Cafe Bucky

In the past few years, I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to social networking sites. Perhaps it was the idea of filling out a profile with the same info over and over. Maybe I wasn’t being sociable. It could be that I had so much going on with the web sites I already check out. I do use Flickr and deli.cio.us (and I see the feeds from slashdot and digg)

But I’m about to set foot in that world on a professional level, so I’m going immersive … I’m on a few of the betas out there (such as wink and newsvine).

So, a question: What are your favorite Social Networking/Bookmarking/etc sites?

The demo has been updated, and you can now easily download a copy to check it out.

I just put up a proof of concept/demo of my idea for multiple links and other arbitrary content. The MulTarg (Multiple Targets) demo is at daniel.org/software/multarg.

As a brief recap from yesterday’s posting, I want a general framework for showing arbitrary content off of a link. This goes beyond the idea of “one link, one destination”. Bits of it will find their way into FlexiPhoto, and vice versa (mini galleries within a page off a link? sure!) This will also be a path towards getting my old Sub-Post notion going.

Note that the demo is an early stage, and doesn’t show window decoration, resizing, dragging, and other niceties. It does show two types of data access: via internal JavaScript data, or by XMLHttpRequest calls to the server (AJAX). Oh, and before I forget: any feedback is appreciated (got a better name? any functionality it has to have now, etc?)

I’ve been working on some dom scripting skills lately. A good book for this is DOM Scripting, by Jeremy Keith.

It’s also given me a chance to address something about the web that’s bugged me for a dozen years. What’s that, you say? It’s links! Stinkin’ links! I sometimes want links to give me a choice of target, or to simply give me more detail.

Here’s an example: sometimes people will write “for reference, see this, this, this, and that. It’s a drag, because you need to hover over every link to see where it will go. It’d be better, to say “for reference, see these”, and have the link present multiple options.

Of course, that sounds like putting a menu anywhere. It’s like that, and more. It makes sense some of the time, when you would want to present multiple options, or explain something in more detail. We might also want our information to be obtained dynamically, so that it’s customized to whatever else we have going on with our current web page.

Here’s some sample text with a link:

Let’s click it:

As you can see, the basic idea is a popup div with arbitrary content. The key to making it work is to give each link a unique id, such as id=”example_1”. We would, of course, add a simple means to close the popup. We can easily add images:

The goal is to enable the popup content from two sources:

• from data embedded in JavaScript when the page is delivered (arrays, objects, etc)
• as return value from an XMLHttpRequest call (plain text, JSON, or XML)

I’ll take a step back and explain a few of the puzzle pieces:

• JavaScript, XHTML, etc. to enable all links (or some subset) on a page to call an event handler
• prototype.js, or some other off-the-shelf package, to handle AJAX calls to get dynamic content
• JSON to handle parsing complex content

There’s quite a bit I am not explaining here. When I put up a demo, it’ll become clearer.

p.s. This post was mostly generated via RedCloth. I’m experimenting with Textile to see if it helps me write an entry faster. You can infer that since I’m using RedCloth, I’ve installed Ruby on Rails. This also points to the fact that I’m probably using TextMate. Yep, it’s all true :-) It’s also true that I’ve resurrected my old Perl CLI package, from circa 1992. Stay tuned.

Jeffrey Zeldman tackles the spinners of Web 2.0, and is eager to get on with Web 3.0

I got to Macworld a couple of times this week, and saw the keynote over a stream sometime late Tuesday. The new Intel boxes are great, though it remains to be seen how well the first iteration holds up once they start shipping.

Heat

The MacBook Pro that I saw was a preproduction unit. It runs HOT. I’d say hotter than my 17″ G4. Hopefully they’ll get that addressed in the shipping units.

Evolution

This first Intel iteration doesn’t really look different than the PowerBook. There’s an iSight camera built in, an IR port, and the ExpressCard slot is narrower than the one it replaces. In between that and the “MacBook Pro” lettering replacing “PowerBook G4″, it’s pretty much the same design with some minor tweaks. I get the feeling Apple rushed this one out, in order to deal with a lot of pent up demand. The next revision ought to reveal their true intentions. Hopefully the 12″ and 17″ versions will be out before too long (though I’ve read that Intel doesn’t have enough Core Duo chips to go around, and is making HP and Dell wait in line)

FW800

At first, I was dismayed that the MacBook Pro left off support for Firewire 800. Perhaps that’s because my wife and I have ~8 LaCie FW800 drives between us.

I quickly spoke to a person from firmtek.com at the Apple booth. He was holding an ExpressCard SATA adapter. That’ll be good news for people that want to do external SATA. I told him that he should consider a FW800 adapter. Someone’s got to do it, right?

Dual Layer SuperDrive?

The MacBook Pro doesn’t offer a Dual Layer DVD burner. Apparently they moved from a 12mm thick drive in the PowerBook, to a new one that’s 9mm. It seems like a strange compromise, but the new machine is slightly thinner. I wonder if they’ll skip to an HD or BluRay burner in a laptop in a year or so. On the other hand, I wouldn’t expect anyone to burn something over 10 gb and still have much battery left.

[make that "a few years". CNet has an article about how clunky the large HD DVD players looked at CES.]

iMac Monitor Spanning

Hey, unlike the G5 iMac, the Intel iMac supports monitor spanning, Digital resolutions up to 1920 x 1200. Analog resolutions up to 2045 x 1536.

iMac Memory

The G5 iMac supported up to 2.5gb of RAM. The Intel supports up to 2gb. Interesting…

The EFI Boot Thing

A question floating around is: will the Intel Macs support dual or triple booting? (OS X, Linux, and Windows) Windows XP reportedly wants a BIOS to boot from. Engadget has a blurb about it. My hunch is that the Linux community will solve it first - they’ll quickly come up with a way to get Intel distros running on the MacBook Pro and the new iMac. Why? Well, for no other reason than to beat the Windows people to it :-)

The javascript-driven Pictures On A Page package has been updated (along with the demo) - poap-1.0b4.tgz. It features keyboard commands (’n', ‘p’, arrows, ’s’ for slideshow, ‘1′-’9′ to set delay).

POAP is now usable in Windows MSIE. There are some CSS quirks to iron out. It also should be updated to cache image src locations when calling into FlexiPhoto.

First off, Happy New Year!

I’ll be at Macworld SF next week, at least on Tuesday and another day. I don’t have a conference pass, so I’ll check out the exhibits and get to events to meet people. A couple of events are the TWiT broadcast, and Deb Shadovitz’s Party For The People. Those are on Tuesday. The Netter’s Dinner on Thursday looks like fun.

I’d enjoy meeting up with folks next week at MWSF, particularly if they’re into PHP/web-dev stuff, or photo databases, or splitting things up with Linux (what do you like to run on which platform, etc.) I’d also like to talk to folks that have had success with Ruby on Rails - I’ve read why’s (poignant) guide to ruby [1] and some other Ruby docs, and totally get it. Looks like an excellent thing to learn. If you know of a web-dev gig, check out my resume. If it seems like there could be a good fit, let’s meet up this week, or at MWSF.

[1] which is a bizarre bit of writing, sort of like Hunter Thompson writing a book about cooking. But there is good Ruby info in there.