rgnbgn.de

Twitter Founder Evan Williams on TED

Simon — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 21:42:51 +0000

Evan Williams on TED.com

The guys from TED have posted an interesting presentation by Evan Williams on their blog. Evan is has co-founded several web startups, namely Blogger and Twitter. In his talk, he explains the principle behind twitter and offers some insight in how the service was shaped by its users.

The Video can be seen here: Evan Williams on TED.com

Simple JavaScript Debugging with Blackbird

Simon — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:36:19 +0000

If you, like me, tend to use logging with Firebug or even alert() quite often when developing JavaScript, you might be interested in Blackbird by G. Scott Olson. Blackbird is a simple utility that does nothing apart from displaying log messages and very basic JavaScript performance testing.

Logging JavaScript with Blackbird

Unlike utilities like Firebug or Venkman, Blackbird isn't a browser add-on but just some JS and CSS that you can add to your projects, therefore it can be used in any browser. The tool even works in IE6, what makes it pretty useful for cross-browser debugging.

You can see the tool in action at the project website, it's also a demo by itself. Nice layout idea btw, incuding the tool itself in the design as title artwork.

If you need more than just logging: Firebug lite simulates some features of Firebug and works the same way Blackbird does.

My Thoughts on <head> Conference 2008

Simon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 09:20:38 +0000

Last weekend, a special event took place: The first edition of Conference. In case you haven't heard of it yet - 2008 was a web conference that took place on the web, or as the organizers kept pointing out, everywhere.

Paul Boeg "live" at Conference

There were some local venues, so called "hubs", were attendees could gather to follow the talks. Apart from that, people joined the conference online - both attendees and speakers: Instead of making you come to the web conference, let's make the web conference come to you.

The three-day conference covered a broad range of topics, such as community building, information graphics, etc. but the focus was clearly on web design and (frontend) development.

Content is King: The Speakers

The talks were surprisingly good with virtually no exception. I attended about 15 talks and there were just one or two downfalls. I especially enjoyed the contributions by Richard Rutter, Paul Boag and Robert L. Peters.

Another speaker I found worth mentioning in particular was Rafi Haladjian of Violet (makers of the Nabaztag) who explained Violet's idea of ubiquitous computing. Of course, he was advertising his company's upcoming product mir:ror but it sounded really interesting. Maybe I'll write some more on that later.

Attending a conference on the web.

Due to the lack of a conference hub in Germany, I attended the conference online. Actually, given the small number of hubs, I suppose that's what most attendees did. Staying at home while being able to attend a conference at the same time had it's benefits but also some drawbacks:

(+) No need to travel: Attending an event from home is convenient, environmentally friendly and inexpensive: No hotels, no trains, no flights etc.

(+) Good value for money: The conference tickets were amazingly cheap - just 100 bucks for 3 days and 40 speakers

(+) Recordings available: All talks were being recorded and will be made available on the web. I haven't seen any of the recordings yet, though.

(-) No (real) socializing: For me, using a chat-room on the web is by far no replacement for real socializing and talking shop. Apart from that, discussions during and after the talks worked surprisingly well: No flaming or the like, everyone was in pretty good mood.

(-) The by far biggest drawback: Being at home while attending a conference (at night, on a weekend!) sucks. It was much harder than I had imagined. There were all kinds of distractions, including family, friends, beer etc. that kept me from focusing, and explaining your mates over and over what you are doing at home in front of your computer on Saturday night is kind of tedious.

All things considered, Conference 2008 was a pleasant experience. Kudos to Aral Balkan and everyone else who made it happen. I hope for a 2009 edition.

I took the Survey and so should you!

Simon — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:35:05 +0000

The guys at A List Apart are curious to learn a little more about you. They are calling for developers, designers and everyone else in the industry to answer 58 questions on their educational background, working conditions and a bunch of other topics.

Take the survey at aneventapart.com/webdesignsurvey!

Close to 33,000 web professionals took last year's survey – the results were pretty interesting. The collected data is available to everybody: Apart from a nicely designed PDF you can also download the raw data and use it for whatever you want.

By the way, the German web professionals association WebKrauts did a similar study in January. Although only about 2,800 people took this survey, the results might also be interesting to you if you're working in Germany.

On not blogging

Simon — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 14:12:24 +0000

There wasn't much activity on this blog recently. The reason is that I was quite busy with my Real Life™: I recently relocated to Frankfurt/Main and started working full time for an interactive agency called Syzygy, where I'm designing and developing user interfaces for web applications. Which is a great job, by the way.

Apart from these distractions, I just didn't felt like blogging very much. However, I am going to change that – starting now. See you soon.

Chart-o-matic: Semantic Charting

Simon — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:11:35 +0000

Tonight, I am happy to announce the soon-to-come release of a project I've spend a fair amount of time working on:

Chart-o-matic is a easy-to-use solution for embedding simple charts in web documents. Initially developed as a part of my final year project at university, it will soon be released to the public under BSD-Licence.

What makes Chart-o-matic significantly different from all the other client-side charting libraries is its approach to the visualized information: It takes statistical data that was stored in html tables and turns it into a bar-, line-, or pie-charts. In a way, it does for charts what sIFR does for typography: It preserves the semantics of textual information while still providing a rich graphic experience to the users of modern browsers.

Although it's not completely finished yet, I've put some more Information and a small demonstration of the system together. Have a look at it here: Chart-o-matic project website »

Powerset – Wikipedia meets ELIZA

Simon — Mon, 26 May 2008 20:52:27 +0000

The brand new web-app Powerset is a semantic search engine that aggregates information from Wikipedia as well as other sources. As the search engine understands natural English language to a certain extend, it is able to reply to questions – e.g. if you ask Powerset "Who invented the web?", it will answer "The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989." and point you to a bunch of relevant articles.

Promotional Video by Powerset

On first sight, Powerset might seem like a combination of Wikipedia and the concept of ELIZA ("what is ELIZA?") or todays chatterbots, but it is much more than that. It offers an ass-kicking interface for browsing and searching Wikipedia. The search engine even extends Wikipedia's functionality by generating outlines and linking to further relevant information. It resembles ideas from Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web and is in some ways similar to the knowledge database Freebase (actually, Powerset also aggregates data from Freebase).

Apart from all that, Powerset is a great example of slick interface design and information architecture. Try it yourself: Ready. Powerset. Go.

Laserpower rocken hart!

Simon — Sun, 04 May 2008 22:39:20 +0000

Dieser Tage erschien die erste EP der neuen und heißen mannheimer Band Luis & Laserpower! Das freut mich besonders, da ich daran nicht ganz unbeteiligt war.

Photo: Splashed Wall by Kirk Butterfield (cc)

Interesse geweckt? Den Song "Gib mir mehr!" könnt ihr zur Zeit umsonst bei regioactive runterladen. Außerdem touren Laserpower gerade durch Deutschland. Hingehen! Alle!

Preloader für ActionScript 3

Simon — Fri, 02 May 2008 08:48:09 +0000

Initially I've planned to blog in English, but to be honest, right now I'm a bit too lazy. After all, I'm much more eloquent in German :-). As this topic has been covered elsewhere before, this article is just a summary anyway. If you stumbled upon this page but don't understand German, a good starting point for you is Preloaders in AS3 by Keith Peters.

Für ein kleines AS3-Projekt, an dem ich gerade arbeite, benötige ich einen Preloader. Wie sich herausstellte, ist das gar kein so triviales Problem wie man denken könnte – wenn man nicht mit Flash arbeitet, aber auch auf das Flex-Framework verzichten möchte.

Einen "Preloader" sieht man am Anfang so ziemlich jeder Flash-Applikation: Eine Animation, die den Nutzer bei Laune halten soll, während die eigentlichen Inhalte geladen werden. Jeder, der Erfahrung mit mehr oder weniger ernsthafter ActionScript-Entwicklung in Flash hat, kennt dabei Folgendes: Per Standardeinstellung landen alle Klassen und alle anderen Elemente der Bibliothek, die man erst zur Laufzeit auf die Bühne bringen möchte, im ersten Frame. Diese Assets werden geladen, bevor die Flash-Applikation (inklusive dem eventuell vorhandenem Preloader) angezeigt wird – auf der Bühne ist nichts zu sehen, bevor das erste Frame vollständig geladen wurde. Dieses Problem lässt sich einfach lösen, indem man "Export in first frame" deaktiviert, und eine Instanz der Assets von Hand in einem späteren Frame auf die Bühne zieht. Auch Klassen lassen sich in spätere Frames importieren (siehe "Publish Settings" » "ActionScript-Settings"). Im ersten Frame kann man nun die Zeitleiste anhalten und einen Preloader einfügen.

Linkage Properties in Adobe Flash CS3

Verwendet man nicht die Autorenumgebung von Flash, sondern Flex Builder oder eine alternative IDE, steht keine Zeitleiste zur Verfügung – der oben beschriebene Ansatz ist also nicht umzusetzen. Das Flex-Framework bietet dafür eine komfortable Loader-Komponente, die hier in die Presche springt. In einem reinen ActionScript-Projekt ohne MXML und den ganzen Flex-Kram scheint das ganze aber auf den ersten Blick ein ziemliches Problem zu sein. Also was tun?

Der Ladezustand einer Datei lässt sich überprüfen, indem man EventListener implementiert, die auf Event.COMPLETE und ProgressEvent.PROGRESS reagieren. Da dieser Code erst ausgeführt wird, wenn die Applikation vollständig geladen ist, lässt sich so kein klassischer Preloader realisieren. Es ist allerdings möglich, einen Preloader in eine separate Datei auszulagern, die wiederum die eigentliche Applikation läd und deren Ladezustand anzeigt. Eine so erstellte Anwendung besteht allerding aus mindestens zwei swf-Dateien, was etwas umständlich ist und in manchen Anwendungsbereichen ein Problem darstellen dürfte.

Beim googeln zu diesem Thema bin ich auf einen schon eineinhalb Jahre alten Artikel von Keith Peters gestoßen, in dem dieser beschreibt, wie sich mit Hilfe des undokumentierten Metadata-Tags [Frame] der Hauptteil einer Anwendung in das zweite Frame schieben lässt, während das erste Frame nur den Preloader enthällt. Keiths Variante wirkt erstmal reichlich skurril, funktioniert aber einwandfrei.

Der einzige Nachteil dieser Vorgehensweise ist, dass einer so erstellten Anwendung beim Kompilieren Flex-Komponenten hinzugefügt werden, was die Dateigröße unnötig aufbläst. Wie man Abhilfe für dieses letzte Problem schaffen kann, hat in der Zwischenzeit Sven Busse beschrieben. Seine finale Lösung besteht aus dem oben beschriebenen Ansatz von Keith Peters in Verbindung mit entsprechenden Compiler-Settings.

Hello world!

Simon — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:13:04 +0000

This is the first entry in my brand new blog. Actually, it's my first personal entry in a blog ever.

I'm a (currently) self-employed web developer and I'm planning to write mostly about the things I do for a living: building websites. That said, there might also be posts on web culture and technology in general, as well as the usual personal scribblings.