTML5). Michael begins that message with this paragraph:

I’m working on the app cache for Chrome. We’ve decided to hoist most the functionality provided by the app cache into Chrome’s main browser process, so we won’t be using most of the implementation provided by WebKit. I’d like to work through what changes to make within WebKit/WebCore to allow an embedder pull that off. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Darin Adler responded with some thoughts and a question (to which Michael replied) but the discussion about specifics didn’t go anywhere after that (not on the mailing list at least), because in the next message in the thread, Maciej Stachowiak replied to question the general approach — in fact, to question whether the WebKit trunk should be providing mechanisms to facilitate replacements of parts of its own core code:

It’s been a recurring theme for the Chrome team to request hooks to bypass WebKit functionality and replace it with Chrome-specific code that lives outside the WebKit tree. So far this has been mostly for code developed when Chrome was originally a secret project. While we felt it was best to grandfather in the existing carve-outs, in general I believe this is not the best way to move the WebKit project forward. I would not like to see this pattern replicated for newly developed functionality.

Earlier in the same message, Maciej cites a reason why facilitating the proposed general approach can have a potentially negative side effect:

One downside of this approach is that, if the application cache ever needs to change, it may be necessary to make changes to two separate implementations hosted in different repositories. In addition, quality-of-implementation improvements to one version won’t benefit the other.

[…Continued…]

WebKit team is implementing HTML datagrid element/API

Michael(tm)Smith (mike@w3.org) — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:53:35 GMT

David Hyatt just opened a new WebKit master feature-implementation bug on June 19th: Implement the HTML5 datagrid. His first comment there:

This implementation may end up being very different from what’s in the spec.

The goal is to create a simpler implementation that can help improve the spec.

The <datagrid> element is a new HTML element in the HTML5 draft standard, with a corresponding DOM interface.

Elliotte Rusty Harold did a writeup on datagrid for the IBM developerWorks site a couple years ago, describing it in these terms:

What distinguishes [datagrid] from a regular table is that the user can select rows, columns, and cells; collapse rows, columns, and cells; edit cells; delete rows, columns, and cells; sort the grid; and otherwise interact with the data directly in the browser on the client.

The <datagrid> spec has been updated since the time when that article was published, but at a high-level, the feature remains the pretty much the same as in that description quoted above.

It’s great to see a browser project finally starting to implement <datagrid>, because it’s a great feature that I think a lot of Web authors and Web developers are going to be very glad to have.

Omar Hamoui on Ideas and Company Launches

Russell Buckley — Sat, 23 May 2009 16:47:23 GMT

As many of you will know, my day job is working for AdMob. I was actually lucky enough to be the first person Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s Founder and CEO, employed 3 years ago and it was mainly through writing this blog that we connected.

Over 80 Billion ads and 3 years later, we’ve come along way since then, have over 100 employees and a valuation at least in the hundreds of million dollar range. Indeed, Ron Conway, legendary Valley angel investor (among his portfolio is Facebook, Twitter, Digg and AdMob, of course) was kind enough to suggest last week that we were good for an IPO when the market comes back next year.

With success like this and the profile that comes with it, Omar gets asked by friends and aspiring entrepreneurs for some of the lessons he’s learned along the way. This prompted him to curate these snippets into a list, which he can add to from time to time and which he can share when appropriate. I think there’s some gems in there, so I asked if I could share with MobHappy readers as I thought you’d appreciate them.

Rather than publish them all at once, I’ll put them up as short series of posts in the next week or so and I’ve classified them into topics. This one is about how you come up with a great idea for a company or product, so perhaps you can use them to create your own multi-million dollar company.

Finally, before we get stuck in, no one (least of all Omar) is suggesting that all these are necessarily stunningly original, but they are observations as to what Omar has found to be especially true along the way.

Solve your own problem

The best solutions will come when you are working to solve a problem that is deeply impacting you. Avoid solutions in search of a problem.

Russell adds: The idea for AdMob came when Omar found it very hard to market a mobile service that he’d launched. If you’re interested about what that was, I wrote about it back in 2005. In retrospect, I am very pleased that I liked his original concept, otherwise things might have worked out very differently for me and AdMob!

The first idea is probably the most important

Many great businesses were built on the back of one fundamental insight. Much of the rest is just execution.

You shouldn’t have to push

You want an idea that gains traction and accelerates on its own after you give it the first push. If you have to continuously infuse energy to help it grow, you should probably go back to the drawing board.

Pay no attention to common knowledge

Too many people claim to know too much. The largest opportunities are found in ideas that go against the grain.

Try often, fail fast

What you are doing is wrong most of the time. Don’t spend too long examining every rock. If it’s really a diamond you’ll know.

Businesses make money

Think about the business model from the start.

Russell adds: This is a school of thought and one that’s very popular in times of recession. For an alternative view, see Linked In’s Reid Hoffman, who says it’s all about users and you’ll figure a way to make money later. Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, all have enjoyed very high valuations, but the jury is still out as to how/if they’ll ever generate significant revenues.

Break the speed breakers

Whatever is slowing you down isn’t helping. If you KNOW the launch will do damage, then investigate. If you don’t know what it will do, then go faster so you can find out. If something ALWAYS slows you down, get rid of it.

Next time, I’ll post Omar’s thoughts on deal making.

Open Source ECM: Alfresco Business Strategy

Roberto Galoppini — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:17:02 GMT

Alfresco meetup for community and customers took place here in Rome two weeks ago, featuring both John Newton and John Powell, respectively Alfresco CTO and CEO.

I asked few questions to John Powell, learning more about Alfresco licensing story, and about differences between Alfresco Enterprise Edition and Alfresco Labs.

When we looked at open source companies, and we were particularly impressed by JBoss, and they used LGPL. So when we first started we used the LGPL license, and those days Alfresco was unknown. And lot of people said to us the LGPL wasn’t so a good license. Because the LGPL for big companies, they think is like the GPL, they don’t understand, it was confusing at that level. And a lot of other companies could take the LGPL, not contributing anything back, so we were advised to change to the MPL license, because it was like the LGPL, in terms of the effect of the MPL license, but it operates at file level, so technically you could explain MPL, while no one really knows how technically, legally how the LGPL works. So we changed to MPL and that was quite successful, but we then were basically running into the problem that the MPL doesn’t work well on the Web.

Basically we work with Matt Asay, he said why we try all these ‘exotic licenses’ like LGPL, MPL, which, particularly in US, the legal guys ask lots of questions.. let’s just say GPL, GPL is not perfect, but virtually all common open source projects use GPL, so it is a sort of ’standard’, so that is why we changed.

Alfresco licensing story is hectic, probably because first choices have been taken without consulting IP lawyers, differently from what we have been seing with open source vendors. Alfresco was probably aimed to be a cheaper ECM vendor, before anything else. The importance of open source economics came at a later stage, as the need to look deeper into the licensing thing.

Matt Asay recently started advocating the BSD, will Alfresco change the license again? I don’t think so, but GPL the SugarCRM way - i.e. using the GPLv3 attribution-clause - seems a way to better protect Alfresco’s IPR.

Powell about Alfresco Labs-Enterprise differences.

I think we should have started branding Labs just to give a bit like Fedora and RHEL, to give that type of differentiation. Labs and Enterprise have the same functionality. I don’t know if you remember, we experimented with Enterprise with some closed sorce stuff for a while, and basically all goverments says “no, no, no.. a little bit closed is all closed!”.

The principle is Enterprise and Labs, some functionality, but Enterprise is care quality, because we put more bug fixing, long Q&A, more certifications, etc.

The only slight move recently we have made, is to say Labs and Enterprise functionally the same, so you can build a Labs system and an Enterprise system, and provide that you take the equivalent versions, you can run on either.

So you can build on Enterprise and switch to Labs. The only thing if you are using a proprietary system, like Oracle, we don’t certify the oracle drivers in Labs, basically you have to build those yourself.

We actually improved the quality of Labs recently, we had a period, mainly because of the workload, where we did very low Q&A on Labs, and the community was complaining. But with Alfresco 3 we put a lot more effort. Enterprise is more Q&A, that doesn’t mean no Q&A on Labs.

Alfresco’s community expressed some concerns and doubts about Alfresco’s open source strategy, and beyond polemics there is some food for thoughts.

Alfresco keeps expanding globally, while exploring new channels and consolidating year-over-year positive growth. But is the line drawn by John Netwon definitive? Decisions about what to give away and what to keep secret are all but simple.

Alfresco’s core competency is the ability to create and mantain an extensible ECM platform based on viable open source components, compliant with standards (sometimes even driving some of them).

Open source core is not bad per se, as far as differentiating features are welcomed by customers and do not prevent users to deploy. Establishing which software add-on has to be proprietary is not easy, though. In the mobile space Funambol makes a great job, ending to please customers without upselling its community. Unfortunately the ECM space is not a pyramidal market, and that approach won’t fit.

Open source vendors sell preferably products (subscription), and Alfresco is not an exception. Alfresco’s decision to not professionally support the Labs edition maybe the very reason to lack business opportunities with governments, though. Open source software can be downloaded and deployed without a call for tenders, but paid services must be acquired with tenders and here Alfresco may be competitive.

Moreover, supporting Labs Alfresco might convert some users into customers, maybe providing them with a different level of support. In this respect GroundWork’s Starter Edition experiment maybe inspirational.

Do You Know Where Your Data Is? - Wall Street Journal

Google Inc. (news-feedback@google.com) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 22:08:04 GMT

The Money Times

Do You Know Where Your Data Is?
Wall Street Journal
Cloud computing is another technology where users entrust their data to service providers. Salesforce.com, Gmail, and Google Docs are examples; your data isn't on your computer -- it's out in the "cloud" somewhere -- and you access it from your web ...
The Sorry State Of Online Privacy Washington Post
How secure is the cloud? Search Security
all 6 news articles

Zoho Now Fully Integrated With Mobile Devices

Leena Rao — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 12:55:16 GMT

Zoho, the creators of a web-based software suite made up of document, project and invoicing management tools, has launched the availability of its comprehensive webtop productivity products on mobile devices.

Zoho previously had basic mobile support for its applications on iPhone and some limited capability on Windows Mobile but now fully integrates Zoho Applications with several mobile devices. Zoho Mail, Calendar, Writer, Sheet, Show & Creator are now available for the iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, WindowsMobile and Symbian devices.

As we’ve written in the past, Zoho is an innovative document management tool, and includes easy access thanks to support for Google and Yahoo IDs and the group sharing across different apps feature. While Zoho has added useful features to its software suite, Zoho is going to have to fight an uphill battle to keep consumers from going towards web-based applications offered by companies with a vast reach (Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc.).

Here’s a slideshow on Zoho’s mobile integration:

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TrueCar Shifts Into Gear, Lets You Check If Your Neighbors Got That Mercedes At A Better Price

Robin Wauters — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:57:31 GMT

TrueCar, an information service launched at TechCrunch50 that aims to give potential new car buyers an idea of what the price tag of the vehicle they’re considering purchasing should really be reading, is officially launching its free consumer-focused website today by taking the beta label off.

In essence, the service allows car buyers to check if the price for their next car is on par with the price others have paid for the same vehicle in the past, hopefully bringing some transparency to the automotive retail industry.

So how does it work? When a new car buyer visits the TrueCar website, they are asked to enter their zip code and all vehicle details down to the specific options. TrueCar then generates a complete Price Report with nifty graphs, displaying the full distribution of prices paid by other people for the exact same vehicle in a given market area. In addition, the web service calculates the actual dealer cost structure of a particular vehicle.

TrueCar claims it holds data for more than 25% of all new vehicles sold throughout the United States, which is quite impressive and a high enough percentage for comparisons to be made, although we noted in our coverage from the TC50 event that the company was going to try and hold off from launching publicly when they actually reached 50%.

And where exactly does all that data come from anyway? The company says it currently processes thousands of transactions on a daily basis, from a variety of sources across the U.S., ranging from financial institutions to vehicle registration organizations that collect and store new car transactional data, to generate its Price Reports. Using this data, TrueCar is able to tell you if you’re getting a good, a great or an over-priced deal on a new car based on actual sales data and not estimates.

For the occasion, TrueCar is taking the wraps of its blog, called The Truth, where it aims to regularly report car pricing facts and trends backed by real market data. In their latest blog post, TrueCar gives some insight in the top 10 deals on new cars at this moment:

I’d say considering a Ford is probably a good start to getting a good deal.

On a sidenote: TrueCar isn’t founder and CEO Scott Painter’s only venture: the man is also co-founder of both Pricelock and BrightHouse, and also acts as founder and CEO of Zag, which recently raised $32.4 million in venture capital. One wonders where he finds time for all this.

You can see the video of his presentation of TrueCar at TC50 right here.

CrunchBase Information

TrueCar

Information provided by CrunchBase

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Orange forms world's first mobile and internet partnership with the Wikimedia Foundation

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:40:10 GMT

* This partnership, the first of its kind, will expand the reach of Wikimedia content through co-branded channels on Orange's mobile and web portals * The two partners will work together to develop... Read more >>

Mobile Device Detection Results

John Keith — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 04:00:42 GMT

In a previous post I presented the performance numbers for mobile device detection using WURFL and Device Atlas. Our numbers were generated on a data set consisting of 1,572 unique user agents we collected as part of our mobile device concurrency test. At the time I was looking for information about the quality of our results - did we have accurate classification of mobile devices for the purposes of our test? I unintentionally wandered into performance for a while, but now I’m back onto the quality thing.

Here, once again, are the results for processing 1,572 unique user agents:

Method	Time (seconds)	Mobile	Non-Mobile
WURFL Old API	1082	711	861
WURFL New API	20.8	1090	482
Device Atlas	1.2	527	1045
Mobile Device Detect	1.3	684	888

As you can see, there are obviously some differences between results for each detection method. Interestingly, both the old and new WURFL API use the same device database (wurfl.xml file), but yield considerably different results. So, what’s going on here? Is there a clear quality winner in the group?

For the time being, we are using the old WURFL API as our classifier. The new WURFL API is giving us a lot of false positives - many different user agents are mapping to the wireless device “amoi_e72_ver1,” which could be some kind of fall-through condition. It’s possible that I’m doing something wrong, but the API usage is pretty simple: instantiate a class and call a method with the user agent as a parameter.

Device Atlas is interesting to me and it’s quite possible we’ll be shifting to that for device detection. It’s certainly much faster than WURFL in our environment. While there are a few misses, there is really just one issue I’m seeing, and that may not be a real issue at all. The Opera Mini user agents are not being classified as mobile. Is this because we’re talking to a transcoder? Or is it a mistaken classification? I’m not sure, but the other methods all classify these user agents as mobile devices. Take this user agent for example. Should this be classified as a mobile device? Device Atlas says no; WURFL says yes.

Opera/9.50 (J2ME/MIDP; Opera Mini/4.0.10406/298; U; de)

The mobile device detection script actually does a pretty good job. Rather than use a comprehensive user agent database, this script looks for specific, known string fragments in the user agent string. That’s also a bit of its undoing though. For example, I’m seeing a bunch of false positives for user agents containing the word “Java.” I think these false positives could be eliminated by also checking the HTTP_ACCEPT header for mobile content types.

Java/1.6.0_05

So the implication here is that you need to be aware that device detection is not guaranteed to be 100% accurate. User agent strings are highly variable and non-standardized, so there’s a bit of artistry here.

Resources

that canadian girl » Browsing the Mobile Web: Anyone Out There?

Vero — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:49:36 GMT

As a more representative sample of the mobile web than AdMob’s figures, it’s fascinating to see that a phone as basic as the Nokia 3110 Classic tops the chart. This is 2009. Weren’t we supposed to have hover cars, food in pill form and ...

Search Engine Optimization - MobileDesign

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 04:13:00 GMT

Free Online Stanford Course on Developing iPhone Apps

John Gruber — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 17:23:48 GMT

Should be available this week through iTunes U.

★

dotMobi: Mobile websites grew sevenfold in last year

Jason Ankeny — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 13:50:49 GMT

The number of mobile websites increased sevenfold over the past year according to mobile web domain registry dotMobi. There are now roughly 1.1 million mobile site addresses worldwide based on a scan of the largest Top Level Domains (.mobi, .com, .net, .uk and .de) in use; when dotMobi performed the same study a year ago, its search revealed only 150,000 mobile websites. dotMobi adds that approximately 0.8 percent of all domains are likely to feature mobile-optimized content.

While the "/wap" identifier, used primarily by legacy sites from the initial WAP era, still represents 22 percent of all mobile-friendly Internet addresses, dotMobi forecasts its market share will taper off in the year ahead. Other mobile content identifiers include "/m" (13 percent), "/wap." (10 percent), "mobile." (5 percent), "m." (5 percent) and "/pda" (3 percent).

For more on the dotMobi study:
- read this release

Related articles:
dotMobi acquires Mowser
dotMobi to auction adult content domains
dotMobi launches mobile web task force

Yahoo Takes A Few Steps Out Of Image Search With A Better Preview Pane

Erick Schonfeld — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:46:32 GMT

One of the annoyances of doing image search on Yahoo and Google is the way they’ve both handled image previews. Up until now, when you clicked on a thumbnail image after doing a search, both engines took you to a preview page showing a larger version of the image in a pane at the top and the original Website it appears in below. Like many other frustrated image searchers, I find myself constantly toggling back and forth between the preview page and the original search results page to look for a better image.

Today, Yahoo is taking a few steps to improve this experience by taking a few steps out of it. Instead of showing a lone image in the preview pane, it is expanding the pane and filling up that real estate with a larger preview of the image, more image results, and image search box. Search assist also works in the search box so that when you start typing you get related keywords tuned to image search. (See illustration below).

If you search for rain, for instance, and then click on one of the image results, you will see the new preview pane at the top

The original page is still shown in the bottom pane for context (and you can always remove the Yahoo overlay altogether), but you can also continue your search without going back to the full results page. That should help speed things up, which is always a good thing.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

An API readiness checklist

Kas Thomas (noreply@blogger.com) — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:45:00 GMT

Someone asked me recently if I could name some enterprise software products that have good APIs. I think it would be much more useful to list some of the characteristics of good APIs so that you can sniff out the various odors for yourself as you examine various products.

The rules for creating REST APIs are pretty simple (although often violated) and I won't address them here. Right now, I'll just speak to the topic of programmatic APIs, which is where most of the customer and consultant pain lives.

Realizing that the following list is by no means exhaustive and reflects a number of my own personal biases, I hereby offer a perfunctory API Readiness Checklist. Vendors can use this as a kind of scorecard to determine whether APIs are ready to show customers or not.

☒ Common operations don't require the user to write lots of repetitive boilerplate code

☒ Methods aren't complex, heavy (they don't try to "do too much")

☒ Methods have fully-spelled-out names; no abbreviations

☒ Method, variable, class, and other names are self-descriptive

☒ Methods have few formal parameters (seldom more than 3)

☒ Concrete methods are final

☒ Parameters are positionally consistent across different methods

☒ No ambiguous overloadings (in a Java API: You should be able to call every flavor of a method from JavaScript, without generating disambiguation errors)

☒ Code often reads like normal prose

  if ( user.debt( ) > Credit.LIMIT )
        reject( user );

☒ Standard best practices apply with respect to internationalization

☒ Few custom exception types

☒ API follows patterns that developers are familiar with (don't make up new ones)

☒ Consistency of approach: The API follows the same patterns when doing similar sorts of things

☒ Consistency with related APIs: The API does things the way other company or product APIs do

☒ API favors interfaces and composition, not inheritance

☒ Documentation actually explains usage patterns and gives examples

☒ User doesn't have to know how everything works, just how to use it

☒ Sample code is intelligently commented

☒ Usability testing was conducted

☒ Your in-house developers actually like the API

There's a lot more to read on this subject. Joshua Bloch's book is a good starting point, as is this slideshow. A good resource on API design (for Java) can be found in this sample chapter from the book, Practical API Design.

If you have a favorite reference or more ideas to add to this list, by all means leave a comment here.

OpenOffice.org tools, Free Your Documents Guide: OpenOffice.org links, 25-03-2009

Roberto Galoppini — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:12:12 GMT

Taking Control of Your Documents - Rob Weir’s guide to free yourself from Microsoft Office dependency in 3 steps.

OpenOffice Draw Repair - Repair Deleted .ODG Documents - a shareware openoffice.org draw recovery software which repairs corrupt and damaged .odg files.

OpenOffice gets Non-linear Solver - a new extension to the OpenOffice.org Calc spreadsheet which adds two new solver mechanisms.