Ben Shoemate's Notebook

Doriano "Paisano" Carta via Mashable! shared by 4 people

There are countless online spreadsheets and word processors these days, but not too many online databases. Sometimes the best way to work with data is naturally within a database. Managing data in a spreadsheet can only get you so far. Sure, it’s great for number crunching and financial analysis, but if you want to enter data once and use it over and over again in queries and reports and share them with others, then the best solution is an online database. Here are six of the most popular online database services available today.

Zoho DB & Reports
Zoho DB & Reports offers a free and easy way to create your own database online. You can create a database from scratch or by importing data from an existing spreadsheet. The databases run rather quickly, which was a pleasant surprise. There doesn’t appear to be any limits in place for the number of databases you can create.

You can share any database with anyone you want by simply adding their email address and sending them a link. They don’t even have to join Zoho to view the database which is a nice change of pace from other services. Another excellent feature is the ability to embed any database or view on your website. Here’s an example of a database called The Zone where I have every Twilight Zone episode along with other information. You can share databases with individuals, make them public or keep them private.

Zoho Creator
Zoho Creator is not really a database service but a Web application builder. What’s strange is that it’s eerily similar to their own Zoho DB in that you can create databases as well. Zoho Creator does offer a great deal more options than Zoho DB. It offers an excellent interface builder for creating customized forms and the ability to build database applications for the mobile platform.

They have their own API for those interested in building more complex databases. Their scripting language is called Deluge. Zoho has stated that there are plans to one day unite Zoho DB and Creator into one product which makes perfect sense.

DabbleDB
DabbleDB is similar to Zoho DB except that it doesn’t offer a free account. There’s only a 30-day trial, otherwise you’ll need a premium account. After kicking the tires with the trial version you’ll notice that it isn’t as easy to use as Zoho’s other database solutions. The interface doesn’t present the data as well as Zoho DB’s useful Tabbed interface. The performance was brisk with the test database, which included a few hundred records. There doesn’t seem to be enough options or features to justify the expense when compared to the free offerings available today.

Blist
Blist provides the best looking interface for any database service. Its Ajaxy look and feel makes the databases you create look rather slick. Unfortunately, the sharing feature still needs some work because it isn’t as easy to share databases as it should be. However, allowing people to view your databases without requiring them to sign up for the service is a great feature. They do need to join Blist if they want to make any changes or contribute anything to the database, which makes sense. Another nice touch is the ability to copy any public database, which is a great time-saver because you can use them as templates.

Strata
Strata from Kirix is a unique kind of database service. They describe themselves as a fusion of a Web browser and a built-in relational database. That’s not a bad way of putting it. It’s important to note that Strata is not free. There’s a 30-day trial that you can download for Windows or Linux to see what it can do.

QuickBase
QuickBase is from Intuit, the people behind Quicken and QuickBooks. They were one of the first online database services. Needless to say, their service is robust with features and the performance very strong. Just like DabbleDB there’s no free account, just a trial version. The least expensive account that you can get is $15 per month for 5 users.

Conclusion
When you want to slice and dice data online and share the results, using one of these online databases could be exactly what you need. Which one is the best database service? At this point in time, if one had to make a pick the edge would go to Zoho DB & Reports because of its SSL and mobile support. However, you can’t go wrong with Blist if you aren’t interested in mobile access to your databases or SSL security. If Zoho ever does merge Creator with Zoho DB & Reports, it will only make their solution that much stronger.

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"On the run"

Eric Eldon via VentureBeat shared by 6 people

When Yammer presented at TechCrunch50, I wasn’t so sure about it. The company offers a service that’s the business version of micro-messaging company Twitter. You leave short messages about what you’re doing, your co-workers do the same, and everyone can view what everyone else is doing in a running stream showing the latest activity. Conceptually, this is a great way to quickly stay in touch with the people you need to communicate with.

And the company has gone on to win best-in-show at the TechCrunch50 conference.

The thing I was concerned about was Prologue, an open-source version of this concept, that blog platform WordPress launched last January. In fact, there are 11 companies in this area, as Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang points out, including a project by enterprise software giant Oracle.

So, when I heard about Yammer, it seemed to me that this is a great idea that’s a feature for enterprise software, but not a stand-alone company. Specifically, businesses often prefer to own their software completely and customize it to their needs — open-source software is perfect for that.

Here’s why Yammer won, anyway. Lots of companies might not want to bother setting up and customizing their own service. Instead, they just want to get started quickly with as little hassle as possible.

And Yammer comes loaded with useful features for businesses. There’s an application for business-favorite mobile device Blackberry, and a desktop application. You can even set up an organizational chart within the site, which is useful for larger organizations. You can customize your profile with additional work information and set notifications for email, mobile and instant messaging.

It also includes a smart, subtle interface for getting users to join.

When you first set up an account, you’re asked to provide your work email address. Then, you’re asked to invite colleagues using their work email addresses — not other domains. This helps ensure that every user really belongs in the account. Facebook used this same strategy when it first started: Only people with a university-domain email (yourname@college.edu), could join a particular network. Facebook then spread this concept to high schools and work places.

As one Yammer supporter quipped to me, regarding the open-source rivals: “There was open-source social networking software before Facebook, too.” Yammer’s business model is to charge companies for services when they want to take greater control over the company networks that employees create on Yammer.

Which leads to my other criticism. Twitter grew because it spans the web. Your Twitter-using friend gets you to join, you start following them, you see when they respond to other Twitter friends using the @username symbol — those messages appear within your feed of your friend’s tweets. Then, you go see who your friend is twittering to, and you may just decide to follow that person, too.

With Yammer, you don’t have this effect. The way Yammer spreads is if employees at different companies tell each other that they’re using it. Or if, say, it wins a top award at a tech industry conference and gets a lot of press coverage.

So, at this point, Yammer could be on its way to success. We’ve actually played around with Prologue, hoping to use it as VentureBeat’s intranet. Similarly, Yammer itself grew out of being a sort of intranet for another startup, Geni. But, because Prologue requires extra customization and setup, here at VentureBeat, we’re starting to use Yammer.

Adam Pash via Lifehacker shared by 4 people

In the face of internet service providers like Comcast instituting bandwidth-capping, the Simple Help weblog details how to use a router running the open-source DD-WRT firmware to monitor your bandwidth. It's actually very simple to do, requiring no work on your part aside from installing DD-WRT on your router. DD-WRT automatically tracks bandwidth, so from there it's a matter of knowing where to look. If you're running the user-friendly Tomato firmware (we also showed you how to install Tomato), you can easily access your daily, weekly, or monthly bandwidth as well.

Like DD-WRT, Tomato automatically tracks bandwidth usage for you, so all you need to know is where to look. Just log into the Tomato interface, and then click on the Monthly link under Bandwidth in the sidebar (or, if you're using a default configuration, just follow this link). You'll get a simple table displaying your bandwidth stats for the month. Tomato also displays bandwidth use by week, day, and even in real-time if you're interested.

I've used DD-WRT and Tomato exclusively over the past few years, so I'm not really sure what the status is for bandwidth monitoring on most default router firmware. If your router supports bandwidth monitoring, let's hear about it in the comments.

Josh Marshall via Talking Points Memo shared by 4 people

I get the sense that maybe the subject is so charged that people don't want to bring it up. But I'm wondering if Charlie Gibson might be able to raise the matter during the Barbara Walters style interview he's doing today with Gov. Palin up in Alaska.

While Gov. Palin was Mayor of Wasila, Alaska in the late 1990s, the city's policy was to charge rape victims for the cost of the 'rape kits' used to collect forensic evidence to help prosecute the rapists. Eventually the state had to step in and pass a law banning the practice. And according to former Gov. Tony Knowles, the law was passed specifically in response to Wasila's policy. "There was one town in Alaska that was charging victims for this, and that was Wasilla," says Knowles.

So Wasila was either the only or one of the only towns in the state to follow this practice. And the state legislature had to intervene to put an end to it. There's no controversy about this. So this part is clear.

But it appears this is another case whether Sarah Palin is lying or in this case deputizing press aides to lie on her behalf. In this case spokeswoman Maria Comella, when asked, told USAToday that "does not believe, nor has she ever believed, that rape victims should have to pay for an evidence-gathering test. Gov. Palin's position could not be more clear. To suggest otherwise is a deliberate misrepresentation of her commitment to supporting victims and bringing violent criminals to justice."

Well, this just appears to be a confident statement of another lie. She does not and has never believed this, only it was her policy when she ran the city in question which was either the only or the most prominent in the state that held to this practice.

Charlie, can you help on this?

(ed.note: This has been another edition of "Lying Sarah Watch"...)

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz via Smashing Magazine shared by 12 people

Developers and designers are using more and more JavaScript in modern designs. Sometimes this can be a hindrance to the user and take away from the simplicity of the design, and other times it can add greatly to the user’s experience. The key is a) adding the right amount of JavaScript, and b) using the right JavaScript techniques. We have already collected various JavaScript techniques in the past – now it’s time for a new portion of JavaScript.

Thanks to the Web’s widespread adoption of JavaScript, JavaScript libraries have sprung up to help make design and development easier. Here are a few of the major JavaScript libraries that developers use: jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, mootools, Dojo. These frameworks have thriving communities whose members have developed countless plug-ins that can greatly add to the JavaScript framework.

However, sometimes we need JavaScript solutions that are a little more involved or specific. Here are 75 more handy JavaScript techniques that have made websites much sleeker and more interesting.

75 Useful JavaScript Techniques

Textboxlist Auto-Completion
One of the most attractive features of JavaScript is the highly useful autocompletion. No other website does the autocompletion better than Facebook. They have created an elegant way to search for other Facebook users using the autocomplete feature. Once the user is found, their name is added with an outline and an “X” link to remove the name. TextboxList has mimicked this feature and created a little script for downloading.

Hyphenation in Web
This project collects working solutions for automatic hyphenation in (X)HTML pages. For different human and script languages, server- and client-side. A JavaScript-solution, called Hyphenator.js is available as well. Hyphenator.js brings client-side hyphenation of HTML-Documents on to every browser by inserting soft hyphens using hyphenation patterns and Franklin M. Liangs hyphenation algorithm commonly known from LaTeX and Openoffice.

SocialHistory.js
SocialHistory.js enables you to detect which social bookmarking sites your visitors use. It cannot enable you to see all of the user’s history. It checks, in a 20-questions style, if the user has been to a particular URL: It’s hit or miss. SocialHistory.js has a big list of the most popular social bookmarking sites which it checks against. An alternative approach.

addSizes.js
This small JavaScript takes care of an automatic link file-size generation. For instance, if you have large .mp3- or .pdf-files offered on your page, this script automatically checks the size of the file and displays the format and the file size in brackets.

syntaxhighlighter
SyntaxHighlighter is here to help a developer/coder to post code snippets online with ease and have it look pretty. It’s 100% Java Script based and it doesn’t care what you have on your server.

samaxesjs
samaxesJS is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building rich interactive web applications. The TOC control dynamically builds a table of contents from the headings in a document and prepends legal-style section numbers to each of the headings: adds numeration in front of all headings, generates an HTML table of contents, degrades gracefully if JavaScript is not available/enabled.

Step by Step
This script allows you to show and explain visitors what your page has for them. You might have encountered interactive demos created with screencasting and screengrabbing software that explain an interface to users in a step-by-step manner. This is exactly what this script does for web sites.

MoreCSS
MoreCSS is a small, cross-browser compatible JavaScript library which enables you to create tab menus, tables and lists with “zebra”-style as if you were using regular CSS. It’s enough to include the library in HTML and use CSS for general purpose design elements.

Facelift Image Replacement
Facelift Image Replacement (or FLIR, pronounced fleer) is an image replacement script that dynamically generates image representations of text on your web page in fonts that otherwise might not be visible to your visitors. The generated image will be automatically inserted into your web page via Javascript and visible to all modern browsers. Any element with text can be replaced: from headers (h1, h2, etc.) to span-elements and everything in between!

CSS Sprites2
Cross-browser functionality is a bit of a freebie; jQuery works across most modern browsers, so everything you see here works in IE6+, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc. We’ve also accounted for multiple graceful degradation scenarios.

jParralax
“Parallax is [a jQuery library that] turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.” Think of looking through a camera and having layers of objects at various distances moving around. This library achieves that effect using multiple using static images, one for each layer.

ddMenu - Context Menu Script
ddMenu is a simple MooTools-based script to create you’re own context menus. Press the Crtl-key and right click to switch between ddMenu and browser default context menu. Press the Shift-key and right click to open ddMenu beside the browser default context menu.

js-hotkeys
jQuery.Hotkeys plugin lets you easily add and remove handlers for keyboard events anywhere in your code supporting almost any key combination. It takes one line of code to bind/unbind a hot key combination. Alternative approach.

BarackSlideshow
An elegant, lightweight slideshow script. It works with MooTools 1.2, and supports all kinds of shape transformations (top and left coordinates, and height and width properties), which means it can now be used with vertical, horizontal, or even irregular lists.

Galleria
Galleria is a javascript image gallery written in jQuery. It loads the images one by one from an unordered list and displays thumbnails when each image is loaded. It will create thumbnails for you if you choose so, scaled or unscaled, centered and cropped inside a fixed thumbnail box defined by CSS.

History Keeper
unFocus History Keeper is a JavaScript based library for managing browser history (back button) and providing support for deep linking for Flash and Ajax applications. It enables back button support, for client-side applications, has a hash-based deep linking (Anchor Style - index.html#foo=bar) and is event-driven - Subscriber pattern. Currently the script works well in all modern browsers.

date.js
Datejs is an extensive open source JavaScript Date library for parsing, formatting and processing time and dates.

Lightview
Lightview is another script that create modal windows on a web-site. It has a smart image preloading, adjustable rounded corners, without PNGs and content resizes to always fit on your screen. The script can be used for presentations, single images, Quicktime-files, Forms, Iframes, Inline content and Flash-files.

Coda popup bubbles

The software company Panic has a beloved Mac application for developers called Coda. Coda has an incredibly elegant design, and one of the subtle JavaScript effects that have been added to it is a stylized pop-up bubble. The blog jQuery for Designers has created a script that combines jQuery with custom code to replicate the feature used on the Coda website. The effect is subtle and elegant and greatly adds to the user’s experience.

ajax im
With the popularity of Web-based IM clients, like meebox, many developers want to add a JavaScript IM client of their own. Ajax IM is a library dedicated to creating an Ajax IM client that works out of the box. The script is a relatively large one, but it can be a nice effect for some websites that need more interaction with their users.

LiveValidation

This is a handy gem for any web developer who uses forms. Trying to create an intuitive sign-up form can be a chore with all the different types of validation that need to happen. Also, creating a faster, more intuitive form with JavaScript can be tricky, too. Thankfully, LiveValidation has taken the guesswork out of the process and created a tiny, unobtrusive script that can take the pain out of form validation. If you’re a Ruby on Rails developer, LiveValidation comes in two forms: either with Prototype (ideal for Ruby on Rails) or one that can be used as a stand-alone package.

Ajax AutoSuggest
Like TextboxList’s autocompletion script, Ajax AutoSuggest is a tasteful and refined autosuggest script. The script is quite tiny, weighing in at just under 9k, and adds a very nice touch to any search form.

FancyUpload
This is an upload script that shows the progress of files you are uploading. It’s perfect for any upload form and even allows for multiple uploads at the same time. You can limit the size of the uploaded file as well as restrict the type of file that can be uploaded. The only requirement that FancyUpload has is that your users have installed Flash, which has a 95% penetration among Web users.

Taggify
Taggify is a bit different in implementation than the other JavaScripts listed. Taggify is a hosted solution for adding pop-up widgets to photos. Instead of having to download a script and host it on your site, you can just add a tiny <include> in your tag, and you’ll have the power of Taggify installed on your site. Using Taggify is interesting; it adds notes and other useful information to photos.

Think of it as a souped-up version of the note-adding feature for Flickr images. You can add any HTML to the Taggify note, creating a nice informational page to accompany any image that needs a bit more explanation.

AmberJack
AmberJack is one of the more interesting and compelling JavaScript techniques. Website tours are extremely beneficial because they can help familiarize users, showcase features and products, and many other things. Possibly the best part about AmberJack is that nothing has to be installed or learned to start creating website tours. AmberJack provides a way for website and product owners to quickly and easily create website tours with JavaScript. It’s an amazingly tiny download, at only 4 KB.

Sliding Tabs
This is another script inspired by Coda. Essentially, it’s a smooth-scrolling tab system that makes switching between panes easy and smart. You can see a demo of Sliding Tabs here. Sliding Tabs is built off of the JavaScript framework MooTools. Alternative solution.

JavaScript Image Loader
If you’re looking for a more intuitive way for users to upload and preview images on your website, the JavaScript Image Loader (demo) might fit the bill. The JavaScript Image Loader is a great way to show your users an image before it has uploaded, and it can also provide other information about the image if desired.

swfIR
swfIR is an interesting concept as it uses a combination of Flash and JavaScript and adds image manipulation functionality to it. Once swfIR is installed, it adds a <span> with the class “swfir” around the image. swfIR can add almost any manipulation to an image. An especially useful feature of the script is its ability to automatically resize images based on the size of the page. When you resize the text on the page, the image resizes proportionally with the layout. By resizing the picture along with the text, the design feels much more cohesive.

MooFlow
For fans of Apple’s Cover Flow feature in Leopard, MooFlow is taken directly from Apple’s playbook. MooFlow is a JavaScript gallery script that uses MooTools and adds a bit of JavaScript magic to make beautiful image galleries, complete with a slider that mimics Cover Flow.

Just like with Cover Flow, you can manipulate MooFlow’s gallery layout and functionality. You can toggle full-screen mode, image reflection, and autoplay. MooFlow is quite configurable and easy to set up because it just grabs all of the images within an element.

amCharts
This script is a chart generator that runs off of a combination of flash and JavaScript. You can generate virtually any type of graph or chart with the script, and can even use .csv and xml files to pull the data from. With amCharts, you can generate graphs in the form of Column & Bar, Pie & Donut, Line & Area and Scatter & Bubble.

GreyBox
GreyBox’s website hails the JavaScript pop-up window as “A pop-up window that doesn’t suck,” and for good reason. GreyBox does everything that a modal window should do. It can display pictures, websites, and just about any other content you can think of.

Using GreyBox is incredibly easy because once you’ve included the JavaScript file in the header, the only thing left to configure is adding a <rel> tag to whatever element you want to display in the window.

Mailist
While Mailist isn’t a full-blown AJAX contact form, the tiny script is exactly what most Web developers need to quickly store email addresses for things like beta sign-ups and other expression-of-interest forms. It even has a back end for administering things like email backups and editing the look of the form.

SWFObject
SWFObject is a tiny little Flash player that uses JavaScript to overcome many of the obstacles that can’t be solved by markup alone. The player is a tiny download, only 9.5 KB (or 3.8 KB GZIP’ed). SWFObject prides itself on its compatibility with modern browsers, and it actually uses JavaScript to help detect which Flash player version to use and to avoid outdated Flash plug-ins that break Flash content.

PlotKit
PlotKit is a JavaScript chart-plotting script that relies on the tiny JavaScript framework Moochikit. PlotKit is an exceptional library for quickly plotting all sorts of graphs.

JavaScript tabifier
The JavaScript tabifier is a nifty little script that allows you to quickly and easily create tabs for your content. All that is required to use tabifier is to include the JavaScript and add a <div> with the class “tabber” surrounding the tabbed content, and then add the class “tabbertab” and the title for the <div> in what shows as the tab’s title. You can even use advanced techniques, such as adding cookies to the tabs, dynamically changing the tabs, and setting a default tab.

FancyZoom 1.1
Designed to view full-size photos and images inline without requiring a separate web page load, FancyZoom is providing a smooth, clean, truly Mac-like effect.

It is focused on a smoothest, polished zooming animation and automatically scales images from any image link, with no HTML changes. The script also preloads full-size images in the background on link mouseover and requires no Javascript libraries. FancyZoom requires only two lines of code in your HTML-files.

A Mac OS X-style Dock In JavaScript
Apple’s Mac OS X operating system is renowned for its fluid graphical effects. One impressive feature is the dock’s ‘fish-eye’ effect, whereby icons expand and contract as the mouse moves over them. Achieving this effect in JavaScript is difficult, but the MacStyleDock function allows this feature to be implemented easily.

fValidator - An open source (free) unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation
fValidator is an open source (free) unobtrusive javascript tool for easy handling form validation. It allows a user to more easily enter fixed width input where you would like them to enter the data in a certain format (dates,phone numbers, etc). Alternative jQuery Plugin.

jQuery Interactive Date Range Picker with Shortcuts
An advanced jQuery date picker that is optimized for quickly selecting a date from a list of preset dates/ranges, and we added smooth transitions when additional options are revealed.

Raphaël
Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the Web. In case you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library. Raphaël uses SVG and VML as a base for graphics creation.

NoGray Time Picker
This time picker utilizes a simple drag and drop interface. To select the time users can just drag the minutes or hour of a clock.

Yetii - Yet (E)Another JavaScript Tab Interface
Yetii is a simple, yet functional tab interface implementation. It has lightweight, object-oriented code and degrades gracefully in browsers without JavaScript-support. You can have many independend tab interfaces on a single page, specify initial tab, turn on automatic tabs rotation, add next/previous navigation, nest one tab interface inside another and define custom function to run after certain tab is clicked.

You can link to certain tab on page A from page B via URL parameter and you can turn on tab persistence feature, so the most recently clicked tab is stored inside a cookie and remembered between page refresh.

Calendar
Calendar is a Mootools Javascript class that adds accessible and unobtrusive date-pickers to your form elements.It has highly configurable inputs and selects, multi-calendar support (with padding), variable navigation options and multi-lingual and fancy date formatting.

Starbox
Starbox allows you to easily create all kinds of rating boxes using just one PNG image. The library is build on top of the Prototype javascript framework. For some extra effects you can add Scriptaculous as well.

Magic Zoom
Magic Zoom is a JavaScript zoom tool. It’s the best way to display images in incredible detail. Users do not need to click anything - they just move their mouse over the image to see every detail of your product.

Magic Magnify
Magic Magnify is a Flash zoom tool. It’s an elegant effect to view images with a magnifying-glass. Upon hover over the image, the user sees the close-up detail of the product. Price: $28 / £15 / €18.

Carousel.us
Carousel.us is a Javascript 3D carousel, using either the prototype.js and scriptaculous.js or mootools.js frameworks. It also uses PHP Easy Reflections v3 by Richard Davey.

slideshow
Slideshow is a javascript class for Mootools 1.2 to stream and animate the presentation of images on your website. Slideshow is the result of many trials in code attempting to create a javascript class that was lightweight, unobtrusive, a snap to setup (but also highly configurable), extendable and - built using the javascript framework with the best effects - visually very impressive. Slideshow began as a side project by Aeron Glemann, and is now open source with an MIT-style license.

jgrousedoc
jGrouseDoc allows developers to produce documentation for their javascript code based on javadoc-like comments embedded into the source code. It allows documentation of classes, regardless what kind of library/technology was used to implement OOP. The script also allows documentation of multiple syntaxes that could be used to invoke a function/method. The output is customizable using CSS and Velocity templates or XSLT.

Lightbox 2
Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

Control.Window
Control.Window is a fully programmable, multi purpose windowing toolkit for Prototype. It covers a wide variety of use cases and allows for a high degree of customization. It can attach to links to open the targets as windows, or can be filled with dynamic content. It includes support for stackable, draggable and resizable windows. Subclasses to handle Modal windows, LightBoxes and Tooltips are included.

SimpleModal
SimpleModal is a lightweight jQuery plugin that provides a simple interface to create a modal dialog. The goal of SimpleModal is to provide developers with a cross-browser overlay and container that will be populated with data provided to SimpleModal.

Creating a carousel with MooTools
You’ve probably seen it on various websites: those neat little inline slideshows that browse you through a gallery of images (or content if you want, too). Most people simply copy the code to use it on their own site, but I believe that by making it yourself, you learn new techniques and gain new insight. Therefore I’ll walk you through this tutorial that teaches you how to achieve this through the use of CSS and MooTools.

Unobtrusive Expand and Collapse Navigation
A tutorial that displays how to to create a vertical navigation that will expand and collapse to show and hide sub-navigation using only unordered lists and as few class/id names as possible.

Image Cross Fade Transition
Image rollovers were the staple JavaScript nugget of the 90s, and for a lot of JavaScript developers I know, one of the starting places their passion for JavaScript. Today, rollovers are a no-brainer - either in CSS or with the simplest of JavaScript. Today’s challenge is the rollover transition.

Slider Gallery
This ‘product slider’ is similar to a straight forward gallery, except that there is a slider to navigate the items, i.e. the bit the user controls to view the items.

FancyZoom meets jQuery // Ordered List // We Make The Web Beautifully Simple

Build An AJAX Powered Shopping Cart
The goal of this tutorial is to show you how to build an AJAX powered shopping cart. However, it will not be production ready. The back end requirements vary from site to site far too much to write an effective tutorial. Instead, we are going to focus on the AJAX parts.

jQuery iPod-style Drilldown Menu
“We created an iPod-style drilldown menu to help users traverse hierarchical data quickly and with control. It’s especially helpful when organizing large data structures that don’t translate well into traditional dropdown or fly-out menus.”

Load Content While Scrolling With jQuery
This script allows to load the content “on the fly” - once th visitors has scrolled vertically to the end of the content block. “I always loved the dZone’s Ajax content loading while scrolling feature and created a similar one using jQuery.”

JavaScript Tooltips
This tutorial describes how to create a nice, lightweight JavaScript tooltip. By Michael Leigeber.

Newsticker
Antonio Lupetti re-creates a news ticker which is similar to the one used on Newsvine. Mootools in use.

jQuery virtual tour
This is an extension to the simple panorama viewer that allows you to play a little bit more with jQuery by adding interactivity to transform some panoramic views into a virtual tour.

Flexigrid
Lightweight but rich data grid with resizable columns and a scrolling data to match the headers, plus an ability to connect to an xml based data source using Ajax to load the content. Similar in concept with the Ext Grid only its pure jQuery love, which makes it light weight and follows the jQuery mantra of running with the least amount of configuration.

tableFilter
This script allows users to filter and sort even large tables quickly and in an interactive way.

Row Locking with Checkboxes
“I had my function set up so that if any part of the row was clicked, the checkbox would check. When I clicked the actual checkbox, it would show a checkmark, but since the checkbox is a part of that row, my function would run, too, which would then think it’s time to uncheck the checkbox. In a fraction of a second, it would look like the checkbox never checked, but the row changed color anyway, sending the wrong signals to the end user.”

jQuery File Tree
jQuery File Tree is a configurable, AJAX file browser plugin for jQuery. You can create a customized, fully-interactive file tree with as little as one line of JavaScript code. It has the ability to style icons based on file extension, uses AJAX to fetch file information on the fly, has a customizable expand/collapse event and support single- and multi-folder views.

Proto.Menu, prototype based context menu
Proto.Menu is a simple and lightweight prototype-based solution for context menu functionality on your page.

Pricing Matrix
This tutorial explains how to create a matrix that would give an indication of relationships among the information provided.

Toggling Announcement Slider
“A few of my customer have asked for me to create a subtle but dynamic (…I know…) way for them to advertise different specials on their website. Not something that would display on every page, but periodically or only the homepage. Using a trick from GoDaddy’s playbook, I put together an announcement slider that toggles on click. Thanks to MooTools 1.2, this was a breeze.”

Tutorials

Show/hide a Login Panel using Mootools 1.2
“Some of you were wondering what script I used to show/hide the login panel on top of this page (or in my latest Wordpress theme: “Night Transition”). In this tutorial, we will see how to create a similar login/signup panel for your website using Mootools 1.2.”

Images slider to create Flickr-like slideshows
If you like Flickr slideshow, this article explains how to implement it using Prototype-UI framework. “Since long time I was looking for a simple way to implement a Flickr-like slideshow (”image carousel”) and finally I found a good compromise between complexity and result to implement it using Prototype-UI, an awesome JavaScript framework based on Prototype and Scriptaculous.”

Create an apple style menu and improve it via jQuery
“Since I wrote my last tutorial on how to create a CSS only multilevel dropdown menu I got a lot of visitors who wanted to know how I created the main navigation of kriesi.at. (a so called kwicks menu) The interest in extraordinary menus seems to be high nowadays, so today I will teach you how this is done.”

Creating a Slick Auto-Playing Featured Content Slider
By Chris Coyier.

Build An Incredible Login Form With jQuery
One struggle that still remains today in web design is displaying all of the redundant information on every page. For example, a login form. What if there was a way to easily make the content accessible on every page, but keep it hidden until needed? Well you can, by making a top panel that when clicked, will reveal its self and its content. But we need to make this look nice, so we’ll also animate it

Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery
“One of the biggest challenge to web designers is finding ways to place a lot of information on a page without losing usability. Tabbed content is a great way to handle this issue and has been widely used on blogs recently. Today we’re going to build a simple little tabbed information box in HTML, then make it function using some simple Javascript, and then finally we’ll achieve the same thing using the jQuery library.”

Create a Simple, Intelligent Accordion Effect Using Prototype and Scriptaculous
Learn how to create a lightweight, intelligent “accordion” effect using the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries.

Create a Simple, Powerful Product Highlighter with MooTools
This tutorial will help you find your inner cow by introducing you to one of the most powerful and modular javascript libraries—MooTools. You’ll create a flexible tool for highlighting your sites products or services using the MooTools javascript framework.

Creating a Dynamic Poll with jQuery and PHP
When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty cool results. In this tutorial we’ll create a poll using PHP and XHTML, then make use of some jQuery Ajax effects to eliminate the need for a page refresh, and to give it a nice little bit of animation.

Related Posts

You may want to take a look at the following related articles:

• 80+ AJAX-Solutions For Professional Coding
• 60 More AJAX- and Javascript Solutions For Professional Coding
• 30 Scripts For Galleries, Slideshows and Lightboxes
• 40+ Tooltips Scripts With AJAX, JavaScript & CSS
• Data Grids with AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript

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Steve Rubel via Micro Persuasion shared by 6 people

Google isn't exactly known as the most transparent company in the world, but they're light years ahead of Apple - a company that in some ways they share a kinship with when it comes to their reputation for innovation. Apple (or for that matter any big company) can learn a lot about radical transparency, customer service and PR from Google, even though they're hardly perfect here.

First, Google does a great job of telling you where they're fallible. Many Google products have pages that list the bugs that they know need to be fixed. GMail and Google Docs are just two. You can visit each of these pages for an update and even let Google know if you're experiencing one of these issues.

Apple, by contrast, just lets you know when they've fixed bugs, but leave it to bloggers to dig into the code to see just what was fixed. Most Apple software update release notes from Apple simply say "Bug fixes."

Second, Google, like Apple, has forums where users can voice their opinions about new features, gripes, wishes, use cases and more. Google employees actively participate in these forums and you can track their activity. Here's a page that shows you all of the posts that a Google Reader forum guide, "Roger," has responded to. Apple does the same in its forums. Here's a list of all of the postings that Jason L has responded to.

However, the difference between the two is that users can rank the posts of Google employees or even report misconduct. I give credit to Apple for participating, however, I wished they would let users rate employee postings.

Finally, Google has a ton of blogs. Most of them link back to the bloggers who link there. Some are beginning to allow for comments. Google Blogoscoped aggregates them here. Even better, all Google blog posts clearly identify the employee who authored the post and their title.

Apple meanwhile has one blog for its much troubled MobileMe services, which I am probably dignifying by calling it that. It's bascially a news feed of product updates. The authors aren't identified. Worse, there are no comments or links to other bloggers.

There are other companies in the tech industry that go even further than Google in their transparency - namely Dell and Microsoft (an Edelman client). However, Google and Apple are often closely linked in their cultures. The reality is, though, that when it comes to customer engagement, they are quite different.

"Harvest"

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