This purchase is interesting seeing how Plymouth State University, my place of employment, just finished an implementation this summer. With such a large organization backing Zimbra now, it will be interesting how licensing will change over the years. We can always hope that the changes will be minimal…but as always, change is inevitable.

Regardless, the two companies in bed together isn’t too scary of a thought and I look forward to seeing things unfold!

EatPoopUCat is the name of the game. Funny name? Yeah, well this game goes by many. You may know this game as: Fax Machine; The Paper Game; Pictophone; The Picture Sentence Game; The Sentence Game; Paper Telephone; Sentence Picture; Telephone Pictionary; Descriptionary; Writesy Drawsy; Cricket Cricket I’m On Fire; or Moneyduck.

The game works like so: Someone comes up with a sentence or phrase. That phrase goes to another person who draws a picture of the phrase. That picture goes to the next person who writes a phrase to the picture (without seeing the first phrase). Rinse and repeat. The web-based game works the same, you type a phrase in a box and hit submit, or you draw right on the site or upload a picture from your compy. Easy as that! Here’s an example result of a game I participated in:

Phrase 1:For your children, go straight to the wall and jump it like a gazelle

Phrase 2: It was a bright sunny day and kids were playing in the frontyard

Phrase 3: Outside the bar, Phil was roughed up by some plug-uglies who beaned him in the head with a volleyball.

Phrase 4: If the beer and power cords don’t get you, the low flying soccer balls surely will.

Final Phrase:He has 3 choises: Drink 2 Beers, throw Frisbee-pizzas or be a human bridge for the electricity.

It’s pretty cool how the phrases/pictures change as it gets passed from person to person. In addition to the ability to do the above, each ‘story’ can be commented on and rated. Plus, for pictures or interpretations you can give “kudos” to the author/artist. Oh! And as you participate in different threads, you can keep tabs on the statuses of those strips that you have done.

Lastly, for those of you that are Web 2.0 geeks, the site is Ajaxified with a combination of Google Web Toolkit, Amazon S3, and Amazon EC2, along with an in browser drawing utility that uses the Canvas element. Pretty snazzy. I’ve already wasted a great deal of time in the evenings on this site and many more to come!

The web, and the way people engage online, has evolved dramatically over the past decade. We still see a lot of room for the browser to keep pace with everything that’s going on on the web. Providing a fast, safe and simple browsing experience is very important, but at Flock we are also trying to look more broadly at how the web browser can enrich users’ online experience.

For this release, and for at least the next year or so, we are primarily focused on supporting the social dimension of the web, and on bringing information closer to the user. Right now this includes a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.

Casey over at MaisonBisson posted about Flock back in October when the Flock preview first came out (v0.1 or something). I saw Casey’s post and decided to give Flock a whirl. I was mildly impressed and saw that Flock had potential. Its big problems at the time were related to memory leaks and sluggishness. That seems to be resolved and they’ve done wonders to their ‘features.’

Social Bookmarks

Beautiful. Flock lets you use Del.icio.us or Shadows as your bookmarking tool. So anything you bookmark can be accessed from anywhere you go (whether through Flock or at the bookmarking site). Your bookmarks can be tagged right from the browser as well as marked as public or private.

Social Images

Flock integrates with Flickr and Photobucket and a sexy manner. The browser literally becomes an uploading/browsing agent for images. They’ve a nice drag and drop interface with a photo bar that you can place above your tabs. Check it out:

Its slick, intuitive and has many Flickr features (I can’t speak for Photobucket as I do not have an account there).

Text & Misc. Images

Another sexy aspect of Flock is the ability to highlight and drag text and images URLs from anywhere and store them for later. Once you’ve placed something in that Text and Image bar you can browse, drag and drop the data into the browser or external applications. In addition to the dragging and dropping of the data, you can simply right-click the data and select the blog option.

Blogging

Flock being a Web 2.0 browser (as its being toted), it cannot forget blogging. You can set your browser up to post to your blog (using a WYSIWYG editor). You can post to blogs hosted by: WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, and Blogger. The blogging tool supports any blog that uses Moveable Type, Blogger, MetaWebLog, and Atom APIs. Snazzy tool, but I’m happy with the web-based editing of my blogs for now.

News

There’s a nice news aggregator as part of Flock. Looks decent…but I’ll stick to my own home-grown aggregator.

Searching

If you use the browser search tool, Flock goes a step further and as you type it’ll grab items from your history, favorites, and the top five searches from Yahoo!. Pretty sexy stuff. Be sure to add Blingo to your search list!

Extensions

Because Flock is based off of Firefox, many of the extension run for it! So you can still have the must haves. I definately wouldn’t be using Flock otherwise.

Summary

I like Flock for now. It looks promising, the features are nice and it looks pretty sexy too. Get it at Flock.com.

If you haven’t been acquainted with the site, its a wishlist site with a schlew of features. The high point is the ability to secure down lists and grant access to specific buddy groups. I’m pleased to say that we have gained a decent member base in the past 8 months and I am also happy to say that things are going to change around shortly!

MasterWish was built using SAJAX as the tool of choice for Ajax communication but as I’ve mentioned in the past, I am a Prototype convert. My knowledge of Ajax, JSON, and general application structure has been morphing so much in recent weeks that I have held off in completely revamping the wish list site.

Things are changing. I have begun the work to implement the following:

• Creation of more “hackable” Web Service APIs using SOAP and REST
• Representation of data using both XML and JSON
• Ajax powered by Prototype
• Sweet DOM manipulation powered by Script.aculo.us
• Separation of Layout and Logic with event:Selectors
• and of course, we’re already doing: Server-Side Templating for greater separation of Layout and Logic.

Sign up. Stay tuned. Get gifts.

Well, as I’ve been waiting for and S5 editor to come along, Thumbstack has come along instead and I’ll be content goofing around with that for a while. While Thumbstack isn’t built off of the S5 standard, it is a sold web implementation of presentation software complete with a decent draggable presentation builder…themable to boot! (although the available themes are dumb right now, that’s sure to improve). The editor is a div based-DHTML pumped-Ajax integrated layout; the presentation itself seems to be Flash. Interesting stuff.

It shows promise, but there are a few things it lacks that I hope to see:

• More themes
• Slide transitions and animations (nothing too crazy, basic will do fine)
• Export to Powerpoint
• Ctrl+S to save
• While viewing a presentation, right clicking should give a contextual menu.

I’ll be keeping an eye on Thumbstack. Google recently bought Writely, which means they are interested in web-based Office software. They’ve got Gmail, an upcoming Calendar, a Word Processor, and a Webpage Builder. All they need now are solid presentation and spreadsheet applications. The race is on.

The gist of this application is that its a Word Processor online! You can type documents (much like you can with MS Word or OpenOffice.org) through a web interface. The application has an auto-save, hot keys, exporting to HTML and Word, HTML editing and the ability to publish to blogs! Oh, and the sweet part about it…you tag your documents and can distribute them with other users.

Writely is an excellent product and, like most other web 2.0 applications out there, larger companies caught notice. This time, rather than Yahoo acquiring this web 2.0 app like it did Flickr and Del.icio.us; Google made this acquisition. There is now a Google Writely team. Jen Mazzon, a Writely developer posted this on the official Google Blog:

For the last five months, I’ve been part of a Silicon Valley startup called Upstartle, which makes Writely, a collaborative word processor that runs in a web browser. Well, as of Monday, I’m happy to say that I, and the rest of the Writely team, are now part of Google.

The Writely team seems happy with the acquisition (as I would be). Sadly, if you are interested in creating a Writely account, you’ll have to wait until they re-open account registration…which they plan to do once they’ve re-located to Google. The good news? Those that already have accounts will still be able to use them as is. Also those that have existing accounts can still add collaborators to documents despite the closed account creation process. Sexy.

And if you’re curious:

Here are our “top 10″ reasons why being part of Google is fantastic for Writely and the Writely team:

10. Writely is like a caterpillar that we hope to make into a beautiful butterfly at Google!
9. We love Google’s philosophy and values — especially “Focus on the user.”
8. We’re as passionate as Google is about respecting users’ privacy.
7. Many of our users are already Google fans using other Google services.
6. Being at Google will help us do more great things faster.
5. Some people didn’t feel comfortable trusting a tiny startup with their documents…and we’re no longer a tiny startup.
4. We like lava lamps and they’re pretty much standard decor at Google.
3. Three words: Free Googleplex lunches
2. As fun as it’s been to launch a popular, global, 24×7 Web service, it’ll be nice to take a vacation once in a while!
…and the number one reason???
1. We’ll be able to bring Writely to not just thousands but millions of users — the more, the merrier

I can’t see the links show up in Gmail itself yet, but if you go http://mail.google.com/mail/?view=barc you can select which links to show. And when you go to the calendar url (http://www.google.com/cl2/) it gives you the login box, but if you try to login it gives you an invalid request page.

I’ve no clue what Google CL2 has in store, but I’m hoping for something on par with Zimbra‘s integrated calendar. I speculate that it will be hand-in-hand with Gmail, it will be Ajaxified, and I can only hope it has RSS features. Just another sweet tool to be added to Google’s list of services!

The important topics discussed are:

• Web as a Platform
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• Data is the Next Intel Inside
• End of the Software Release Cycle
• Lightweight Programming Models
• Software Above the Level of a Single Device
• Rich User Experiences

Of particular note is the comparison between a Web 1.0/Web 2.0 comparisons:

I did stumble upon some Prototype Cheat Sheets that have helped immensely in exposing functions that existed in Prototype that I had no clue were there. Desipte the exposure of function names, I was at a loss for what some of them did. Luckily, there is an article over at SergioPeriera.com that documents many of those functions! The documentation is fairly solid so I HIGHLY reccommend checking it out. Here’s one of the features of Prototype that I had seen the function but hadn’t a firm understanding on what it did:

Try.these()
Tries a number of functions in order. If the first fails, it attempts the second, and so on.

function getXmlNodeValue(xmlNode){
	return Try.these(
		function() {return xmlNode.text;},
		function() {return xmlNode.textContent;)
		);
}

Hugely cool. In addition, Ajaxian – which seems to be my source for many things Ajax – has pointed me towards this article over at SitePoint. I was aware of a number of the points mentioned in that SitePoint article, but a few stood out as super sexy. Here’s the juicy tidbits:

String.times([something])
Prototype adds a great method to Number, too. Say goodbye to your for loops!

// alerts "1", "2", "3" ... "50"
(50).times(function(n) { alert(n); });

Enumberable.each([something])
This does the same as a foreach in PHP. I’ve been looking for something like this!

// alerts "a is at 0" then "b is at 1" then "c is at 2"
["a", "b", "c"].each(function(item, index) {
 alert(item + " is at " + index);
});

Iterating over childNodes in the DOM
By default, even though nodes are represented in Array-like form, they do not have Enumerable available to them automatically. Here’s how to do it:

// add Enumerable to childNodes
var children = $A($("mydiv").childNodes);

// sets class="highlighted" for all child nodes of "mydiv"
children.each(function(child) {
 child.setAttribute("class", "highlighted");
});

Here’s one I found while digging around in the Prototype code that the article solidified my understanding:

Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater(id,file,options)
Periodically does an Ajax.Updater call!

new Ajax.PeriodicalUpdater("mydiv", "hello.php", {
 // initial number of seconds interval between calls
 frequency : 1,
 decay : 2
});

The decay option allows you to give your server a bit of a break if it’s returning a lot of identical responses. Essentially, every time PeriodicalUpdater makes a request, it compares the results with what the server returned last time. If the values are the same, it multiplies the interval by the decay value. So, for the above example, it would make the next request two seconds later, then four seconds later, and so on, until it received a different result from the server. At that point, the interval would be reset to one second.

Ajax.Responders.register(options)
Register global event handlers that are triggered for each and every AJAX request that happens on the page.

Ajax.Responders.register({
 onCreate : showLoader,
 onComplete : hideLoader
});