Wordpress version 2.9 came out this week and one of the features that made me sit up and take notice was the new support for oEmbed for embedding content (Thanks Brajeshwar for the link). oEmbed is one of those things that I feel not enough people know about, well at least in my circle. The oEmbed specification basically allows you to query a url and retrieve the significant embedded content on that page. The idea was concepted by Leah Culver (formerly of Pownce, the Twitter on steroids app that didn’t make it) and her announcement post on the spec is a good read to understand more about the idea.

So what this means is, now to embed a video from YouTube (or any other site that supports it) at a page http://www.youtube.com/abcdef, Wordpress users dont have to copy paste an embed block of code, they just have to paste the link to the video in their post and Wordpress will automatically swap the link with embedded video. While this is convenient for people like me who run our own blogs, its a huge deal for the less technical users on hosted Wordpress blogs who may not know how to use the embed blocks or may not be allowed arbitrary html in their posts. Thats a huge deal for syndication! The specification goes beyond video of course and includes any embedded content, like slideshows, presentations etc. And of course Wordpress doing this is great but I imagine a lot more applications will start using this feature soon.

I have to admit, after the collapse of Pownce, I thought oEmbed would not go anywhere but the sites listed on the Wordpress feature post are a lot of the big players.

Its great to see a good idea go beyond the product that spawned it.

Its exciting to see LogBook, Comcast Interactive Media’s first open source project get some traction. There is talk of LogBook being included in other open source projects as well as people have started submitting patches and suggestions to the project.

One issue that was submitted a few days back was around the Logging implementation dispatching all logging events out of the application across the LocalConnection. Here is a quote from the issue:

Logging could add significant overhead to an application, due to
log message construction, and sending messages to LogBook.

It is good practice to minimize logging overhead, with code like:

if (Log.isInfo()) {
LOG.info(”version: {0}”, version);
}

The current implementation of class LocalConnectionTarget always
sets the log level to ALL and the log filter to “*”. This means
that all logging methods are executed, which is undesirable.

You can see the details of the issue here.

I just wanted to elaborate a little on why the LocalConnectionTarget class does not use any kind of filtering to reduce the number of LogMessages being constructed.

One of the reason we went with LogBook as an AIR application as opposed to a web application was because as far as I know, the Flash Player process on the web is independent from that in AIR. This means that LogBook could become a very elaborate application on its own but it will not impact the performance of the application using LogBook based logging. Also when we pass objects across LocalConnection, these objects do not accumulate in the application’s memory. Here is a screenshot from a quick experiment where I ran an endless loop that created a custom LogDispatcher object, had it send a log message across the LocalConnection and then get garbage collected. The memory profile of the application can be seen below:

Here is also the live objects screen capture:

As you can see, over 600 objects were constructed but all of them could be garbage collected with no overhead in terms of memory used.

So your take away from this discussion is: using LogBook has virtually no memory overhead in your application. The idea of broadcasting all messages to LogBook is to allow you to filter the data on the client at the moment of debugging or after, rather than configuring it at some pre-launch time.

Now LogBook itself is another story. Another bug submitted by the same developer who reported this also talked about LogBook’s performance when over 1000 messages were collected, and yes, I have verified that at that point, the application becomes pretty sluggish. So for the next version of the LogBook, I am considering leveraging the SQLite database that AIR comes packaged with.

More on LogBook 2.0 soon. We are already on it and it will be good . If you would like to participate in defining the functionality in 2.0 or better yet, help us develop it, join the conversation on the LogBook user group here.

Most Flash/Flex developers are by now pretty familiar with the Adobe Air platform. And maybe its a case of “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” syndrome, but suddenly the browser doesn’t seem to be enough for the kind of apps I would like to build. The realization couldn’t have come at a better time with so many new cool platforms to play with, and if big company adoption is any measure of the merit of an idea, then web apps that live beyond the browser is the way of the future.

Today a couple of interesting news items came to my attention.

1) Myspace integrated Google Gears into their messaging platform.
This makes Myspace the biggest Gears adopter and with the audience the size of Myspace, the platform has suddenly become relevant again.

For the uninitiated, here is the Gears announcement video from a while back

I use Google Gears (or Gears as apparently it has been renamed today at the Google I/O conference) for Google Reader, but it always surprised me that even GMail hadn’t adopted it. Based on what I read on Techcrunch, MySpace’s main justification was to reduce the load on their servers for pagination and sorting. While they haven’t enabled offline functionality a-la Google Reader, I am sure they will at some time.

This move, while obviously great for MySpace, also is a huge boon to people looking to create OpenSocial applications that would live on MySpace. They can, if not completely depend on, at least use it to lighten the load on their own servers. And these applications living on a different OpenSocial containers may prompt more non-MySpace audience to download Gears.

2) Yahoo launches BrowserPlus
BrowserPlus is an application that adds more services to a web browser. The plugin installs Drag-and-drop capabilities, image manipulation libraries, persistent stores, etc. And the idea is that you will be able to write your more and more services once the platform opens. Another great idea here is that, while there may be a million services out there, only the ones that are needed for apps are loaded on demand. Yahoo will adopt a ITunes-for-IPhone-Apps model to make sure services loaded in are not malicious, and given Yahoo’s history, I trust them a lot more that Apple or Google. All the services will be available via Javascript, so web developers can leverage any of the services out there to build their apps, all of which are basically web pages. I am really psyched about this one. To me it almost looks like a Adobe AIR-esque runtime but this time I can extend it if I need it to do something. Plus given that a Ruby interpreter is already included into the runtime, and I am getting to like Ruby quite a bit, you can potentially build some really awesome applications leveraging libraries available there.

Gears and BrowserPlus are awesome, and there are other technologies that look really interesting. One of these is JavaFX, Java’s stab at a client-side runtime very similar to Flash. The Java Virtual Machine (Java’s equivalent to the Flash Player), is a lot more powerful than the Flash Player itself, although I am not sure how much of that functionality will be enabled from JFX, it still could be an interesting technology to watch, especially after you see the kind of interaction they are hoping to enable (even if the demo below crashes repeatedly)

Besides these there are other technologies that Mozilla Prism as well as other widget engines Yahoo Widget engine, Windows Gadgets, Mac Dashboard widgets, Google sidebars etc etc, all of which are worth watching. With all these technologies and runtimes that are based on web technologies, especially client side technologies like HTML, Javascript and even Flash, the web developer is suddenly at a point where he can enable his applications to do a lot more than ever. Of course now we have to choose our runtimes and make sure we do not serve broken experiences when users dont have appropriate plugins, as well as learn some technologies traditionally we weren’t concerned with (like SQLite, almost everything seems to use SQLite). But in any case, its a good time to be a client-side developer .

This one is funny: I followed this link off of Ryan Stewart’s blog to NewTeeVee with a video on Ice Cube promoting UVNTV, which is being advertised as an internet TV experience complete with a channel lineup etc built on Silverlight. I love it when Ice Cube basically forecasts the demise of Flash (’Flash is outta here’): hey man, if he says it, it must be true . The interview later has them saying that they got a better video quality using the windows codecs but seeing some of the really cool high def video around even before the Moviestar release of the Flash Player kind of makes me doubt that. Anyway, the video is a fun watch if nothing else than to see celebrities talk about server-side code, CDNs and of course, Silverlight .

Video: Ice Cube's UVNTV.com goes live with Microsoft Silverlight

I just got back from my trip to San Francisco (top secret project…shhhhhh), but a couple of things made this trip rather interesting. I have never really been a tourist or a photographer. Its something I have been meaning to change for a while since I do want to have something I can look at years from now and be like: “oh yeah I remember that..”. However my interests are so much more in the new and shiny things on the www that cataloging my travels seems like a chore.

However this trip I tried to mix the two domains a bit. I have a shiny new iPhone (well not so new now), and I have been meaning to play with Google’s new my maps + embeddable maps features, so here is my trip with photos from my iPhone with some information about my trip on custom markers. I have a vague color coding going on there with green markers being the first day, the blue, the second and pink the third day at SF.

View Larger Map

While this was fun, it really isnt the experience I was hoping to create. Thankfully, both flickr (where my photos are hosted) and google maps have apis so I may monkey with ‘em a bit and come up with something interesting.

I usually keep personal observations on my blog to a minimum, keeping it more about the code and apps. But off late I have been feeling this a lot and so I feel I must speak at least once if only for cathartic release .

There has been a lot of new activity in the UI world: Apollo, Silverlight, JavaFX, WPF and now Ted Patrick’s sneak peeks on the new features of Flex 3, and a lot of people have very strong sentiments about it. However it seems like we have all set camps around technologies rather than what they mean for the end user.

Silverlight was the perfect example of course. While blogs on mxna screamed how it was utter crap, people I know who attended the Microsoft MIX conference proclaimed it to be the undoubted Flash killer. As a UI developer who moved from Java to Flash to Flex to now-eyeing-the-3D-capabilities-of-WPF, I couldnt care less about what I write my code in. If there is something in Silverlight that I cant do in Flash (and my target audience has the plugin), I will code in it.

But the Silverlight conversation is over so lets continue…

The latest thing is the Flex 3 sneak peeks. I have read quite a few blogs about the lack of any earth-shattering new component in the framework. I am not surprised. Now that I have been with Flex for about a year, I am truly loving it. I dont care about the List, Datagrid or the Tree component, heck I could them all easily in Flash. Flex gave me a framework to work within. When I work with another developer or look through a component’s source code, I KNOW what I am dealing with: I know the measure function is where the measurement is happening, and updateDisplaylist is where the component is drawing itself out, etc. Now its up to ME to code my cool app. I will write a component to suit my application’s need rather than look at the new component set and try to fit those into an application. Adobe cannot write a component set for every app out there. Flex 3 gives me exactly what I want: A better way to write code (Refactoting, Code assist, etc), a way to make sure I am not killing a user’s computer (with the profiler stuff) and a better way to deploy it (using the flash player’s caching mechanism): after that I almost want it to leave me alone and let me build my app to work the way I want it to.

I dont want to sound harsh. Heck I would love to have some cool components that I may use once in a while, but its not something I expect to get from the SDK. For that I look at the broader community out there.

Lets make cool things….

This is amazing. My apollo application is one of the 10 finalists in the Digg API contest. But it gets even better: Techcrunch did an overview of the 4 apollo based entries and only mine has a screenshot up there (yay! I am special). I am not going to win the contest itself but I never imagined I would ever be on Techcrunch!!! This rocks !

Check out the DiggGraphr application here and digg it if you like it.
The TechCrunch article can be found here
For more info on DiggGraphr, check the info page here

And here is a screenshot saved for posterity

The nominees for the webby awards are out. Check them all out here. Almost every site is amazing to look at and learn from. The one thing that tickled me a bit was the nominees for the “Best Navigation/Structure” are predominantly Flash and/or multimedia based. I love seeing that and then reading the “Flash breaks navigation” paragraphs on Jakob Nielsen’s ‘Flash=99% bad‘ article.

This is cooooool. FlexBox features my Squarified TreeMaps code. Plus FlexLib has the SuperTabNavigator component that Doug McCune developed using my earlier closeable / draggable Tab Navigator class. So my ‘six degrees of separation‘ has Mike Chambers,Ted Patrick, Doug McCune and Darron Schall. I am psyched !!!

I am still working on the final releasable swc for a Flex component for the Squarified TreeMaps but I do have it working: check out my DiggMapper app.

Karl pointed me out to the widgetbox site and I have to say I was impressed. Its awesome. AAAand I found this cool widget…well its too big for a widget but love the design anyways.