SuperWonderBang

Once again, 37signals peers down from their ivory tower and tells us all how we should be doing something. Do they sell software or ego?

This time, Ryan (last name here) decides that he hates lightboxes. Apparently, his eyes are so sensitive that he gets a strobe light effect from just viewing some screenshots. What else would we expect from someone whose applications are perfect in every way.

I could stomach this righteousness if his blog post gave any inkling of solving the problem of displaying screenshots in an attractive way. It doesn’t. He just complains and, I suppose, keeps the secret magic to himself. Instead, we are to infer that a long page which we scroll through to see screenshots is better.

Snark aside, I see benefits to both approaches. If the lightbox is done well, as in it has gallery functions to move through a set of pictures, it has merit. The long scrolling page can be done well as long as there are some good visual cues to separate image and its accompanying text from the next set of image/text.

However, just declaring from the heavens that lightboxes are evil just smacks of the same old 37signals papal decree.

Technorati Tags: 37signals, lightbox, screenshots, pope

Of course not, but I am going to be sharing a link feed from Google Reader the same way he does.

Why would you follow my links? There’s no good answer to that question that doesn’t involve a llama and a slingshot.

Subscribe here: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/10173748285033497033

Technorati Tags: scoble, google reader, rss, link blog, sad imitation, doppelganger

For a project at work, I’ve been diving into the Salesforce.com application framework. It is truly awe-inspiring what they have been able to do.

In addition to building a really powerful and somewhat easy interface into a click-and-build framework for the more technically adept business user, they have created a state-of-the-art SOAP API that offers good security and amazing power. Now, they’ve come out with Apex Code which allows an ever deeper level of integration between your own code/system and your Salesforce applications.

I’m excited about the possibilities of what we can do with Salesforce. I’m looking forward to the internal apps we can build and the really cool stuff we will be able to do for our clients. It’s nice to have a really juicy project to dig into.

Technorati Tags: salesforce, apex code, web services

I noticed that this article on CNN had a really unfortunate ad next to it. The bad part here is that the ad by itself is pretty bad. Paired with this article, it just makes you a little nauseous.

Here’s a shot of the full ad:

Technorati Tags: cnn, oops, bad ads

I received my invite this morning and got all signed up on Pownce. I haven’t done anything with it yet, so my profile is pretty bare.

We’ll see if I stick to this more than I did Twitter.

Technorati Tags: pownce, twitter

I was sick on the 4th of July. No great big deal as I’m not a huge celebrator of holidays, but I was sick the next day, too, which meant I had to work from home. It seems like things are more hectic when I work from home, than if I am at the office. That’s odd to me.

To make me feel a little better, my wife bought me Guitar Hero II for our Xbox 360. I ended up playing until my hands were cramping. I’ve done the same thing tonight and writing this post is much more difficult than it should be. To that end, I’ve been reading up on the possibilities for secure RSS feeds.

We are looking at using RSS feeds at work, not just for basic public information, but for account-specific work as well. It seems that the jury is still out on RSS in the enterprise. Much of it is focused on letting employees access enterprise data. There is little information out there regarding a user of a service authenticating and receiving data in a feed based on who he or she is while also encrypting that data via SSL/TSL.

Most solutions munge some combination of HTTP basic authentication or LDAP or propriety authentication with the industry standard SSL over HTTP. This doesn’t do much if the feed also needs to indicate to the system what data it should return. So, that’s like three levels of interaction.

In addition, we are wanting some of the feed data to be available when the application is not. Things like maintenance feeds or outage updates. These feeds are more “public” in nature but need not rely on our app or database to be accessible to function correctly.

I’ve looked at some offerings from Worklight, Newsgator, Attensa, and KnowNow. I don’t have a good feel yet for which of the products can actually do what I need. In the end, I suspect I will be rolling my own because of some thorny business needs for which these products don’t seem to have built-in answers.

Technorati Tags: rss, enterprise rss, worklight, newsgator, attensa, knownow, secure rss, guitar hero, xbox 360

I’m watching the IRL race on TV today and I see that Joost is sponsoring one of the vehicles. I have been using Joost since the first beta invites were handed out. Even now that it’s in a larger beta, I still can’t figure out why there’s so much great press about it. My major question is: What is there to watch on Joost?

I’ve flipped through every channel and watched a lot of the crap that’s on there and none of it is compelling. It’s all just generic music video style content. It seems like maybe they are only programming for 14-year-old boys. I just don’t see the appeal.

I look at the channel list online at Joost’s website and it seems like most of those channels don’t show up when I actually use the application. Is there some secret here?

UPDATE: Yes, I’m the idiot. I see that you have to go to the “Channel Catalog” and “Add Channel”s to “My Channels.” This seems very counter-intuitive to me. There is a lot more content than I originally thought. The commercials are still amazingly obnoxious.

I recently started using a Mac. I am a huge consumer of RSS feeds and absolutely love Nick Bradbury’s FeedDemon. However, I have been less impressed with NetNewsWire, NewsGator’s Mac feed reader. I tried NetNewsWire first because I can get a good discount as a current FeedDemon owner.

On the recommendation of Marcus, I have proceeded to try Google Reader. This post will grow over the next few days as I dig in.

My first impression is negative because when importing my OPML feed from FeedDemon, the folders, which I have spent lots of time organizing, were not retained. All the feeds were dumped alphabetically into a single folder.

As of the moment, I haven’t moved forward until I can see if this issue can be worked around.

Update: Well, the “Updated” view seems to have solved all the info overload that not having my folders seemed to create. Yes, you can create folders, but it seems better to only show me the feeds which I have updates. If I need to find something I read a while back, I can always do a search or just switch to the “All” view.

It’s growing on me.

Sure, add me and follow the flock.

Me at Twitter

For an ongoing project, I have been tasked to incorporate OpenID authentication. Along with that, I am also to incorporate authentication through Google, Yahoo, and Facebook credentials. Luckily, all of these services have pretty easy and straightforward ways to accomplish this. There is one problem though. It’s the paradox of choice with a dollop of confusion.

The issue lies in the fact that the authentication is also the registration. In other words, logging in can also be signing up if you don”t already have an account. It’s a nice way to do it to save the users from filling out long forms but it can cause problems.

Primarily, if the user uses Google to authenticate on one trip to the site and then Facebook on a subsequent trip, two accounts will be created because there is no definitive way to tie the two accounts together.

Sure, you could create a user in your system and create a password for them and have them use a standard login on your system for subsequent visits. However, that defeats the purpose of the single sign-on authentication service and just means you are duplicating effort.

I have been banging around for ways to handle this and for now, we’ve gone with user education. We tell the user up front to use the same service for every visit otherwise they may create multiple accounts. We also explain what data we can and cannot retrieve from these services.

The site is not launched yet, but it will be interesting to see what the uptake on all of this is. For me, the easiest to code for has been OpenID because it gives the most flexibility from a system perspective and from the end-user perspective.