When I saw the press release on the get Google Social Scene API I thought it sounded mildly interesting but not really compelling. Then I read this from a link on [url]http://www.simplebits.com[/url]: [url]http://bokardo.com/archives/why-im-excited-about-the-google-social-graph-api/[/url]. One of the annoying things about facebook, Myspace, linked-in, gmail, etc. is that all the contact/friend info is separate in each one other then facebook importing email contacts and the like.

If you work on web based UI much, and you're a standards junkie...

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Great GREAT articles there. He just recently posted http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

Got me all excited about HTML 5!

With all the ranting and raving by people (me), about CSS, and simple Html markup. I’ve had quite a few questions similar to “what exactly does that mean?” I’m going to take a few minutes and “decode” where we’re heading with our Html markup and CSS, and what the big drive was for our Frio release.

Always a stickler for UI patterns and consistency, I’ve found another pattern that seems to be repeating a lot…

An object that has a title, a description and optionally a Thumbnail Image and (optionally again) a HighRes image.

So, I had quite a few senarios where I needed to display information that took up a whole lot of real estate, but was only needed for a short period of time. Sort of a "hover help" kinda thing. I googled it for a while, and really wanted a "pure css" solution, but after realizing how much "fussing" with it that was needed for it to actually work in IE6 (even IE7 requires a strict doctype to get the hover pseudo element to work properly on non anchor elements), I decided to just go with a JS solution.

A few of us went to a Microsoft presentation at Cambridge University last night on ASP.NET and AJAX (aka Atlas). It is currently on Beta 2 and should ship by the end of the year.

The presenter recommended taking a look at Scott Guthrie's Blog on ASP.NET and .NET:

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/

There is a lot of interesting stuff there.

Scott is the General Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division. He runs the development teams that build the following products/technologies:

Session:  “The Usability of AJAX: A Primer for Usability Professionals and First Hand Account”

Presenter: John Whalen, Ph.D., Human Factors International

What you need to know

AJAX = A (Asynchronous) + JA (JavaScript) + X (XMLHttpRequest)

One of my major frustrations with web development has been the lack of good testing tools for the user interface. Back at Dell I worked on one tool which we developed using the .net httpRequest objects and some scripts to check the html and step through some pages, but writing tests was entirely too tedious and broke often. Plus it didn't handle client side well.

My next approach was to wrap the DOM in an XPathNavigator. This made the process less error prone since you could do things like //a[text='next'] or //div[@id='contnet'] however the COM overhead made the searches too slow and you ended up adding hints into the document layout to speed up the searches. The advantage with this approach was that you could find and test just about anything on the DOM including javascript events, etc.

Here are a few great AJAX examples that can easily take the place of popup windows.

GreyBox

ThickBox

LeightBox

All are based off the original LightBox technique

If you are a .Net developer, UI or Backend, you should take 18 minutes and check out this presentation by Scott Gunthrie.

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/5/8/85803fdd-fe9a-4783-ab37-e0c565172ffd/asp_net_atlas.wmv

Shoot... If your not a developer, but care about where the web is going and how web based applications behave, you should check it out too!