Yes, we have spoken about this but have not implemented it yet. This gets around the problem of your browser crashing while your connection is down.
Yes.
AJAX auto save will cover 90% than 7% will be covered by cookie save and 3% will be left - as even desktop applications will not recover 100% of data.
I think, as far as you are aware you can always leave a hook to plug it in later release (applicable to me too).
EBay Desktop (beta)
As we touched it before and I am sure you looked at it. What you like or don't like in it?
I understand it is a Flash and it is hard to compare it with HTML but if to touch interfaces.
Will you use it instead of web version?
[quote]EBay Desktop (beta)
I understand it is a Flash and it is hard to compare it with HTML but if to touch interfaces.[/quote]
AIR is a run time environment which Flash apps can run on, this Ebay Desktop application is not necessary built by Flash, could be Flex.
[quote]Will you use it instead of web version?[/quote]
I'm an Ebay addict and I definitely will use this once Ebay release stable version, or I guess i can try this beta version on some non-critical item that I want. However it also depends on interaction time between the desktop client and the server, do you know which protocol the AIR framework use to communicate?
Though by using desktop application, you kinda lost the feeling that you are connected to the world, you are not 'on the net' (using a website). That would have impacts on how people would choose to move to desktop apps base on AIR.
Though I think AIR is definitely the future of web applications, bringing it to the next level.
Sadly, Beta version has HUGE memory leak, i just let it stay in the background, a while after it took up to 300MB of RAM, 0_o …
(Im not bidding anything, just checking out the app)
[quote]Sadly, Beta version has HUGE memory leak, i just let it stay in the background, a while after it took up to 300MB of RAM, 0_o …
(Im not bidding anything, just checking out the app)[/quote]
I am not heavy EBay user but your comments are very valuable. This is what I said before - AIR is a good idea but all will depend on implementation of AIR and application implementation within AIR. My impressions are more interface like ones and I will post them tomorrow on Monday.
Very interesting point of view related to our discussion (AJAX, sandboxes, JavaScript execution speed) - Strategy Letter VI.
Feedback on EBay Desktop (Beta 0.7.024)
[center][/center]
[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 1[/center]
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[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 2[/center][/color]
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[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 3[/center][/color]
This is a line from the article regarding AJAX apps:
[quote]"The developers who ignored performance and blasted ahead adding cool features to their applications will, in the long run, have better applications"[/quote]
I totally agree with the guy on the aspect that applications should be (cool) features rich rather than being optimized, and it's not only applied to web apps, but also to desktop apps. But ofcourse if it can be both then there's no need to say anything.
While web apps performance can be limitted by bandwidth and how quick a response/request is sent, desktop apps is dependant on hardware.
I do think that customers are first attracted by look and feel, plus what they can do with an application, but usually not how it scale, as long as it perform tasks at reasonable speed. Particular examples are windows vista, the office family, etc... Why does people upgrade if they can use office 97 or windows xp to do the same thing? I think it's just look cooler and "supposedly" have more features. I've been using vista for half a year and there's no major features that I can't find in XP. Same thing can be applied for web apps. What do you think?
This is an interesting application using air, tileUI.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qkb6fXnIkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qkb6fXnIkU
This air browser is really cooool…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qkb6fXnIkU
It is true until you release now and your upload and/or execution times are annoyingly slow.
This job is easier at Microsoft as they know what hardware vendors are up to when they plan.
I think if JavaScript applications will advance and load speed or execution time will become an issue vendors will come up with a way to compress JavaScript to deliver it to browser quicker (load time issue) or precompiled version of JavaScript (execution and load time issues) as mentioned in an article.
Another 'perl' from LG - automatic response email containing two TEXTAREAs.
[center][/center]
[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 1 'No Follow' follow email[/center]
Drop Down buttons
Calling this way YahooMail buttons with arrows. It is interesting why there are dots '…' after 'Move' but no '…' after 'Mark'?
For me '…' in UI - nothing will happen, another option will reveal. I vote for 'Mark …' 
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[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 1 YahooMail drop down buttons[/center]
Another interesting discovery by accident - when you click 'Empty' next to 'Bulk' folder in YahooMail it actually clears not what you see in this folder but its content on a server at a time you hit 'Empty' button.
It effectively deletes stuff without you seeing it (everything which arrived to 'Bulk' after you loaded page last time).
[center][/center]
[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 2 YahooMail Empty Bulk concept[/center][/color]
TAF prêt-à-porter
Delay was caused by new type of decease 'new developer's chickenpox' - another prove that we are not Gods but only humans.
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[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 1 TAF with a loaded web server form[/center]
'Preferences' at this stage are used to quickly put system in a different sorts of emergency situations.
We also look now how 'Windows' can be used to create multi window environment within TAF main window with ability to cascade or tile them inside.
It is interesting to be able to create 'linked' windows when you have paginated search results and as soon as you select a record you can see its full view in another 'linked' window.
Than you can click next record and content of linked window changes. This is a different story though but very interesting too as gives a lot more options for interface design still staying within HTML/JS domain.
'Current Status' line below form on Fig 1 - just a debugging output area.
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[color=“#483D8B”][center]Fig 2 TAF Debugging configuration[/center][/color]
URL www: URL to home page of our application - in our case page shown on Fig 1 is index.php
Not exists: as simple as page we do not have on our web server
Timeout page: page containing as much as sleep(999)
Application timeout: here we define for our application for how long to wait a response from web server before actioning as on timeout. Previous page will sleep 999 and here we say '5' seconds and give up (process exception)
New page: this one is to test 401 Unauthorized - page without read access given to it for web server in a . Basically php page which returns 401 in headers (not to bother with actual permissions)
Current test: here we decided to use following system for test cases
1 - timeout, 2 - not found, 3 - unauthorized, 4 - no problems, form is shown on a page
Basically I can start TAF set test to '1' , set timeout to 25 sec, press 'Save' in Preferences and close application. When I start TAF next time I will see rolling Loading … for 25 sec and than system will react saying "Support was notified. Do you want to try again" thing. I will not see my form as it was not loaded from server. Later on on Stage two we will have Preferences window open side by side with application (forms) window and by changing 'Current test' parameter I will be able to put system in any kind of troubles as I like on a fly. Our test programmed to look at what test we are running prior to executing application workflow.
Once everything will be figured out it will be clear what framework will include handling all those scenarios in an independent to application ways. I hope
We wil polish some minor things over weekend and I will put some more screens with tests and explanations if you like.
Have a good weekend!
Golden rule - quality of support and company size are in inverse proportionality (there are rare exceptions I personally know).
Two weeks since I reported their problem to them. Promise was to reply soon.
I was looking for a firmware update.
Page looks exactly the same way today.
[center][img]http://boxstr.com/files/303086_5miwo/lg2.png[/img][/center]
[color="#006400"][center]Fig 1 Screnshot which was sent to LG support 29 Nov 2007[/center]
Inspirational article on support for people managing it.
Google
If to type in Google link:matrix.squiz.net and filter it you will get all your customers including ones running it without support and excluding ones behind firewalls.
It is just because you have matrix.squiz.net as well as www.squiz.net in HTML comments of generated pages.
Filtering using Google search syntax is not possible. I tried ‘links:matrix.squiz.net -site:squiz.net’ - ‘links’ does not work together with ‘site’.
Another interesting thing - it is very easy to block Google analytics to track your browsing sequences by pointing its URL to 127.0.0.1 in your hosts file.
Idea was taken from CustomizeGoogle web site which offers an interesting plugin for Firefox.
[size=1]Ask: If anybody can recommend a free BLOG web site where there is a possibility to load and store images and ideally with ability to use them not only in BLOG posts but anywhere on a Net.
Please PM or email it to me or post it here.[/size]
Thank you
[quote]If to type in Google link:matrix.squiz.net and filter it you will get all your customers including ones running it without support and excluding ones behind firewalls.
It is just because you have matrix.squiz.net as well as www.squiz.net in HTML comments of generated pages.[/quote]
It is because these sites link to us in their footer.
And if they don't there is no way to track your installs with Google?
Stupid on me to think that Google will index URLs within HTML comments.
If you find a way, let me know. I've been trying to see if Google would search in HTML comments and it doesn't appear to.
Google is right - HTML comments are not content. Even if they index it we can't access those indexes.
Thought about - inurl:_edit but again (if I am right) this URL is not accessible by crawlers and will not be indexed.
What about something invisible inside generated pages? Very very small. I guess this won't be appreciated by customers.