Alcides Fonseca

I’ve been reading tons of reactions to the launch of the latest best-game-ever GTA IV. I liked Penny Arcade’s the most. And real geeks are also impressed by GoogleMaps-powered Liberty City Map. It is a nice mashup indeed.

Today Luís remembered me of Google Drive where you could drive a little yellow car around the world in real streets. Then it hit me: What about joining the two of then, add some extra features, and get a javascript web-based GTA game, with the top-view, just like the original one (which I’m a fan of!).

Someone with a lot of free time? Anyone? Maybe you?

Neil has this great post on how take advantage of the full capabilities of modern browsers to improve the user experience. I just love the OpenID provider example since I’m in the long process of implementing OpenID comments in this blog.

Oh, and I am thinking of making possible to receive updates to comments through Jabber…

Until now, I would swear that the only mobile device AJAX was available was in the iPhone. Well, I now know how to use the XHR activeX object in Pocket IE and it gets better: There is a library for working with the AJAX capabilities of mobile browsers. Frost AJAX lib (via Celso) is a really nice project that I will use when developing my next web application.

I really hate when I go to some website that is only meant to use with desktop browsers. Sure webdesigns should have fluid layouts and AJAX should be hiJAXed, but I believe sometimes the best solution is to make a mobile-specific website. Like m.twitter.com or GMail/GReader. Sometimes users in different devices have different needs so they should get different contents.

But yes, Javascript and AJAX is the future for Mobile also. The iPhone is a good example of that!

Apple did had a great vision buying Coverflow from SteelSkies. It is impressive and very user-friendly for managing images. Now imagine this for Flickr Images! Here you go… “Wooow…” you say.

Well I had this idea a while ago and I tried to do it with Javascript. I used my favorite JS library Prototype and as I don’t have much free time, I used Reflex.js for the coverflow effect.

I then wrote a simple Python cgi file to fetch the images from you flickr account and a javascript file to go through them. Nothing special. You might want to check out the final result.

Well, I believe this can be improvable, maybe making it easy to access other photos than yours (if you know the API is pretty simple) and add more than 3 photos (reflex.js limitation) so we can experience full effect (this might be a little more complex). I am also using the thumbnails from flickr because I want them to be fixe-size square, but using Python ou PHP+GD, we could make it work using larger images.

If you feel like working on this, talk to me and feel free to use the source code for any purpose.

As mentioned before, I started to use Google Reader and Mail a while ago and now I have a few ideias for Google to implement:

First of all, why not a optional external CSS file for all my account of google. It would affect my google reader, mail, iGoogle, etc… This matters to power users who chose (as I did) google apps because they access it from various devices. And it wouldn’t cost a thing! Yeah, I use GreaseMonkey but when I use computers that are not mine, it sucks. I don’t like google’s design, it’s too white and blue…

I use Google Talk (in which webcam support is missed a lot) and I love the notifications for mail, but I would like to delete and mark as read right there, because only from reading the title, most times I already know what I should do with it.

Other of the things that I do really miss is a GReader and GMail desktop. Everything would be smoother and much faster running from the OS. I think Google is too ahead of real users, those who aren’t ready to move everything into the browser. In this aspect Microsoft is being slower keeping desktop apps like Windows Live Mail and Writer.

Just some ideas from someone who has been using Google apps almost every hour.

As I’ve already posted here, I’ve been working the last two months on the ejaki project. I was assigned to make its web interface and I have it working already.

The previous website was very ugly and the ejaki data displaying was only a list of ejakis with a small google maps thumbnail for each one. It was running in ASP.NET (SQL server as database) and was using .NET authentication methods.

It was my first time working with ASP.net (I’ve only worked with classic ASP a few years ago) and I didn’t like quite much the webcontrols and the way things were organized. A RAD MVC platform for ASP.NET is what I really wanted, but Midgard wasn’t ready yet.

I decided to remake the website all from scratch. The database was changed not to use that heavy .NET authentication modules and to add some extra information. As for javascript, I chose Prototype + Script.aculo.us + MyPrototype and it was the first time I’ve seen it being used with ASP.NET. It works the same way as in ruby, python or PHP, you just have to make a ashx file (Generic Handler) with the response you want to load with AJAX methods. I found the MASTER and partial page system pretty weak for some stuff I wanted to do.

In the new website I tried a different approach. Being the data mainly geographical, the map is now the center of the website, and everything works around it. This may raise issues with browsers not compatible with Google Maps API and Mobile Devices (a target platform). So in the future, a mobile website will probably be done.

As for now, I’ve revamping the Windows Mobile software so it looks more cool to use. If you’re attending Barcamp Portugal, I’ll be making a short presentation with a demo, so if you do have a PDA with GPS, please don’t forget it ;)