“We’ve been working on hard on some new updates for you, and are thrilled to pull the curtain off of a big one — our iPhone app is now completely native! We think you’ll love the faster, smoother, and more responsive Tumblr Dashboard,” they say.

The new “native” experience is a pretty significant rebuild, as Tumblr abandons web views. They say that this shift will make the user experience more responsive, and on first impressions they are right.

Here’s a full list of the updates the shipped along with version 3.2:

• Redesigned dashboard — enjoy bigger photos and faster post loading.
• Spiffy new notification previews so you can see exactly which posts were liked, reblogged, or replied to!
• GIFs now play automatically on your Dashboard! Slide your finger across a GIF to view frame by frame.
• New gestures — swipe right on any screen to go back to the previous view; long tap photos, links, tags, and post headers for more options.
• Brand new blog screens with blog portraits and descriptions.

Last month, Tumblr launched their spiffy Photoset app for iOS, allowing users and non-users to create their own photosets quickly and easily. Android is still waiting on its version of the new Photoset app, but they did get some improvements to their Tumblr app a couple of weeks ago.

You can grab the new Tumblr app today on iTunes.

“Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop experience,” said the company in the Mozilla Labs blog post. “Web developers don’t have to target it separately, because any application that can run in a modern standards-compliant web browser can run in Prism.”

We gave it a try, installing and launching it without difficulty. A dialog box asks for a web application’s URL, and a name you want to assign to it.

We threw Prism a curveball by adding Yahoo Mail, which promptly complained that it didn’t support the browser we were trying to use. Google Reader worked perfectly, just as it does in Firefox.

Which it should, since Prism creates a dedicated browser window for that application. As one commenter noted on the blog, it’s a Chrome-less popup window.

Since Prism is an early stage product, and unlike the full Firefox browser doesn’t support a web application like Yahoo Mail, Prism isn’t better than a bookmark on Firefox today. How Mozilla chooses to develop Prism will determine its usefulness over later versions.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a laptop to do any Live Blog coverage like I would have liked to so instead I took what notes I could on paper and took plenty of photos along with a couple of videos.

Mashup* Demo Event – Day Before FOWA

First up let me tell you about the Mashup* Demo event, In running order the following companies demoed, yes they only had 5 minutes to demo, this made sure they got to the point of why we should try out their site/service/product etc and why investors should invest in them:

3.30pm – Serena Software
3.35pm – Mobestar
3.40pm – 15 Second TV
3.45pm – BabelTV
3.50pm – WeLoveLocal.com
3.55pm – Rummble
4.00pm – Magpie
4.05pm – Inspire
4.10pm – Bondaii
4.15pm – Meecard
4.20pm – Serena Software
4.25pm – Rollsense
4.30pm – Fav.or.it
4.35pm – Kwiqq
4.40pm – Tipped
4.45pm – testcard.tv

I have yet to test fully every site/service/product on this list; however I hope to do very soon. The venue it’s self was great and I had some interesting talks with people such as James Dyer (TestCard.Tv) and Dominik Grolimund, Co-Founder and CEO of Caleido who has created Wuala, which is a new way of storing, sharing, and publishing files on the internet.

I would however like to make some suggestions for improvements, mainly on the after party hosted by Blognation, as part of their UK Launch of Blognation. Me and a few others agreed that some music would have been nice to go along with that disco ball they Club had, along with some food/nibbles as it was dinner time by then…

Other than that it was pretty good, I’ll be sure to be checking out each and every site/service/product in more detail. By the way Richard Brooks (Managing Director of The 100 Year Website) where were you – someone said they talked to you but we couldn’t find you again – hope you had a good time and that my invite for you to come was worthwhile!

The Future of Web Apps Conference and Expo (FOWA) – Day 1

Ok now let me tell you a little lot about The FOWA Conference and Expo.

Welcome from Brian Oberkirch & Simon Willison, the FOWA Conference Chairs
We were first welcomed by Brian Oberkirch & Simon Willison, the FOWA Conference Chairs, along with Ryan Carson, co-founder of Carsonified (Carson Systems), they gave us a quick talk on what we could expect over the next 2 to 3 days at FOWA.

What is the Future of Web Apps? We Discuss! – Om Malik, (GigaOM) & Michael Arrington (TechCrunch)
After this brief welcome to FOWA there was a discussion between Ryan Carson, Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, Inc and Michael Arrington, serial entrepreneur and operator of TechCrunch. In this talk they talked a about how web apps are changing the web and how we can benefit from them.

10 Real-world Apps That Represent The Future of Web Apps – Ben Forsaith (Adobe)
10 Real-world Apps That Represent The Future of Web Apps was a fast pace session presented by Ben Forsaith (Andrew Shorten), product specialist with Adobe UK, in which he demoed 10 Web Apps that were using Adobe technology such as Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)

High Performance Websites – Steve Souders (Yahoo!)
High Performance Websites was the first developer track session of the day, and was presented by Steve Souders, who works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Examples of High Performance Websites (Comparisons)
• Importance of the backend
• Memory Cache
• iFrames
• YSlow

The Future of Search – Tony Conrad (Sphere)
The Future of Search was the second business/entrepreneur session of the day, and was presented by Tony Conrad, who is a Venture capitalist turned entrepreneur who co-founded Sphere (previously Yodel Search).

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Sphere past/present/future
• Sphere Widgets (as seen on popular sites like the New York Times, Pop Sugar, TechCrunch, Cool Hunting, All Things D, TIME, AOL News, GigaOM, Wall Street Journal, Access Hollywood, Captains Quarters, ZDNet, O’Reilly Radar and many more)
• BlogBurst

The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites – Robin Christopherson (AbilityNet)
The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites was the second business/entrepreneur session of the day, and was presented by Robin Christopherson, who despite being blind, uses a computer very effectively by relying on speech output to access the full range of mainstream software including email and the internet. So he has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web design practice to accessibility, which is great for AbilityNet’s Web Consultancy services which he manages.

In his talk he talked about how over 90% of sites are still illegal because they do not meet the required accessibility standards and how sites which are accessibility friendly are really easy to use for people who are vision impaired.

*Lunch Break*
It’s Lunch Time, so I took a walk around the ExCeL Building and the FOWA Expo Hall.

How User Feedback can Influences Design – Daniel Burka (digg / Pownce)
How User Feedback can Influences Design was the third developer session of the day, and was presented by Daniel Burka, who is the creative director at Digg and is one of the cofounders of Pownce.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Gathering User Feedback
• Reacting to Feedback
• Are the changes worth it?
• Creating user feedback communities.
• Anticipating areas of friction.
• Digg Images “Digg Images: A dedicated images section (with thumbnails). Still on track to launch in late October. – Kevin Rose “

The Architecture Behind WordPress.com – Matt Mullenweg (WordPress)
The Architecture Behind WordPress.com was the fourth developer session of the day, and was presented by Matt Mullenweg, who is best known as the founding developer of WordPress, the blogging software tool.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• WordPress
• WordPress MU
• WordPress.com VIP Hosting
• Wordcamp
• Equalities to look for when hiring people (e.g. Personalities, Ability to learn, Taste, Passion for space, Familiarity with Technologies etc)

Building a Community (Creating and Running Communites) – Matthew Haughey (MetaFilter)
Building a Community was the fifth developer session of the day, and was presented by Matthew Haughey, who is best known as the founder of the community weblog MetaFilter, where he is known as mathowie.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Building a community
• Community growth
• Build for yourself first / Eat your own dogfood
• Use Guidelines not Rules in communities
• Tailor to community norms
• Every community suffers a revolute eventually
• Ways to avoid community disasters (e.g. Be transparent, honest, responsive. Have a dedicated place to talk about the site/product etc. Explain why you made changes.)
• Always acknowledge your mistakes
• And last of all remember to find out what’s illegal and where?

Taking Your Application Mobile – Heidi Pollock (BluePulse)
Taking Your Application Mobile was the sixth developer session of the day, and was presented by Heidi Pollock, who having left Yahoo! Mobile, started to work as a contractor for Twitter and then more recently started work for the Australian start-up, Bluepulse, fulltime.

In her talk, she talked about some of the following points:

• Bluepulse
• Firefox Extensions
• Developing Mobile Web Sites for Mobile Phones.
• Optimising Web Sites for Mobile Phones.
• Mobile Acid Test (http://jwtmp.com/a)

The Future of Firefox and JavaScript – John Resig (Mozilla Corporation)
The Future of Firefox and JavaScript was the seventh developer session of the day, and was presented by John Resig, who is a programmer working for the Mozilla Corporation. As well as being a programmer for Mozilla, he is also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. He is also the author of the book ‘Pro Javascript Techniques.’ And is currently located in Cambridge, MA.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• The Future of Mozilla Fireox
• SVG/Canvas 3D
• OpenGL in Browsers
• <video></video> and <audio></audio> Tags etc..

7 Things You Probably Don’t Know About That You Can Use in Your Future Web Apps – Mark Quirk & Jon Harris (Microsoft)
This session was presented by Mark Quirk who joined Microsoft UK in 1992 as a senior support engineer for Microsoft development tools and is now the product manager responsible for Visual Studio and web development at Microsoft UK.  And also by Jon Harris who used to work for Macromedia but is now a Microsoft User Experience Evangelist.

• In their talk, they talked about some of the following points:
• Microsoft Visual Earth (Interactive SDK)
• PopFly
• Microsoft Codename Astoria (http://astoria.mslivelabs.com/ and http://astoria.sandbox.live.com/)
• Microsoft Live Labs Seadragon (http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx)
• Windows Live and Silverlight

Lessons Learned From Launching Digg & Pownce – Kevin Rose (digg / Pownce)
Kevin Rose was up next for this last session of the day
In his talk he talked about some of the following points:

• Saving Money
• Making Money
• Digg 1.0
• Digg past, present and future.
• Scaling
• Chilling Effects
• Hosting

Live Filming of Diggnation @ FOWA London
What can I say about it – The Live Filming of Diggnation with Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht was more than awesome! The place was packed out with people wanting to watch the show – The Crowd went wild – And I had a front row side seat!

Watch Diggnation Episode 118 London Here.

Carsonified Relaunch Party @ FOX@ExCeL
Yet more fun, a big thanks goes to both Kevin and Alex for allowing people to take photos with them!

Me and Kevin Rose!

Me, Kevin Bing (uni student) and Alex Albrecht

The Future of Web Apps Conference and Expo (FOWA) – Day 2

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) continues on Day 2…

Developer Stage: Welcome from Brian Oberkirch & Simon Willison, the FOWA conference chairs

The Future of Web Startups  – Paul Graham (Y Combinator)
The Future of Web Startups was presented by Paul Graham, who is the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004).

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• About Startups
• Let the market design the product
• However many acquisitions Google does Microsoft should do x10.
• Do we still need Silicon Valley?
• Do Startup Founders Need Degrees?
• Will Colleges and Universities change?

Predicting The Future of Web Apps – Edwin Aoki (AOL)
Predicting The Future of Web Apps was presented by Edwin Aoki, Chief Architect AOL.
In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Edwin’s Near Term Industry Predictions:
  • A new industry group to develop standards for building web apps and content for low-cost, reduced capability devices
  • Aol to announce a major push for html and javascript apps on the desktop
  • new mobile computing device with a modem os and open deve platform.

• All of the above came true 10 years ago:
  • The Network Computer Reference Platform – 1996 Sun, IBM, Apple Replace Network with Mobile
  • Netscape Crossware 0 1997 apps build on javea javascript & html
  • AT&T/EO Communicator – 1994 – touch screen, handwriting recognition, live object embed, 33.6 kbps fax and data modem

• Technology evolves, impetus the same
• Build on Solid, Tested Foundations:
  • Storage – AOL Xdrive, Amazon S3
  • Message & Data Exchange – XMPP, JSON & REST based APIs to Open AIM
  • Publishing & Commenting – Atom
  • Idenity – Open ID, Open Auth

• Web apps of the future need to run everywhere.
• Learning from our past:
  • Small & beautiful beats large and clunky
  • Sweat the details, but don’t sweat infrastructure
  • Let the service provides do the heavy lifting for you
  • Standards and openness are important
  • But employ with an eye towards security and trust
  • Technology moves faster than society
  • It’s up to us to use it responsibly

• We won’t need a Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Anymore, instead we will have a Future of Web Stuff (FOWS) or just Future of Stuff (FOS) – 5/10 years from now!

Web app do’s and don’ts – Practical lessons we learned – Leah Culver (Pownce)
Web app do’s and don’ts – Practical lessons we learned Predicting was the first developer session of the day, and was presented by Leah Culver who is currently best known for founding Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka as a way of sending messages, links, files and events to each other.

In her talk, she talked about some of the following points:

•  Thinking about technology choices
• We could pick anything – made from scratch
• Social as well as technological reasons factored into our decisions
• Took risks to work with newer technologies
• Why Django?
  • Django is a Python web framework
  • Yah! Web frameworks!
  • Documentation and readability
  • Auto-generated admin

• Why S3?

  • Amazon’s Simple Storage Service
  • Pownce files are stored on S3
  • Less maintenance for Pownce
  • Inexpensive

• Why Air?
  • Adobe Integrated Runtime
  • Works on both PC and Mac
  • Easy to develop
  • Encourages good UI

• Do a lot with a little
  • Pownce has a tiny team
  • One website developer
  • Self-funded
  • Short deadline

• Small Teams – we wear many shoes
  • Multiple roles
  • Learn quickly – I have had to learn a lot about everything
  • Dedicated

•  Open Source Tools
  • Plenty of web application help
  • Someone has solved this problem before
  • … and they’re probably smarter than me
  • Lots of tools available

• Use your Resources
  • Get some help
  • Documentation websites
  • IRC
  • Network and learn from friends
  • Exchange knowledge with other sites

• Be kind to your database
  • Pownce’s databse is its main bottleneck
  • One MySql database – a bit embarrassed about, not a dba
  • REsponding quickly to slow querie

• Caching – I’ve already done that
  • Memcached
  • Caching at page and object/list level
  • Cached our static pages since launch

• Queuing – I’ll do that later
  • Taking a shorter note of a longer process to do later
  • We send notes via a job queue
  • Need to improve our queuing system

• Limits and Pagination – I don’t need to do all of that
  • Notes list, friends list, recipicient list
  • Good user interface as well

• Index – I’ll mark that
  • How would I search, set up database

• Avoid Complexity: I won’t make the db do that
  • Some queries are just to complicated for a new web app
  • Consider if they’re actually needed
  • Usually good to avoid abstract or conceptual data display

• Expect Anything
  • Young sites can run into many problems
  • Need to respond quickly
  • Can’t prepare for everything – stuff with come out of hte blue
  • Every web app is different

• Keep Backups – because stuff happens
  • Use version control
  • Have a system to revert to code changes
  • Tract dependencies and updates made
  • If developing locally, backup personal

• Duly Noted – Keep lots of data
  • Stats to monitor
  • Quantitative data

• Community – Keep in touch with your community
  • Let users know what you are doing
  • Respond to bug reports
  • Inform users of bug fixes and new features

• Friendships Matter – Social sites are all about friends
  • Strive to make it easy to establish, maintain or break relationships
  • Accurately represent user relationships

• Prepare to Scale UP – It’s a good problem to have
  • Don’t prematurely optimize
  • … unless you work with Kevin Rose
  • Design for success
  • Accept that your code will change 

Thanks goes to Jenifer Hanen for the gap filling – check out her post here!

The Story Behind The Facebook Platform – Dave Morin (Facebook)
The Story Behind The Facebook Platform was the second developer session of the day, and was presented by Dave Morin who is the Senior Platform Manager at Facebook where he leads platform strategy and community

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Amount of active users on Facebook (43 Million)
• Amount page views on Facebook (60 Billion)
• Amount of people who have added an application – 80% of users
• The Social Graph
• Facebook Photos (Built in a week)
• Facebook Events (Built in a night)
• Developing for Facebook
• Generating Revenue

Preparing for Enterprise Adoption (The Future Of Blogging) – Suw Charman (suw.org.uk)
Preparing for Enterprise Adoption was the third business/entrepreneur session of the day, and was presented by who Suw Charman, a social software consultant and writer who specialises in the use of blogs and wikis behind the firewall. Suw is also founder and board member of the Open Rights Group, a digital rights advocacy group which aims to raise awareness of digital rights issues, to campaign against bad legislation in Britain and the EU, and to support grass roots activism.

In her talk, she talked about some of the following points:

• Getting products out
• Getting your products bought
• Finding out what business want from your products and services.
• Supporting your products and services.

*Lunch Break*
It’s Lunch Time on Day 2, so I thought id go outside down by the water to take some photos.

On the ExCeL Victoria Dock Bridge I witnessed the filming of a film/movie/soap/drama/documentary… ehhh… no idea what it was but we were not aloud to cross the bridge until they were finished and as we were approaching we were told to be quite! I heard one of the actors say “Dial 999″ quite loud….

Click on this photo and Zoom in and you’ll notice they are still up there

Putting Users First – Thomas Vander Wal (InfoCloud Solutions)
Putting Users First was the fourth business/entrepreneur session of the day, and was presented by Thomas Vander Wal, who is the The Principal and Senior Consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, Vander Wal is an information architect best known for coining the term “folksonomy.” He’s also known for initiating the term “infocloud”. His works has been with the Web and with information design and structure.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Focusing on real people
• Tagging
• Folksonomy
• Magnolia
• Stikkit

Next Generation Visualisations – Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design)
Next Generation Visualisations was the fith business/entrepreneur session of the day, and was presented by Eric Rodenbeck, Stamen’s founder and creative director. He is a 10-year veteran of the interactive design field, and has spent this time working to extend the boundaries of online media and live information visualization.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Visualization
• Visualising Data
• Visualisation is a media
• http://cabspotting.org/
• http://oakland.crimespotting.org/
• Modest Maps
• Digg Labs (Arc, BigSpy, Stack, Swarm)
• Twitter Blocks
• Stamen.com

Comet: Making the Web a 2-Way Medium – Joe Walker (DWR)
Comet: Making the Web a 2-Way Medium was the sixth developer session of the day, and was presented by Joe Walker, a developer and consultant working on advanced web development techniques like AJAX. He recently developed Direct Web Remoting, (DWR) which has become one of the most popular Ajax toolkits for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for web developers. See www.drectwebremoting.com. He currently works through his consultancy, Getahead (http://getahead.org/), which is supplying a growing number of customers with AJAX and advanced web solutions.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• Comet and Examples using it
• SessionRater (http://www.webtide.com/sessionRater/)
• Polar Rose

An Insight to FireEagle – Tom Coates (Yahoo!)
An Insight to FireEagle was the seventh developer session of the day, and was presented by Tom Coates, who works for Yahoo Brickhouse where he develops new concepts in social software, future media and the web of data. He focuses on the shape of the web to come and how to make things that thrive as part of it. He’s worked for many of the UK’s most prominent web companies including Time Out, UpMyStreet and the BBC where he ran a small near-term R&D team for the BBC exploring media navigation, annotation and distribution. A regular speaker at conferences including ETech, XTech, IASummit and The Future of Web Apps, Tom also writes extensively at plasticbag.org as well as running the experimental online community barbelith.com.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• FireEagle (won’t be called this when released out of Beta)
• Applications that could use FireEagle
• Twitter Maps

Air – Next Generation Development – Ben Forsaith (Adobe)
Air – Next Generation Development was the eighth developer session of the day, and was presented by Ben Forsaith, product specialist with Adobe UK.

In his talk, he talked about some of the following points:

• What is Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime)
• Building your first Adobe AIR Application
• Aptana IDE
• Adobe Flex
• Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com)
• onAIR (http://onair.adobe.com/)

Best Tips & Screw Ups – Panel of FOWA speakers
This last session of the day was a discussion talk between Ryan Carson, Kevin Lawver, Lane Becker, Rashmi , Dick , Ted Rheingold, Simon Willison and Brian Oberkirch.

Check out all My Photos on My Flick Set!

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"Google Gears Grind Out Web Apps"

Google wrapped up its Developer Day in Sydney, Australia, with a handful of announcements. One of them will help make its many applications available to people who are temporarily without a web connection, like business travelers.

"Unfortunately, today’s web browsers lack some fundamental building blocks necessary to make offline web applications a reality," Google’s Aaron Boodman and Erik Arvidsson said in their post on the new Google Gears blog.

"In other words, we found we needed to add a few new gears to the web machinery before we could get our apps to run offline," they said of Google Gears. "It adds just enough to AJAX to make current web applications work offline."

The browser extension will work with any Gears-enabled application. Though Google is working with Adobe, as well as browser makers Mozilla and Opera, Gears sounds like a project that will compete with Adobe Apollo.

Three core modules for Gears have been released: LocalServer, Database, and WorkerPool. "Gears today covers what we think is the minimal set of primitives required for offline apps," said Boodman and Arvidsson.

One of the first projects for Google Gears is a new version of the Google Reader for RSS feeds. The comapny’s Chris Wetherell talked about that on the Google Reader blog:

Once you’ve installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they’re available even when you don’t have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the “Offline” link in the top right of Google Reader.

We gave the offline reader option a try on one of our machines, and noticed one immediate improvement the offline experience has over the online one. It’s a heck of a lot faster in performance working with those 2,000 items locally, rather than waiting for Reader to churn through the next 60 items in the Boing Boing feed.

Google Gears only grabbed the text from the feeds, though. No images or videos offline. That certainly helps the download speed in getting feeds into the Gears database, but in the case of feeds like Boing Boing’s it really kills the more interesting parts of many of their posts.

In our product Headlight we use a lot of create flows (here’s an example) that are built using tables with 3 columns. The two first are somewhat static text and the third can be any kind of HTML and ASP.NET controls.

It’s a pretty standard way of building create flows and it works even better with custom controls. This is the code used to create the table above:

You can also add create flow items programmatically like the following example where a hyperlink is added:

That’s a pretty easy and uniform way of building them and the best part is, that when something is changed, it applies to all the different create flows – and we use a lot of them. Even though it is not the exact implementation we use in Headlight, it is very similar but also simpler.

This is the source code for the CreateFlow and CreateFlowItem. Just put it in the App_Code folder or a custom control assembly if you prefer.

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CreateFlowTemplate.zip (0,52 KB)

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

Titus Hoskins wrote a neat post describing his top 10 list which included:

- Google Analytics

- Google Sitemaps

- Google Alerts

- Google Froogle

- Google Checkout

- Google Blogger

- Google Toolbar

- Google Groups- Google AdSense

- Google Writely

This list includes tools I use ALL the time. Google Analytics, Blogger and Toolbar are ones I use multiple times throughout the day. I also use Sitemaps, Adsense and Groups very frequently. A few things that would probably make my list would include Google Maps and who can forget Gmail. I think I use Gmail more than my Yahoo and Hotmail account now (why wouldn’t I? It’s so quick and user friendly).

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Manoj has been working in the search engine marketing industry since 2002. He started out as a software developer but now provides in-depth web site analysis using web analytics.

http://www.enquiro.com

Manoj is also the author of Web Analytics World. Web Analytics is an essential component in developing a successful
online campaign. Help convert visitors into customers by understanding
them.

Fortunately, Google is prepared for such events.

One of the nuggets that I think folks will take away from his talk was that software-as-a-service – SaaS – allows companies to focus on business and not on infrastructure.

Instead of having to focus on the technology – installing, maintaining, etc. – they can use hosted services that just work.

Going back to 1997, he spoke about initial user testing of Google, “Users just sat therethey were still waiting for the page to load.”

But Rajen’s point is that simple (especially a simple interface) does not infer simplicity.

Google is close to building a full office suitethat exists totally on the web. Rajen spoke to the fact that Google actually uses its own technology – search, online apps like Gmail and Blogger, and otherwise – to run its intranet:

I have 42,000 e-mails in my inboxusing 3 GB of spaceI never delete themI can access e-mails from several years ago. I have 100,00 documents on my laptop.

Search as a navigation paradigm was definitely harped on, and that makes sense, coming from Google.

The sheer number of data Rajen has in his inbox and on his laptop are only possible with search.

Some interesting stats, which is probably why Google has focused on building Google Apps for Your Domain: 33% of businesses use an ASP (think SalesForce.com) and 22% will do so in the next two years.

Hosted (or “ASP”) services make sense for businesses, especially for small businesses.

Considering the sheer number of them out there, Google, SalesForce, thinkfree, and others are likely going to have growing user bases.

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Ken Yarmosh is a consultant who helps organizations get the most out of their technology investments. He works with technology users and creators across various industries, focusing on technology education and strategy. With over 7 years IT experience, Ken has worked with small businesses, non-profits, federal agencies, and multi-million dollar companies.

His online efforts include acting as the Editor for the Corante Technology Hub and authoring the TECHNOSIGHT blog.

Tapestry is one of the Apache Software Foundation’s many useful projects. Apache’s work goes well beyond its signature web server and the vaunted mod_perl module, and Tapestry is one example.

Developers who have been in the web game for several years likely have worked with Java at some point. Java Servlets offer a lot of power for web applications, and companies like BEA and IBM have crafted Java frameworks for various implementations.

Tapestry picked up the Open Source award at the most recent JavaOne. The judges cited its ability to work with any servlet container or application server as a strength of the project.

For application development, Tapestry noted it brings true object-oriented development to Java web applications. Each web application gets divided into a set of web pages, each of which is constructed from components. The project described more about this:

The Tapestry approach resembles the concepts we covered in Computer Programming As Art. Four principles comprise the keys to the project: simplicity, consistency, efficiency, and feedback. Think of efficiency as high cohesion, consistency as low coupling, and simplicity and feedback as conceptual integrity here.

Presently, Tapestry 4.0.2 is the most current stable release. A snapshot of 4.1 may be downloaded, and Tapestry creator Howard Lewis Ship is at work on version 5. Developers who work in Eclipse may obtain a plugin for Tapestry from the Spindle project.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Search Engine Watch has a more complete exploration of the patents and Google Blogoscoped has put together a nifty direct link list to the applications. For our purposes, we’ll do a quick summary.

The paten applications involve:

1. Factors to determine if an advertisement matches the content of a page, which include user behavior – whether ads are clicked, the length of time a user stays, and if there are conversions.

2. Aiding advertisers to better target ads by broadening the scope of targeting information used. This includes concept keywords, and an incorporation of cost per selection and cost per conversion.

3. A method for personalizing traffic and transportation routing over a wireless device.

4. Optimizing ad layouts, from size, fonts, and congestion.

5. Automated advertisement approval, comparing ads with ad policies on various online ad servers, and suggestions if ad is not approved.

6. Location-specific advertising and the incorporation of contact information.

7. A system for determining how authoritative a web document is.

8. Analysis of white space as a visual indicator of content segments.

9. Indexing multiple geographic identifiers on a page and determining a set of relevant surrounding geographies.

10. Collecting ambiguous geographic references, though the exact location may not be identified, and determining the location from clues on the page.

11. A system to determine if general web results should be returned or local search results.

12. A system for matching addresses with business information and assigning confidence scores based on the information on the webpage to return local item information.

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Many applications that once belonged to the desktop are now running on the web – email, banking, calendars and scheduling applications are common place. We now even have web based word processors, such as Google Write. Many business applications are also moving to the web, and businesses are realising the benefits of subscription based services and centralised support and are running their sales order processing, invoicing and payroll systems on web technology. Many companies are using web technology in-house to support their enterprise, and users are now using applications running within their web browser, rather than traditional desktop applications.

Traditional scripting languages, batch tools and automation solutions are inadequate for automating these new web based applications. Macro recorders and automation solutions which automate desktop applications by simulating user activity are incapable of driving web browser based functionality primarily because web sites and web applications are dynamic. Not only do they change frequently due to a single centralised source, but objects don’t necessarily always appear in the same relative position on the page. Web pages can be resized, moved and scrolled up and down. A new approach to scripting web sites and web applications is required.

Fortunately Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser provides a scripting interface and a Document Object Model (DOM). The Document Object Model exposes all the tags and attributes of all the elements beneath the page. Via the scripting interface the properties and methods of these elements can be modified. So, for example, links can be “clicked” and form elements can be filled in and submitted. So scripts and programs can be written to automate Internet Explorer and drive web applications.

However, you need to be a good programmer to understand how this all works. Not only do you need to understand the Document Object Model, but to write a routine that uses it you need to understand HTML. To determine names of elements and form fields etc., the HTML source of the page needs to be pulled apart, dissected and analysed. You need to understand programming technologies in order to build the routine. Even developing such an automation script in VBScript isn’t for the faint hearted.

What is needed is a tool that records what you do in Internet Explorer, analysing the objects you click on and fields you complete as you go. WebRecorder, from MJT Net, is one such tool. WebRecorder is like a tabbed browser. As you navigate through pages, click on links, select radio boxes and drop downs and complete form fields it identifies the objects and builds a script as you go, using simple to understand code.

For programmers, WebRecorder reduces effort and speeds up development. For less technical users, WebRecorder records web activity which can be played back accurately later.

WebRecorder creates straightforward code that anyone can understand, and can be used with Macro Scheduler, a well known Windows automation tool.

Another web recording tool, is WebAction from Copasetic Software LLC. This works slightly differently in that it installs itself within Internet Explorer as a Browser Helper Object. WebAction records activity in Internet Explorer and creates internet macros which you can play back. However, macros cannot be edited and will not run in other scripting environments, so this tool is focused more for basic macros and is less flexible.

Web macro recorders and scripting tools are ideal for automating routine tasks in modern web sites and web based applications, or for automatically transferring data into or out of web applications and interfacing them with traditional solutions. These tools can also be used for automated testing of web sites and web applications and offer easier, speedier development over traditional scripting languages.

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Marcus Tettmar is founder and CEO of MJT Net Ltd, specialists in windows automation and publishers of Macro Scheduler, the leading automation tool for Microsoft Windows; and WebRecorder for Web Application Automation. Find out more at http://www.mjtnet.com