Personal Portals. Desktop Gadgets.
Microsoft will allow gadgets to be dragged and dropped back and forth between live.com and the desktop (operating system). And they aren’t waiting for Vista – an update to Windows XP will be coming soon that will allow this drag and drop functionality. — Michael Arrington
That is crushing news for a lot of fledgeling personal portal companies. Still, it sounds WONDERFUL to me as a user.
Iamalpha.com from AOL also looks interesting – it’s going for the “lots of mini dhtml gadgets that interact with other services” thing, too. If you can’t figure out how to launch it, go here and click “go play”.
And, hey, am I the only one around here that remembers DoDots? They did what Konfabulator does before Konfabulator did it. Say that 10 times fast!
OH! And WHAT IS UP with web.archive.org? I’m not allowed to see past incarnations of the DoDots.com site because the current domain owner forbids it? Good lord.
Robots.txt Query Exclusion.
We’re sorry, access to http://www.dodots.com has been blocked by the site owner via robots.txt.
AJAX on Smartphones?
I’ve been working on evaluating the abilities of various pda browsers so that mobile interfaces to RSS Aggregators can be a little more smooth. Asynchronous communication with the server is possible, without XMLHttpRequest(AJAX). My test cases are here. Test #15 is the main proof of concept where I swap an image and have the server send down a cookie with useful information when it serves up the image. This functionality could be used to asynchronously mark an item in your RSS Aggregator as read or to tag it. Meanwhile, the cookie that is returned could be used for serving up content asynchronously.
NOTE: After I started down this path, I found Julien Lamarre‘s excellent work on the topic. For some reason, Julien’s tests don’t work in Blazer on the Palm TX, while I have no idea if my tests work on anything other than Firefox and Blazer.
Source Code Search – syntax aware
Huihong launched codase today!
Rather than treating code as text, Codase understands programming languages, and treats code as code, the way it’s supposed to be. It provides the most accurate and detailed search results with fine granuity levels of contols. With Codase, one can search functions, classes, strings, constants, macros, comments and other programming language constructs.
Codase can do free form text searches AND makes it easy to search just method names or class names. The results are also pretty-printed(formatting and colors).
141 hits on a search for methods named doit. Who knew?
a Ruby blog
RedHanded is an excellent Ruby blog.
John Tokash 