CityBlogz Design Studio / Blog

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to attend the SXSW, as it looks like Mobile Web will be more prominently discussed this year. Brian Fling of Blue Flavor gave a presentation at SXSW, and here’s his blog page on the subject. He includes a link to his presentation in PDF. I just finished taking a look at it, and he makes some very good points for designers and web developers looking to make a mobile version of their website. Until mobile phone web browsers have reached the same feature set as the desktop web browsers, all the things that Brian covered in the presentation are good to adhere to.

Here’s a neat little blog post about Mobile AJAX written by PavingWays Rocco Georgi. He also has a PDF of the slides presentation that he gave in the XML conference 2006 in Boston and during the “Webmontag” in February in Munich. He says he will keep updating that page, and I’m curious to see what other web developers have to say.

My hope is that someday the mobile browser space will be advanced enough that it will rival that of the desktop browser space. That way, web developers can simply write their code once, and that it will render properly on all web browsers - desktop and mobile versions.

I finally received a legit copy of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate last weekend from a Microsoft employee whom I shall refer to by first name only (Mike). At first, I wasn’t sure if it would even install properly as my hardware is 5 years old and the Vista Upgrade Advisor constantly crashed on my XP machine (Athlon XP 2000+, 1.25GB, Radeon 9600).

As soon as I put in the disc, there was very little hassle and user input required. I proceeded to install the Belkin Wi-Fi USB adapter. That worked using the XP drivers CD that I had lying around. When I took a look at the Device Manager, there were several missing device drivers. My motherboard uses the older NVidia nForce2 technology which enables RAID support and Firewire, A quick look at the Nvidia support site, and there is no Vista support for their nForce2 drivers. That sucked, but I don’t use RAID and Firewire anyway, so it was no big loss. The big glaring issue was no Vista driver support for my Creative SoundBlaster Live card! I had to search for a hack-around that someone posted to a forum in order to fool the Creative XP drivers to install into Vista. Luckily, that worked and I was able to get sound coming out again. The other big issue was that my previous year Symantec Antivirus would no longer work. Symantec’s solution is to get customers to shell out for their 2007 edition. I found that to be a load of crap! So, I ditched Symantec and went with Grisoft’s AVG Free Edition. That worked with no problems. The next thing I wanted to get working was the ActiveSync for my Dell Axim. I had heard that Vista included a new application that replaces ActiveSync called Windows Mobile Device Center (WMDC). After plugging in my Dell Axim, I expected Vista to automatically launch this new app. However, the only thing it did was install the device drivers and that’s all. I searched for the app using the Vista Search, but no matches were found. I was getting frustrated now, but after searching online, I found out that you have to go to Windows Update to get the WDMC installed. I didn’t understand why it wasn’t just included in the install media.

After all that work, I finally have a decent Vista setup. There are still many apps that aren’t compatible with Vista, i.e. iTunes, PeerGuardian, etc, However, that’s to be expected. My overall impression is that Vista is much prettier than XP.  It does take longer to bootup, and graphics playback seems to lag slightly behind. My experience index was a 3.0 out of 5.9. A more modern graphics card will probably help, but I am guessing that a CPU transplant would be more in order. The biggest con is the hefty price tag, and I would imagine the only reasonable way to get Vista is to get it preinstalled with a new PC. Verdict - I give Vista a 3 out of 5.9. Same as my experience index.

Three weeks ago, Yahoo announced a real impressive tool for developing web mashups called Yahoo Pipes. In the UNIX and command line world, a pipe “|” represents a joining of two programs, taking the output of one and making it the input for another, until you finally get the result you want. i.e. cat log.txt | grep “ERROR”. Yahoo Pipes is really just a conduit for data between web services, much the same as in UNIX where a pipe is a conduit for the transfer of data between programs. I can’t help but think of the wonderful possibilities this web app could have. As Tim O’Reilly states in his blog entry about Pipes “This is something I’ve been waiting nearly ten years for.” A bold and important statement coming from the man who coined the phrase “Web 2.0″.

Now, the concept of Pipes is not new. UNIX has it. Even Apple has a similar type of desktop application called Automator. What is new is that it is all done using a web browser AJAXified interface. You do not need a lot of web programming experience to get started, as you can simply take existing modules and mash them up into your own Pipe. You can then share your Pipe with others and you’ll quickly get the concept of code reuse.

The Pipes Editor - URL Builder allows you to fetch any data source via its RSS, Atom or other XML feed, extract the data you want, combine it with data from another source, apply various built-in filters (sort, unique, count, truncate, union, join, as well as user-defined filters), and apply simple programming tools like for loops. You can solicit user input and build URL query strings to submit to REST-based sites. You don’t just get to look at the output of your Pipes program on the Pipes web site. Output options include RSS, JSON, and you can even get results by email or SMS. Popular uses of Pipes is to use it for searching multiple sites at once and getting aggregated results, or to get alerted to items that may interest you. I wrote one example called “Deals On Memory” that searches sites like bensbargains.net and techbargains.com so that I get alerted to the latest deals on computer memory.