Prism - web apps as desktop apps

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....

December 24, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Re-enacting Video Transition Effects

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

August 31, 2007 · Peter Krantz

How the Swedish OOXML Vote Was Bought for $57,000

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....

August 28, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Content-aware Image Resizing

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)....

August 22, 2007 · Peter Krantz

MySpace Layouts and Markup Quality

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:...

August 16, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Hackety Hack - The Foundation for a Revolution

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....

July 9, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Bringing Ruby to the .NET environment

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....

June 5, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Enterprise Rails Deployment Getting Closer (thanks to Ola Bini and the JRuby team)...

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....

May 7, 2007 · Peter Krantz

IKEA may start selling computers

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....

April 2, 2007 · Peter Krantz

Blogs increasingly more popular among senior citizens

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....

March 26, 2007 · Peter Krantz