jkOnTheRun » Blog Archive Web-based Apps vs. Apps Built on Web Standards «
Have a peek at the above video from iPhoneBuzz that shows an experimental version of Gmail on the iPhone and G1. The application is based on HTML5, a web standard, and works offline with a local database cache.
This is the future.
Google LatLong: 1000 is the new 10
we’ve added a search layer for local search results that activates when there are more relevant results than we can show on one page. Instead of just plotting the first page of business results on our map, we plot more of them as small circles. You can click on the circles to get more information about the businesses they represent. The top ten results will still appear in the left-hand pane and as pins on the map.
Google has definitely taken the lead in every day tasks usability.
Google Pack Comes with Shortcuts for Google Web Apps
If you click on the Gmail shortcut, you have to option to register Gmail as the default mail client.
One step even closer, at least on the Windows platform.
it’s nearly pointless to have scales of 5 stars, 10 stars, or 100 stars, when all you really need is: “Liked it, Didn’t Like It, and Neutral”.
Steven Frank, via Daring Fireball.
Alex Payne — The Problem With Email Clients
Going back to any other email client is agonizing and disorienting, like being knocked around and dumped out of the back of a pickup on the outskirts of a strange town.
I’ll let you guess which client. Great post from Alex Payne; highly, highly recommended.
I started this blog by venting about the mess that was Gmail on the original iPhone immediately post-launch. A year and a half later, this week’s introduction of offline mode through Google Gears removed the last obstacle preventing my move to webmail full time and leaving traditional email clients behind.
And, just when I thought I’ve seen it all in regards to email clients, Google came up with a very thoughtful touch. As seen in the screenshot below, during synchronization, you are shown the date of the oldest message that would be available locally should you stop the sync. Armed with this information, you can decide to wait until sync progresses further or completes; or to disconnect and move on.
I love it.
The secrets of Apple’s growing success. Highly recommended reading.
Digital Arts - Blogs - Digital Arts - The eight secrets that make Apple No 1
(via Core77 Design Blog)
Grrr. Looks like I’ve run into a serious limitation of WordPress, namely the lack of blog aggregation. It turns out you can only have one loop on any given page, therefore you cannot merge two (or more) blogs. Why would you want to do that? To have a sideblog or linkblog. Here’s a good explanation. I’ve been struggling to do this here by stretching the concept of a tumblelog but I’m not too happy with the results. A tumblelog is cool when it’s just that, a tumblelog. But a hybrid where one mixes one liners with 300 words articles - it just feels so …unstructured. Now, I’m all for painlessly making a quick “hey, here’s a cool link” dump into my blog. But what I’m not about is skimping on presentation. Another side effect of hacking this on WP is the need of using categories such as Asides as blog structuring means, which just feels wrong.
Out of what I tried, I am extremely impressed with wp-recent-links, it is almost perfect for what I have in mind. What is left is figuring out how not to intersperse the linkblog entries with regular posts, and to get the recent-links feed to work.
Since it took some research, here’s a quick dump of my del.icio.us links to related WordPress hacks and plugins:
Woot! Joined the Scrybe beta after receiving an email invite yesterday.
Bloglines just announced the launch of Bloglines v3 in a beta open to the public. The announcement reads:
Blogliners we’re proud to introduce a beta of our latest redesign of Bloglines. Our About Beta overview outlines the key features a personalizable home page, 3 reading-views and drag-and-drop foldering in an Ajax interface. We’re inviting you, the Bloglines fans, to the new Bloglines beta in the redesign cycle to provide us feedback. We look forward meeting you in the forums or at conferences to brainstorm on ways to make Bloglines an even better feed reader.
The current Beta is available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers. Of course, the full-featured original Bloglines will still be available during the Beta period.
Enjoy!
- The Bloglines Team
By far the most exciting additions, for me, are the river of news view and abandoning the marking of a feed as read when selected in the feeds panel. I rarely have the time to read through all of a feed’s articles in one sitting therefore I’ve never been able to warm up to Bloglines before.
In the beta reader, you can now navigate through the list of articles Google Reader style, using just the j, k and space keys. J and k scroll down and up, respectively, one article at a time while marking the current article as read. Space seems to be doing double duty - scroll down through a long article and, for short articles, scroll down an entire page while marking all of the page’s articles as read. The scrolling is fluid and good visual feedback is given to the read state of an article. Keyboard shortcuts are available for moving between feeds and for selecting a folder of feeds. One weird omission seems to be the lack of a keyboard shortcut to open an article in a new window or tab. There is a message in the forum asking if this is a bug or just not implemented yet.
The start page, labeled “My Start Page” is basically a page filled with feed gadgets. The page is populated by dragging one or more feeds from the subscriptions list to the page. One or more widgets will be created, each listing the newest five articles in the feed. A “view all” link is provided at the bottom of each gadget. I don’t believe the widgets are resizable at this point in order to display more than just five items. On a 1024 x 768 screen you should be able to fit 4-6 of these boxes before scrolling. The idea is that, upon logging in to Bloglines, you are immediately presented with the feeds you track most.
Unfortunately, the same new start page somewhat breaks the river of news model. The problem is that it also serves as the top of the feeds hierarchy, labeled My Library. In order to bring up all news items in all feeds, sorted with the most recent on top, you need to create a folder and move all feeds into it. You would then select this top folder to start reading, similar to selecting “All items” in Google Reader. Fortunately, the expansion state of the folder is preserved between logins.
The Search function in its default “Find articles” search mode does not seem to perform a search through your own collection of feeds, but rather through all the news articles in all the feeds tracked by Bloglines. The other options are “Find feeds” and “Search the Web”.
A new mobile reader, personalization, the handy Bloglines disposable addresses and an updated API are listed as key future activities. Sharing and link-blog creation and are also listed as upcoming features. This is excellent news!
I will be tracking this beta; so far it seems to be a good step forward to finally create some competition for Google Reader.
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