A List Apart joins the Job Board
Starting today A List Apart, the preeminent resource for web designers and developers, will be displaying one random job from the Job Board in the sidebar on every page. A List Apart serves up a few million targeted page views every month. It’s great exposure for anyone looking to fill a web design, programming or executive position.
So, if you’re looking to fill a position, the Job Board just got even better. You’ll reach the best of the best on Signal vs. Noise and A List Apart. This added coverage nearly guarantees you’ll reach the right people for the right job.
Special thanks goes to Jeffrey Zeldman, Jason Santa Maria, and Dan Benjamin for making this happen so quickly.
Source: Signal vs. Noise
Original Article: http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/a_list_apart_joins_the_job_board.php
Protowidget: Widget system on top of Prototype
Terry Laurenzo found that he liked "the simplicity of Prototype, the widgets/templates from Dojo and the event-based property binding support from OpenLaszlo/Flex". This caused him to create Protowidget which builds on Prototype to add widget support a la Dojo.
Widgets
As the name implies, Protowidget is based on widgets. While some widgets are provided (and more will come in the future), Protowidget’s primary focus is on providing a rich environment for constructing complicated widgets.
A widget is always bound to an HTML element. This will typically be a div, but can really be anything (depending on the widget). We take the Dojo approach of leveraging custom attributes in order to do all of the wiring. This has the advantage of letting us bypass the ID-madness when it comes to hooking widgets to DOM elements. Here is an example:
This HTML declaration tells Protowidget to bind the span to the built-in Text widget. It further sets up a property binding so that the text property will be bound to the value of model.title on the current section (this example came from the Accordian title-bar template so the currentSection reference is an Accordian.SectionWidget in this context).
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/protowidget-widget-system-on-top-of-prototype
Redfin To Change the Rules of Real Estate Sales
Seattle based Redfin is making two major announcements today.
First, they’ve closed an $8 million Series B round of financing, from Vulcan Capital, BEV Capital and Madrona Venture Group. This follows a (roughly) $1m Series A round in January 2006. New CEO Glenn Kelman, the founder of Plumtree, joined the company in September 2005.
Second, Redfin is expanding their service out of the Seattle area to include the bay area in California (and will be expanding to Los Angeles, San Diego and nationwide soon).
They have an intruiging and aggressive business model. Instead of providing useful real estate information to consumers and then pointing them to real estate professionals like competitors Trulia and Zillow, Redfin is doing their best to completely remove real estate agents and brokers from at least half of a home sale.
Redfin combines MLS listing information (homes for sale) with historical sales data (homes already sold) into a single map. If you find a home you like and want to place an offer, Redfin will represent you in the buying process (they have a call center with licensed real estate professioinals to guide you). Here’s the good part: They reimburse you 2/3 of the buy-side real estate fee directly on closing. The average amount reimbursed to the buyer is $11,402 (and that is based on relatively low Seattle home prices).
Redfin is also testing a seller-representation model, called “Direct for Sellers”, that will handle all aspects of a sale for a flat fee (currently $1,350). On a $500,000 home sale, this saves the seller $13,650.
Everything isn’t rosy for Redfin, though. They’ve been operating in Seattle for a number of years and have numerous war stories to tell about threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals. Hopefully things won’t get out of hand as they continue to disrupt this stubbornly inefficient market.
I haven’t met the Redfin team yet, but am looking forward to seeing them tonight at the TechCrunch Seattle party that I am co-producing with them, Farecast and Triphub.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=899
IconDB - Ajax-enabled Icon Search
If you’ve ever been stuck on a project looking for just the right icon to fill your need, you might want to check out the IconDB site and search for what you need.
The site provides a handy sliding navigation on the left to pop out the search button to locate the icons. Click on the “IconDB” text there, and it will slide out to give you the search box. When you submit the search, the box will tell you how many results were found and start to fill them in there behind the interface. Click anywhere outside of the search area and it will slide back, showing you the icons located.
Clicking on each of the icons will show the details for it, including the owner, a link to download it, what the image type is, and some of the keywords that it can be found under. The bar at the top can be used to navigate between the pages either by clicking on the arrows on ether side or actually sliding the highlighted section around.
It’s an interesting interface and it’s nice to help locate some icons if you’re in need, but I do wish there was a way to just browse the keyword categories and see how many of each kinds of icons there are. It feels more like a guessing game right now of getting the right term to find the icons you might want. Even a “similar icons” option might work well.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/icondb-ajax-enabled-icon-search
Benchmark Invests in PageFlakes
According to this post over on TechCrunch, a company called Benchmark Capital has taken a genuine interest in the Ajax desktop site Pageflakes and has even conducted a round of financing for the company.
They make mention of the Netvibes seed round that took place before and how both they and Pageflakes are competing with Microsoft’s offering of Live.com. Benchmark has also invested time and effort into other European-headquartered companies as well, including Bebo.
It’s interesting to see companies starting to get behind the “Ajax desktop” kinds of sites - PageFlakes, Protopage, Netvibes. I’ll be anxious to see what kinds of futures they really have besides just being a place for fun little toy modules that dipslay RSS feeds or keep sticky notes for each user.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/benchmark-invests-in-pageflakes
Joe Hewitt Talks on Firebug (Video)
If you’ll remember a little while back, we posted about the latest release of a handy Javascript extension for Firefox that makes working with the language much simpler. Well, the folks over at the Yahoo! Interface Blog have posted even more information about it - this time, in the format of a video from a presentation.
Joe Hewitt, a longtime Mozilla/Firefox engineer and the author of DOM Inspector, recently made a return to frontend development after many years working on browser code. He found that the state of the art in terms of tooling hadn’t advanced much since his days as a DHTML author in the late 1990s.
While many frontend engineers have lamented the state of debugging tools in the JavaScript development arena, Joe reacted in a singularly useful fashion: He set about in January 2006 to create a Firefox extension that brought together some of the great strengths of Venkman and DOM Inspector in an integrated, lightweight interface. Adding features inspired by sources ranging from Python to Prototype, he’s been evolving FireBug for the past five months and developing a cult following of developers who are finding FireBug to be an essential part of their toolkit.
You can find the actual video of the presentation over on this post, but keep in mind there were a few audio problems, so it’s a bit difficult to hear him over the background noise in some parts. You can still get the ideas that he’s coming across with, however, and that’s what counts.
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/joe-hewitt-talks-on-firebug-video
SixApart To Launch Comet, Renamed Vox, on June 1
San Francisco based SixApart, which owns the Typepad, MovableType and LiveJournal blogging platforms, will start letting users test their new Vox (formerly Comet) hosted blogging platform on Thursday, June 1. Initially a few thousand people will be let in, and they will ramp up from there.
Vox was initially introduced last fall at a DEMO conference (click here for details and a video archive of Mena Trott’s presentation).
Vox is half a blogging platform for newbies (albeit with rich and deep functionality) and half social network. The “new post” functionality is WYSIWYG and allows very easy uploading of images, audio and video, as well as book information (for reviews) from Amazon. Privacy settings can be set for each post, as well as descriptive tags.
There is an obvious focus on social networking. A friends list, called “neighborhood” is prominently displayed on each page (see screen shots below). If you want to add any person on the list as a friend, simply hover over their picture and a number of options pop up.
Vox is not a platform at this point for hard core bloggers who want complete control over the look and feel of the site. But it combines a great interface with the type of functionality most people really want - integration with Flickr and YouTube, easy book reviews, etc. This is aimed squarely at MSN Spaces and AIM Pages.
Vox will be free and advertising supported.
More screenshots here.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=898
LogoWorks Redesign and Discount Code
Utah-based Logoworks, which just relaunched a major new user interface, has an innovative and inexpensive way of creating corporate and other logos for customers. They outsource the project to interested and pre-approved designers who come up with design concepts. You then pick the concept you like best and iterate from there. Designers are paid bonuses based on having their designs chosen, and so a very efficient and competitive market is created around each logo creation project.
I went through the initial stages of the process to see what the Logoworks designers could come up with. After a couple of days I received an email linking to logo concepts (many of them are below). Logoworks stresses that the initial compositions are simply concepts, and asks that you pick one of the concepts and go forward with iterations.
Some of my initial concepts:
The ability to tap into a number of different designers who will have very different logo concepts, combined with the rock bottom pricing, is pretty compelling.
Logoworks has a number of different pricing plans ranging from $300 and up. If you are in the market for a new logo, you may want to give this a look.
Discount Code: If you go to Logoworks using this link - www.logoworks.com/techcrunch, they will take $50 off any order. I am not receiving any commissions or other payments for any purchases - I just asked them to give TechCrunch readers the biggest discount they could. The discount is good until June 13, and you’ll see the original prices crossed out and the discount shown when you select “start my logo”.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=897
Morfik targets Google?
When Google came out with GWT, there was a rumour that they had worked with Morfik on the technology. This false rumour came about due to the similarity in the technologies.
Morfik has shown signs of what they feel about GWT with the press release:
Morfik Will Pursue all Avenues to Protect its IP Rights
Recent recognition of the value of mapping a high-level language to JavaScript by key stalwarts of the AJAX world has confirmed the viability and strategic importance of Morfik Technology Pty Ltd’s many years of pioneering work in this area. Morfik’s vision of “browser as computing platform” embodied by its JavaScript Synthesis Technology, “JST” (Patent Pending) is now gaining mainstream acceptance.
“Morfik believes in this paradigm and has invested millions of dollars over the course of many man-years in developing this technology.” said Aram Mirkazemi, co-founder and CEO of Morfik.
“For some time now, Morfik has been recognized both in the industry and in the press for having conceived of and developed something that is truly inspirational. Morfik has been working on this technology for a long time. We are helping Morfik in pursuing all appropriate forms of intellectual property protection in connection with this technology and invention.” said Tim Hale of Russo & Hale LLP of Palo Alto, California, one of Morfik’s intellectual property attorneys.
Some time ago Morfik’s founders identified JavaScript as the limiting factor in the development of complex interactive Web-based software applications and decided to develop some proof-of-concept prototypes for the translation of a high-level language to JavaScript. The success of the proof-of-concept resulted in the establishment of Morfik as a company in the year 2000 and the further development of JST. JST allows developers to use a high-level language of choice and have it compiled directly and seamlessly to JavaScript. Morfik spent the ensuing years building a state-of-the-art Rapid Application Development tool to make JST accessible to small businesses.In October 2005 Morfik’s JST was featured at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, California and immediately attracted the attention of leading search engine providers and software development organizations, including founders and top officers from some very large companies. In a number of instances, persons recognizing the potential in the JST innovation and its implications for their own organization’s applications requested special more detailed presentations to their engineers or gained access to additional confidential information about JST.
Morfik as the owner of this ground-breaking innovation and technology is committed to protecting all of its rights, working closely with interested organizations to share its learning and innovations related to JST and to enter into appropriate licensing arrangements with such organizations to govern their use of JST.
What about XML11, and the other companies/projects/products that compile to JS?
Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/morfik-targets-google
Sharpcast Opens to the Public
Silicon Valley based Sharpcast, which closed a $13.5 million round of financing in early March (and $16.5 million total over two rounds), is now open to the public. The official announcement is tomorrow - Wednesday - but the site is open now for new registrations.
Sharpcast is important, but hard to understand at a glance. The basic idea is to remove the hassle of syncing data across computers and mobile devices. The first product, Sharpcast Photos, showcases the technology quite well. In the future we’ll see products from Sharpcast that allow auto syncing of contacts, calendars and documents as well, all from their native applications (outlook, ical, etc.).
Sharpcast Photos, though, allows users to upload photos to a desktop application. It is available only for Windows machines today, with a Mac version promised soon.
Once the photos are in the desktop application, users make a few option selections and the photos are then placed on the web, synced to other computers and synced to a mobile device. The process works all multi-directionally, too. Upload a photo the web and it syncs to the desktop (and mobile device). Take a picture with the mobile device and it syncs to the web and the desktop.
I saw a demo of Sharpcast at the DEMO conference in February, and then again a couple of weeks ago from CEO Gibu Thomas and Marketing/Business Development Director Allen Bush. The application is extremely well done and the syncronization is near instantaneous to a mobile device. If anything, the Sharpcast guys have waited too long to launch the product. I found distressingly few bugs to complain about.
This is the future. The question is whether Sharpcast will be part of it or not. If they execute, they will be.
Source: TechCrunch
Original Article: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch?m=895