I sat down to quickly put together a demo to show how easy and efficient it is to use the ajax libraries instead of making dom manipulation on our own.
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> <!-- @author: prabhakar doraisamy. 2/3/09 version 1.0 --> <html> <head> <metahttp-equiv="Content-Type"content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <title>Untitled Document</title> <scripttype="text/javascript">
function addEventSimple(obj, evt, fn){
if (obj.addEventListener)
obj.addEventListener(evt, fn, false);
else
if (obj.attachEvent)
obj.attachEvent('on' + evt, fn);
}
function removeEventSimple(obj, evt, fn){
if (obj.removeEventListener)
obj.removeEventListener(evt, fn, false);
else
if (obj.detachEvent)
obj.detachEvent('on' + evt, fn);
}
function init(){
var tooltip = document.getElementById('tooltip');
var link1 = document.getElementById('link1');
var text = "text here";
tooltip.style.display = 'none';
function findPosX(obj){
var curleft = 0;
if (obj.offsetParent)
while (1) {
curleft += obj.offsetLeft;
if (!obj.offsetParent)
break;
obj = obj.offsetParent;
}
else
if (obj.x)
curleft += obj.x;
return curleft;
}
function findPosY(obj){
var curtop = 0;
if (obj.offsetParent)
while (1) {
curtop += obj.offsetTop;
if (!obj.offsetParent)
break;
obj = obj.offsetParent;
}
else
if (obj.y)
curtop += obj.y;
return curtop;
}
Bill Gates demonstrates Touch Wall (CEO Summit 2008, Redmond, Wash. May 14, 2008). The reason why it’s impressive is not because of that fancy hardware - touch-screen with some sensors like earlier Microsoft’s Surface technology (which is primarily a hardware gimmick). This demo is much more than hardware!
Look closely at the application he is interacting with! It’s a unified model of the data presentation softwares from Microsoft Office (powerpoint, word, visio, interactive multimedia - all office tools put together working seamlessly in a non-linear way). My guess is, this is running on a giant presentation platform (must be more powerful than silverlight or maybe silverlight’s next gen) - should have been built from scratch, made to be capable of aggregating all kinds of documents working with eachother (visio, ppt, doc, multimedia).
This simple demo by a student from Lancaster University, stopped me to think.
It’s about forcing synchronization into periodic systems through coupling crossover.
Below is also the excerpt from Christiaan Huygen’s work who first observed this synchronization between loosely coupled pendula (on 1665).
I recently switched from lastfm to Pandora founded by Tim Westergren (based on Music Genome Project, in it’s own words, ‘the most sophisticated taxonomy of musical information ever collected’) after lot of frustrations with lastfm’s interface and unnecessary complexities with the page navigations. I think this smart radio concept has been successfully executed by Pandora compared to other already-established players including Rhapsody, Napster, slacker.
Pandora edges out other internet radios through its simplicity in its UI, smartness in picking the next right music based on deep musical understanding from its big collection of catalogue titles. I also live feed my blog with my most recently listened songs from Pandora under ‘Listening’ section.
the concept is same as any other internet note-taking tool , but the handwriting recognization and image-text conversion technology is impressive. http://www.evernote.com/video/
Xobni - a nice inbox organizer for outlook. its better than any search add-ons (including lookout, gDesktop) that i’ve had so far. http://www.xobni.com
I know I have talked already about Laszlo, but I should say this article caught me. “Laszlo is XML technology, not Flash technology” by David Temkin that explains how the Laszlo XUL server toolkit differs from Macromedia’s XUL server offering (aka Flex/MXML).
David asks which one is your choice?
Macromedia’s MXML which is tightly bound only to the Flash player and authoring tool?.
Microsoft’s upcoming XAML, which is tightly bound to Microsoft’s Avalon/WinFX client framework?
Or Laszlo’s XML language and framework which is self-contained (no need to use ActionScript APIs, Flash MX, C#, “code behind,” or any other external language) and designed expressly for development of rich interactivity to deliver this application into Macromedia (Flash), Microsoft (Longhorn/Avalon), and Java/J2ME runtimes or anyother powerful client that may arise in future.
David is the CTO of Laszlo Systems so don’t expect a fair and balanced story. Full story here.
What’s your take on it? Do server-side XUL toolkits have a future?
For those who are watching the flexcoders mailing list, this information maybe a repitition. For all others, Something to note is that some .NET web services are written with multiple outputs. The one I recently saw had a WSDL signature like this:
In this case there are two “outputs”, Result and TokenResponse. Unfortunately the Flex WebService library does not deserialize multiple outputs correctly, so only the contents of Result end up getting deserialized. If you want to use a service like this you’ll need to set resultFormat=”xml” on your operation tag and handle the parsing of the XML yourself.
Macromedia Team will be looking into fixes for this in a future version.
Macromedia released Flex today, the biggest bet of the family. Flex is the enterprise level presentation server that generates SWF to the Flash player through MXML, same as HTML gets rendered by browser. Flex has the biggest product team and has had the longest development cyle of any Macromedia product that I am aware of.
With the release of Flex, Macromedia takes its first step to tussle with Microsoft’s Longhorn.
Hear about Flex technology from these places for an introduction if you are new to Flex.
1. Browse through the OnDemand Seminars for Flex introduction, you will find a good intro on Flex technology.
2. Breeze presentation gives you the overview and demo of the Flex product.
