User Interface Timeline
I always like the Mac interface. Just look at the System 1 interface. So cool even with when it was basically a monochrome interface.
Check out all the different interfaces Windows, Mac, X, Amiga, RiscOS, QNX you name it in the timeline.
XMLHttpRequest
The biggest issue with making web applications based on HTML and web browser was the need to refresh everything whenever something changed. I was looking at the way to update just the stuff that has changed. Just the portion of the HTML page.
Searching for this I ended up with information on remote scripting. You can find the most of this at Remote Scripting - Ashley IT.
However, this is not the method used by Google for its gmail interface. The method they have used is XMLHttpRequest, a Microsoft technology. It has been widely accepted by most browsers. While Internet Explorer implements it using ActiveX, others implement it natively in the browser.
A simple and quick summary is available at Apple site about its implementation in Safari .
I need to look more into this. What needs to be developed is a UI library in Javascript so the browser can be sent commands from server and it can renderer it using DHTML and Javascript in the browser. Well, GMail has it; just need one with a BSD or BSD like license ;).
Firefox as RSS client
Just got the new version of Firefox, Firefox 1.0 Prerelease. The first thing I noticed was the support for syndication. In sites with syndication feed, the browser automatically detects it and shows an RSS icon on the status bar. Clicking on it gives the option of subscribe to it.
What was different is the way it presents this subscribed content. No like a traditional RSS clients, but rather the site comes as a group in the Firefox bookmarks and the entries as items in the bookmark group. Found it quite interesting. I don't think I would have come up with this idea. Qutie novel. Let's see how much I will like it.
Also upgraded the mail client Thunderbird to 0.8. It also supports RSS. Haven't looked at it, but I guess it will be more traditional. The nice feature is though having all the pops go to the same inbox in local folder. However, since I got gmail account and Yahoo! gave 100MB, I am using these more than my shrestha.net.np mail account. May be I will get back to shrestha.net.np account once I have my PDA configured again.
Refactoring Thumbnails
Ever since I started using Eclipse I have been refactoring my code. I think most people don't refactor because a. they can't don't understand it and b. because they don't have a good tool.
Well, here's a site to help you summarise some of the different refactorings with images. http://www.refactoring.be/thumbnails.html .
A Must Read
Dive Into Accessibility by Mark Pilgrim is a must read for any one building websites. Specially websites that are there to provide information like government websites. It is not just about making it accessible to people with disability but to all people in general. The guidelines help make any website more usable and friendlier. An added motivation factor, it makes it friendlier for the search engines too ;)
Continue reading "A Must Read"Unicode Nepali Fonts and Gentoo
I knew that Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya had been working on Unicode and Nepali fonts. I knew they had a version for Linux. What I surprised was finding it in the gentoo.org portage. Wow, all I had to do was emerge nepali-fonts and I had Nepali fonts working in X. Now that was really nice ;) Great!
