It seems like drop down menus are moving back towards having down arrows on them.
It seems like in the early days of Web 1.0 people would do all they could to get away from the select box and use all sorts of fancy DHTML menus (remember dynamicdrive.com anyone?). However, these days we are seeing most applications that have drop down menus - while not using the HTML select element - are reverting back to the down arrow visual affordance.
For example, GMail, Zazzle, LinkedIn and Amazon are all using the down arrow on their drop down menus nowadays. This simplification of user interfaces becoming a common theme in the latest web based applications.
One of the more interesting things I came across in my blog reading this weekend was the release of the second generation Openmoko phone. The Openmoko phone is the phone for the FOSS community with even the CAD files for building the phone available under a Creative Commons license and a price just shy of $400 USD.
The question that I have is how many open source developers and evangelists out there that are building their applications on free and open source software like Linux, Apache and Ruby on Rails or that work for open source organizations like the Mozilla Foundation or that are evangelizing open standards like OpenID are going to get on board with the most open mobile device available? How many of them are going to trade in their fancy closed source IPhone - for which Apple has applied for more than 200 patents - for an Openmoko phone? I would wager that very few will.
I would expect that all open source proponents who refuse Microsoft software because of their closed, software patenting ways would likewise refuse a proprietary hardware device form Apple in favour of an open alternative and yet people are still probably more than happy to stick with their favourite pomaceous fruit designed in California.
So who swears by open source and is going to keep their IPhone or other smart phone?
I just saw an advert for Google Analytics in my GMail the other day that mentioned something about a new industry benchmarking feature. I knew immediately what it was.
The idea is that you take the analytics information from all the sites using Google Analytics and generate some benchmarking data by industry and apply it to your stats. That way people who use Google Analytics can see if they have an unusually high bounce rate compared to their peers or if they have a really low pages per visit stat. Right now when people look at their Google Analytics information - aside from their past experiences - they haven’t really got much to go on in terms of what a good bounce rate or pages per visit value might be. This way one can actually compare with others and then prioritize what needs to get fixed based on what is most out of whack compared to others in their industry.
In the case of Google Analytics, I think that this sort of feature could really change analytics from being a private sort of thing to becoming something that, dare I say, a social network could build around - who wouldn’t want to be featured on the Google Analytics homepage for having the best web stats?
I had this idea a while back and I think it can be applied to a lot of different industries outside of web analytics - sort of like PayScale is doing with salary reporting - but of course an idea is nothing unless you can execute
Hopefully we can apply the same sort of idea to RobotReplay in the future.
We are almost ready to start building for our planned July 1 release of Complete UI Q3 - it is looking like we will be on schedule even! It is too bad we didn’t get everything in that we wanted but there are still a few nice new features.
The most notable updates aside from various bug fixes are Firefox 3 support, a new and improved Calendar and Datepicker component, and JSF versions of all the components!
I am really excited to see what sort of adoption we get for the JSF versions of our components and I think that people will be pretty happy with the new and Calendar functionality.
Time to get back to work as it will probably be a pretty tireless last week and a half.
Despite it occurring on one of the nicest days of the year so far in Vancity, sixteen people came over to the Nitobi offices and hacked the day away. The beer arrived early so those of us who’s projects made a turn for the worse were getting sauced already by two or three - just after the pizza lunch.
When everything was said and done, Yohei came out on top with a Papervision3D version of the Nitobi office! It was pretty damn cool and you can play with it below.
Alexei also showed his NitobiBug tool that is a cross-browser Ajax debugging tool similar to FireBug.
Thanks to everyone for coming out despite the amazing weather (which you can see out the windows of the model of the office below) and the opening of the new Vancouver Apple store
We will be having the next one some time in the fall I think.
This morning I remembered why I never use the Vancouver Ontario Street cycle route - it is littered with death traps. No not the type that you may have seen in the recent Jones movie, I am talking about the invasive species introduced from the UK called the North American roundabout. It can generally by discerned by the motorists driving through it at break neck speeds; one may also identify it by the pieces of broken bicycles and / or cyclists strewn about in various states of disrepair.
If you use the Ontario Street bike route you must have a death wish. I think that Main Street - though you do have to be wary of door prizes in certain areas - is actually far safer for cyclists. I for one feel that rather than being segregated to the back of the bus, in the name of safety cyclists should be using the proper road ways, pissing of the car driving, climate changing commuters.
At any rate, one can see in the lovely animated gif, care of the Wikipedia article, that vehicles entering the roundabout yield to those already in the roundabout - be them cars, bikes or hover boards. What that means here in North America is that when entering the roundabout you give the right of way to those on the left unlike a regular stop sign.
In case you have not heard of our upcoming Nitobi events - Ajax and Scotch as well as Hack Day - then where the hell have you been???
Come out on Thursday night (May 22) at the Shebeen Room for some lovely scotch - my current favourite is Auchentoshan - and of course Ajax discussions, which as we all know means pretty much anything these days.
My talk at CommunityOne went off without a hitch and was possibly even well received. After which Andre and I went on to check out the RedMonk track at CommunityOne, which was inciteful as one would expect. We participated in a few discussions around cloud computing, twitter and, of course, RIA. I think from the discussion about RIAs I pretty much decided the only thing that makes an RIA is when an online application does not use page refreshes (too much). Flash, Silverlight and Ajax all share this one common thread. It was a good time and got even better at the house of shields after (between which was dinner with Dion, Ben, Chet, James and Andre).
At any rate, there have been lots of good conversations with all sorts of differentpeople and the creative juices are flowing. Can’t wait to find time to get some code written
Tomorrow is the Anchor Steam tour that Mike Chambers has organized - needless to say I can’t wait!
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