Trends

When people started making applications available in the browser a number of interaction challenges appeared. How do you launch a web app compared to a desktop app? How do you prevent people from navigating away from your app? The Mozilla people have been hard t work with Prism - basically a customized version of Firefox, which lets you create desktop apps pre-configured to load a certain URL at startup. The desktop app is launched like any other application. Pretty sweet as the user experience becomes more consistent. You can also customize the application icon and other parameters. ...

Please note the video progress bar. Via Jim Carlberg’s Finstilt.se.

Sweden is represented in the ISO through the Swedish Standards Institute (SIS). This means that our country has one of the 100 or so votes. The member countries have had six months to consider if the Office Open XML (OOXML) format should become an ISO standard. In Sweden, SIS arranged a working group that have looked through the material. As you may know the OOXML format has been heavily criticized (by many e.g. Google (PDF)) for allowing embedding of closed Microsoft-specific objects in the document standard and thus making it difficult for non-Microsoft software to read OOXML documents. ...

I am guessing this would be a valuable addition to web browsers in the future. With this technique it is easy to target an image for viewing in multiple displays (e.g. a 4:3 screen or a 16:9 TV). “Seam carving” allows an image to be resized non-uniformly, so you can change the height to width ratio in the image without cropping, but also without distorting important features in the image (such as faces). ...

I have received an increasing number of advertising inquiries from MySpace layout sites. Apparently the term “MySpace layouts” is a very popular search term these days. Looking at the default MySpace layouts one can unserstand why. I am confident that they didn’t hire a designer to create the default MySpace look and feel. Looking at the MySpace HTML, they certainly didn’t hire a GUI developer. The markup looks like it was ripped from a teenage fan site from the early nineties: ...

Why the lucky stiff is a well known name among most Ruby developers. Many have read his Ruby programming tutorials and seen his spectacular performances (or whatever they are) at RailsConf and elsewhere. Personally, I owe him a lot for Hpricot, the liberal HTML parser (at my previous government agency Verva we used it to run the quarterly test of all public websites in Sweden). Hpricot is also the default parser for the Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit. ...

Things are heating up in the Ruby-as-a-dotnet-language area. Martin Fowler voiced his concerns on Microsoft not being able to look at source code and therefore having trouble implementing Ruby properly. Microsoft, with John Lam in the cockpit, is implementting Ruby for the .net platform (if you have been reading my previous blog posts I predicted way back in february 2006 that John Lam would get scooped up my Microsoft:-). Ola Bini is also concerned about Microsoft not letting ther developers look at the Ruby implementation. If you remember the whole SCO debacle I guess it isn’t that strange. Microsoft is in the position where software they develop potentially may end up in millions of computers. Apparently the US legal system awards damages in proportion to this. Thus, any issues with a Ruby implementation on .net can quickly become costly. ...

Let’s forget about that for a while. Ola Bini and the JRuby team is quickly moving forward with something I would consider a breakthrough in Rails deployment options. In fact, it could well mean a breakthrough in Rails adoption in many organizations. Why (some) IT-managers like Rails but don’t like deploying it When I was a consultant I talked to many IT-managers that had heard about Ruby on Rails. They were intrigued by the fact that Ruby and Rails were created for developers rather than machines. Most of them realized that developer time costs more than computer performance today (although some of them were still spending money at developers writing unnecessarily complicated code to run fast on hardware that costs less than 20 developer hours). ...

Chief Executive Anders Dahlvig in an interview with Reuters said IKEA aimed to put a “bigger focus” on the living room in the next year, adding accessories for TV and videogames alongside new sofas and storage ranges. When asked if that could lead to electricals being sold in its iconic blue and yellow stores, he replied: Maybe. It depends on the stores. They are big, but they are still crowded; there are lots of products we would like to have in there. ...

Via PR 2.0 (in swedish) I found the recently published TeliaSonera report on communication trends in Sweden (PDF in swedish). 10,000 people were interviewed about their online media use and expectations. Most of their findings were not surprising; people expect wifi in hotel rooms, want to be able to watch TV on their cell phone and so on. One thing did stand out though: 25% of the population regularly reads one or more blogs. Among persons 26 and younger the figure goes up to 50% but for the group 60 or older it is still close to 25%. ...