Get To Business.

A web analytics tool that I stumbled upon through TechCrunch, RobotReplay supposedly records your visitors activity in JavaScript no less, and stores JS videos for later viewing. The idea is very interesting, the implementation still hasn’t caught up.
We’ve signed up, and right now the JS videos do not really represent real user activity (usually for movies clocking at several minutes, you’d see some jerky mouse movements for a couple of seconds and then the movie will end. Where is the rest?)

Should be interesting to follow, if they could actually make it work.

RobotReplay

The standards and requirements of web-based user interfaces have steadily risen in recent years, and heavy use of Javascript and sometimes AJAX is almost unavoidable in modern day web applications. However, developing with Javascript could be similar to pulling teeth - There’s a lot of bleeding and the pain won’t go away for several days (Incidentally, I had a tooth pulled out recently).

Javascript, unlike server-side languages such as PHP, are parsed by the browser, and is browser-dependent in its functionality and debugging process. As fate would have it, all browsers differ from each other in their implementations of Javascript parsing, often times even diverging on different versions of the same browser. And of course, there is also Internet Explorer, whose vile and unspeakable acts of Javascript terror are only surpassed by its level of adherence to Css standards.

For basic usage, plain old Javascript can still make do and create simple user-interface interactions. But when the user-interface requirements are high, and Javascript deployment is massive, other alternatives might be considered.
(more…)

The Web 2.0 concept has been around for a while (coined by O’Reily Media in 2003) and it’s basically synonymous with community driven accessible web sites / web applications.

One of chief characteristics of Web 2.0 websites is the layout. Web 2.0 design pushes for simplicity, with large fonts and a lot of empty real-estate. The use of colorful icons to spice up the design is common. Another common feature of web 2.0 pages is the obsession with Rounded Corners. As most web developers will tell you, Rounded Corners are a thorn in the backside. They look good in photoshop, but when you need to make variable sized containers with rounded corners against gradient backgrounds (another hallmark of web 2.0 design), things get messy.

The Octabox development team has too sinned the rounded path, incorporating rounded corners into most graphical elements, spending countless hours trying to come up with the ultimate solution to make it work against a background gradient pattern, allowing for drag-and-drop rounded corners windows that will look good over any surface and what not.
(more…)

On Sunday, Adam and myself attended a cocktail party for Internet entrepreneurs and bloggers as part of Blogference 2007.
Adam had secured two invitations via the.co.ils, an Israeli blog on Internet and technology.

The first order of business was finding the place, which was more difficult than you might expect. Being that we live in Tel Aviv, where the event was taking place, we actually walked from home to the street that was named on the invitation. However, we were staring at a building with a street #6, and a building with a street #2 which supposedly means we were standing next to #3 which was our destination, but somehow it was not presenting itself. We started walking in some vague general direction, stopping to ask innocent bystanders whom we trusted to know where this building might be, and after a 15 minute walk (!) we found building #3 to be in a completely different area. So much for street numbers and common sense.
(more…)