Mesibo.Net - Invitation

http://upcoming.org/event/156316/

Technorati tags: Mesibo.Net, Israel, Party, Internet, Invitation

TWS 2007

The folks at the.co.ils [Hebrew] (one of my favorite blogs), which is focused on covering the Internet scene from an Israeli angle, have organized a unique event – TWS 2007. It's an opportunity for young Israeli web startups to meet, connect and present. Check it out.

Technoarti Tags: TWS 2007 the.co.ils israel internet web startup

A Moment of Quiet Contemplation

I've upgraded to Outlook 2007.

I upgraded because of the integrated search capabilities. GDS and Lookout were both great, but I use full text search a lot, and I missed a tighter integration of the search results with Outlook.

So, now that the re-indexing is done (5 hours, thanks for asking), indeed I have a super-slick full text search capability on my 9 years worth of emails. Love it!

And, an unexpected bonus – it turns out that Outlook has yet another exciting feature. Every 2 minutes or so, my machine freezes for a few seconds. Every 10 minutes, when Outlook reaches into that deep void called the Internet to fetch my email, my machine freezes for even longer. So now I have these wonderful pauses, which I use for quiet contemplation.

They say that the new office took 5 years to develop. I guess that when they started out, the Internet was much faster than it is today, and CPUs were not as burdened, so they didn't really notice these pauses.

Oh well. Service Pack 1, I await you – in quiet contemplation.

P.S. I posted this with MS Word, in draft mode, and then hurried to check the resulting HTML. Gotta give it to them - very minimal features, but sparkling clean HTML. Nice!

Technorati Tags: Outlook Outlook 2007 performance rant

OpenLaszlo 4 vs. Flex

My post on Adobe Flex and why I don't get it raised a bit of commotion. In particular, Ryan Stewart posted some well articulated objections to the points I raised, and most of the comments on his post seem to support his view. You can read my response to Ryan here.

Dan McWeeney commented on my original post and pointed me to OpenLaszlo 4, which was a delightful find: Modular, component-based XML syntax for declarative programming, JavaScript 1.3 with 1.4 extensions as the programming language. And, best of all, OpenLaszlo has an open output architecture, with support for Flash, Flash Lite 2 (for cell phones) and – standard DHTML + CSS + JavaScript 1.3. Plus there is no reason why it couldn't support Java, XUL or Avalon as well.

RUB – Refresh, URL addressability and Back button support is not part of the basic programming model, but can be added in a reasonable manner using built-in, documented functions. I'd love to see this becoming part of the declarative syntax instead though.

Check out this stunning LZPIX sample app, which implements cool Flickr picture search using OpenLadzlo 4 rendered to DHTML. It's almost had to believe that it's HTML + JavaScript underlying it. So hard to believe that I had to peek inside with Firebug, just to be sure :)

It can even be deployed as a desktop application – a good example of which is Pandora, which is built using OpenLaszlo.

For more info, check out Don Hopkins overview of OpenLaszlo.

Technorati tags: OpenLaszlo, Flex, Adobe Flex

Bye bye Blogger lables

I removed the labels element from the blog.

Being an obsessive tagger, I use a larger number of tags (labels. whatever). And having them presented in a long list consumed way too much space.

So, I don't see anymore any value in using Blogger labels over, say, Technoarti tags. I guess I'll be going back to using Technorati tags only on my posts.

I feel that this is one of these cases where a tag cloud would make much more sense...

Technorati tags: blogger, tags, labels, Tag Cloud, Google

JPG Magazine

JPG Magazine uses a collaborative, user-generated approach to create a beautiful, offline photography magazine.

This is quite unique. Do you know of other services that do the same for other types of content?

Here is the photograph I submitted to the upcoming "Entropy" theme for the next issue:

Technorati Tags: JPG JPG Magazine photography UGC offline

Why I don't get Adobe Flex

I don't get Adobe Flex.

Actually, Flex looks great. Solid architecture, slick IDE, modern declarative markup language and scripting language, lots of productivity features.

Still, I don't get it. Why would an architect choose to rely on a proprietary runtime, available only from a single vendor to do stuff that can be done just as easily with standard XHTML, CSS and JavaScript?

I chatted on Flex with Mark Anders from Adobe. Mark worked on ASP.NET from 1998 until 2003, and then co-founded the Flex effort at Macromedia.

Mark demoed Flex at FOWA today, building a functional, slick Flickr tag browser in few minutes using the Flex markup and practically zero code. The thing is that the exact same day can be built with just as easily with an environment like ASP.NET, with the output delivered to the client using standard XHTML CSS and JavaScript. So why Flex?

Is Flex Adobe's way of leveraging the huge Flash developers community and lure them into a vendor-lockdown?

According to Mark, Flex is a way to avoid the browser compatibility issues, especially with regards to CSS and JavaScript. It's a reliable, predictable runtime that works the same way on all browsers.

Flex must have been a huge engineering effort. Could the same effort have been dedicated to delivering the same productivity and reliability advancements, but with the markup and the script "compiled" into XHTML + CSS + JavaScript instead of proprietary Flash runtime bytecodes?

And what about search engines and other content-aware tools, which cannot easily access the content delivered by Flex applications? And permalinks, which do not work as naturally with Flex as they do with HTML? How do you bookmark a piece of content in a Flex application on Delicious? And - which surprises will you run into when you hit the browser's Back button?

The upcoming Apollo server platform from Adobe promises to deliver support for rich web applications that work equally well offline and online. This is something I've been looking forward to for a long time. Of course, it will require the Flex runtime to provide this functionality. Technically speaking, I don't see a reason why the same capability cannot be delivered through standard XHTML + CSS + JavaScript + a client-side plugin, which could be a subset of the Flex-required Flash runtime.

Given Adobe's track record with Flash and its 98% penetration, I think it's safe to guess that Flex will be hugely successful. Still, I can't help but feel that in a sense, it's a step backward. Or at least sideways.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Flex Mark Anders Flex Standards