Ray Cromwell has the ability to do amazing things in the browser. We have often linked to his work on Chronoscope and more, and this time he has a screencast showing of Timescope “our charting engine, written in GWT, runnable as Servlet or Android native application, renders huge numbers of points at interactive rates, scriptable, annotatable like Google Maps, and stylable via CSS-like stylesheet mechanism.”
For those who know of Chronoscope, this is the commercial version, big changes include more accurate multiresolution filtering algorithm, Android native version, Chart Server, iPhone integration, synthetic datasets, a number of other things. We eventually hope to include a subset of complete implementation of R in GWT, to allow statistical work to be done totally in browser.
At the 7:20 mark, you can see GSS, which is an implementation of a CSS parsing and cascade engine in GWT, to support our totally custom set of properties, elements, and pseudo-classes.
Ben Lisbakken, a chap who I had the pleasure to work with at Google, has done a really nice job creating a Google Ajax API Playground, an area that allows you to touch and feel the APIs in real-time:
Ben said:
The AJAX API Playground is currently loaded with over 170 samples for 8 Google JavaScript APIs (Maps, Search, Feeds, Calendar, Visualization, Language, Blogger, Libraries and Earth) that you can edit and run to help you explore what our APIs have to offer. There are also Save and Export features. The save feature allows you to hold onto an edited sample so you can continue working on it later while export lets you modify a sample and export the code to a sticky URL where it will run by itself.
Since everyone likes to set up their environment differently, I made the three major sections (pick, edit, run) moveable and resizable, and the run section can pop-out to a new window. And what kind of Googler would I be if I didn’t include a search bar to let you find samples by name, tags or category?
At Google we strongly believe in open source, so this code is under an Apache 2.0 license and uses open source libraries and tools: jQuery, jQuery UI, App Engine, YUI Compressor, and CodeMirror. If you want to use the framework to show off your own code samples, please feel free to use it! Adding new demos is simple–find it here on Google Project Hosting and learn about adding samples.
Although most web designers have an idea of how long a project will take based on their past experience, far too often this guess becomes a final estimate. If you’ve ever been 300+ hours into a project that’s paying you for 100, I’m sure you know first hand why this can be a serious problem for a business. Up until now, I’ve used an excel spreadsheet to help me estimate accurately. About a month ago though, it occurred to me that I could make this calculator into a sweet little online tool. I figured it can only lead to more accurate estimates, stronger web businesses, and a better valuation of what we do as designers.
Of course, the fun is tracking how close you come to the estimator :)
SendMeHome lets you to assign a unique code, called a SendMeHome ID, to any physical item. We are launching our newest feature, Stories, which connects a group of people through an item as it travels the globe. Social networks such as Facebook mainly involve users communicating with their ‘friends’, SendMeHome is unique because it uses a real-world object to tell a story that enables interaction between new and like-minded people who may otherwise have never known of each other’s existence.
Our beta users have already created stories to write a collaborative novel, share cooking tips, discuss political events, and even transport a statue to Easter Island.
The site uses GWT components and integrates with services such as good ole Google Maps. You can check out a story. Having a code associated to items is a lot of fun (read: Webkinz) and seems to be something that can be useful.
The Britain from Above BBC programme and website doesn’t seem to use the BBC library Glow but instead has nice Mootools effects on the front page and a jQuery Carousel on sub pages.
The effects made me feel like I was on a Flash site at first, but the real interest is the amazing visualizations that the programme has done.
Christian Effenberger has a Christmas contribution for us, Quickchoice:
Quickchoice is a Speed Dial clone for css transform supporting browsers.
It’s a simple and quick “public domain” implementation of Opera’s Speed Dial.
Currently useable with Safari 3.2 and probably Firefox 3.1 -
through the http-protocol.
For personal use you need to save the html file (save as) and push to
your htdocs folder (localhost) or upload via ftp to your domain!
David King has created a small JavaScript library dlink that styles your links to let the user know if the link is internal, external, a subdomain, an anchor on the same page, or an email link.
I started creating an operating system like user interface in JavaScript. I had intended to use it for the admin sections of my content management system(that runs this website), but through developing it I started to question it's usability and decided to discontinue development.
Features in it's current state:
Start Button
Task Bar - view open windows and set focus/minimize
Windows (Create, move, maximize, minimize, resize, etc.)
Show Desktop on right click
Properties (Theme Color, Text Color, Background Color, Background Image)
Properties saved in cookies for next visit
Still don't know how to create a new window other than a Google one, and I am never quite sure when people will use these (even fully baked). I am sure it will happen, but not until the browser platform has gotten to a point where it actually can. Calling this an "OS" is funny too ;)
Thomas Fuchs and Amy Hoy are back with another web site, this time Freckle, a new take on time tracking.
Thomas posted about it on his site and shared that it uses an early build of scripty2 which lead me to peak around on GitHub. It looks nice indeed.
You can see the evidence of Script.aculo.us throughout the UI. The calendar morphs between months as you flip around. Jumping between headers rolls around nicely (e.g. reporting mode from insertion). Inline modal popups. Nicely done.
I noticed the new iPod Engraving Gallery that is a nice use of Coherent to show a slick UI with engraving suggestions.
I was also talking to a friend that has leopard beta bits and he was playing with an updated Dashcode. It appears that the Coherent library is now used for the widgets too. Yay data binding!
One of the more mesmerizing websites I've worked on recently was for a lingerie boutique in the UK. Aside from the unenviable task of having to look at pictures of women in lingerie all day, I was also forced (forced!) to write a bra size calculator.
The theory behind bra size calculation is arcane and somewhat magical. Understanding of it does not come easily to man nor beast, so it is lucky that I, falling cleanly into neither category, have passed through pain and torment to save you the trouble.
After hours of testing he came up with the BraCalculator:
Damian Wielgosik has created Drawter, a web based tool to layout pages:
Drawter is a tool written in JavaScript and based on jQuery library. It provides you the possibility to literally draw your website's code. It runs on every single web-browser which makes it really useful and helpful. Each tag is presented as a layer you have drawn.
Currently Drawter is available in Pro version, which means that it is intended for webmasters use only - knowledge of HTML and CSS is required.
Drawter is not a tool for laymen, for the time being, but the whole team behind the project is putting every effort to launch a new version called "Amateur". Soon you will be able to draw your websites without any knowledge of HTML or CSS. Launching soon, really soon.
He has a detailed screencast of the tool in action where you see how you can flip between draw and edit modes to build up your page. Nicely done!
Julius Eckert has renamed and relaunched chosr to keyboardr.
keyboardr is a homepage. It speeds up your internet experience. And if you like, it helps you keeping your hands on the keyboard.
In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling of “searching” with the feeling of “launching”.
For the future we have big plans for keyboardr:
keyboardr will utilize much more webservices. Among from usual websearch services like google, we are planning to support friendfeed, delicious, twitter, flickr, google docs and many more. And in the final stage, we will have an extension system, open for any developer, to integrate any webservice into our interface. So keyboardr will be a central station for you to get all your common internet tasks done much faster.
It is a nice showcase of an Ajax and mashup application. I am curious to see if it will get uptake. Having a launcher that lives in a web page may not be enough. In comparison, Ubiquity as an addon can do so much more. You want to do the cool stuff from any page, in any application, and you want to be able to write your own extensions. keyboardr has a good start showing the FriendFeed extension, and with an open API it will be good to see what gets added.
