Network World

Web Applications Alert

Mark Gibbs shares Web site tips and provides advice on getting the most out of your apps.

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PerfectForms: Nearly Perfect: 11/10/09; One of the most common functions of a Web site is to gather data. Building forms absorbs a huge amount of time and energy if you try to do it "old school" by which I mean getting out your Web content editor and wrangling HTML in an attempt to produce an effective form. Making the results look good is even harder.
Better video playback and font viewing: 11/03/09; I'm talking about video freezes – you know what it's like: You're watching the latest cute kitten video on YouTube and the playback pauses for a moment then resumes. Bad enough it does this at all but nope, it does this often, in fact, every few seconds.
Shoeboxed, taking the tedious out of handling receipts and business cards: 10/27/09; There are two tasks in business that are really tedious: Tracking your receipts for expenses and capturing business card data.
Wix; Web sites for even the most daunted: 10/20/09; Building a Web site is, for many people, a task that lies somewhere beyond daunting.
Adobe MAX and Augmented Reality: 10/13/09; There was a lot to be impressed about and one of the technologies getting a lot of attention was augmented reality (AR).
Xmarks, one step closer to having my stuff anywhere: 10/06/09; If you are like me you have multiple PCs that you continually switch between. You have machines that some applications only run on, others with big screens for graphics work, laptops for portability, machines for testing, servers, and then a whole slew of virtual machines.
SealCOS; identifying official brand sites: 09/29/09; Huge numbers of people are now using online Web sites to buy products and services but how do they know whether they are dealing with the actual brand holder or its agent or even some company that is just claiming some kind of relationship with the brand?
Pandora and the future of online music: 09/22/09; You can't have watched the wild ride that the music industry has had since the rise of the Internet without being amazed that the business end of the music world has tried to resist the inevitable for so long. It is a foregone conclusion that the music industry as it was in, say, the nineties is merely history.
Gist, organizing information overload: 09/15/09; The phrase "information overload" has been bandied about since it was first coined by Alvin Tofler in 1970 but the problem of too much information and not enough contextualization and filtering is now really starting to be a big issue. We have email, blogs, microblogs, news feeds, … its hard to keep up with so much "stuff".
Interclue - two exceptional products: 09/08/09; This must have happened to you: You're registering on a Web site or perhaps trying to use a Web form to raise a support request and something goes wrong. Perhaps your browser crashes or you fail to click on the right button and when you return to the form page you've lost the text you were entering. Such things can drive you nuts.
iCyte, Web clipping to the max: 09/01/09; One of the big problems with using the Internet is remembering what you've looked at. Sure, bookmarks can be a great help but often you loose the context of what it was that mattered enough to bookmark because the page contents change and or the bookmark doesn't convey enough information about the contents.
RoamBI for iPhone, not just good, groundbreaking!: 08/25/09; In my career working in the computer world there have been a few products that have stood out as groundbreaking and important. Some were outstanding in their time but their relevance has long since disappeared, for example, Digital Microsystems HiNet, while others, such as Novell's Netware Directory Services, now called eDirectory, (which should have become the leading network directory service but got its lunch eaten by Microsoft's Active Directory) still has relevance and applicability.
Faculte, better pitches with better video: 08/18/09; If you want to pitch something, anything, and you want to get the maximum impact then plain old text isn't going to cut it. Flash? Expensive and complicated. Nope, you're going to want to move to video so you can not only tell but also show as well.
ORCA, S-Commerce, mobile commerce, and u-payments: 08/11/09; My focus for today, ORCA, which stands for "Optimized Real-Time Currency Application", claims to be "the world's first social-commerce (S-Commerce) transaction processing system with an open API architecture designed for social media communities".
The AP and DRM; nothing to see here folks, move along: 08/04/09; The Associated Press recently created quite a stir by announcing that the company is implementing a digital rights management (DRM) system to protect their content from both misuse and unauthorized use.
Looking at online survey systems: 07/28/09; Want to know what percentage of people still think Michael Jackson is guilty as was charged back in 2005 despite the revelations that one of the accusers admitted lying? Maybe you'd like to find out whether the idea of the president having an "Internet kill switch" is a good one? You can, as I did, run a simple survey: I used twtpoll for both the Jackson and Kill Switch questions.
'Net makes getting published easier: 07/21/09; If you want to publish something in book form (what geeks refer to a dead tree delivery) it has traditionally been a complicated and/or expensive proposition. Trying to get a publisher interested can be a huge challenge and for many types of book you need an agent to even be able to get your proposition in front of a publisher at all.
Ifbyphone, a compelling Web-based telephony solution: 07/14/09; Running the phone system for even small companies can be a complicated business if you do it all in-house. Not only are there capex costs to consider (which in these days of tight budgets is probably a topic that you'd rather not think about), there are also potentially serious issues with configuration and scalability.
ZER01, changing the mobile Web game: 07/07/09; The surprisingly quick rise of "netbooks", laptop-style PCs (usually with relatively low processing power) that rely on the Internet to access SaaS-based personal productivity applications, has also created an interesting issues for users: Notably how inadequate most cellular providers' data services are. It is not that they are too slow (although they frequently are marginal when you move away from urban centers or fail to appease the gods of connectivity before accessing the aether) but rather the connections are artificially limited by the terms of service imposed by the cell providers.
Analyzing online content with OpenAmplify: 06/30/09; Making sense of Web content is mostly easy for humans but rarely easy for computers. Part of the issue is that recognizing the "interesting" parts of online content involves what is mostly unstructured data, making the task very difficult.
Opera Unite – Missing the point: 06/23/09; The world of Web browsers is never quiet. Someone is always trying out The Next Great Browser Thing hoping to gain advantage and market share through some, theoretically, unique feature set. Over the last few months we've seen minor new features launched in both Firefox and Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome has taken some big steps forward in stability.
Facebook launches "usernames". Yawn.: 06/16/09; Last Saturday, June 13, Facebook began a new program that allows users to have "vanity" URLs for their Facebook profiles instead of the user-friendly-as-a-cornered-rat URLs that were previously the only option. This means that your profile page URL might have looked like this:
Making Internet communications channels work for you: 06/09/09; Jessica, a friend I know from a mail list, recently complained that "I've been frustrated lately by a few web sites which I wish to follow news on but which inexplicably don't publish an RSS [Really Simple Syndication] feed. I'm trying to find a good way to convince them that it is really worth their time to have a feed, that it will bring them traffic."
Today's focus: Wolfram|Alpha, brilliant but boring: 06/02/09; Last week I pondered the nature of search, what it would mean to have a "better" search, and how when people have to make choices over things like which search service to use they tend to gravitate to that which they are most familiar with unless an alternative has an undeniable edge.
Today's focus: Algorithms and Search: 05/26/09; You could, quite reasonably, argue that more than any other technological advance including microchips, nanotechnology, fiber optics, you name it; computer algorithms are what created the 21st century as we know it.