ProjectX Technology

Xlinks is a digest of interesting links that have been found by the ProjectX staff.

How to pick up a VC – Guy Kawaski
Added on 05/31/2008 at 07:03PM
Google release Google Earth Plugin for Browser: 3 months ahead of when I predicted
Added on 05/31/2008 at 05:14PM

New iPhone rumoured to have GPS
Added on 05/31/2008 at 03:13PM

Prototip2 – Create beautiful tooltips with ease
Added on 05/31/2008 at 03:09PM

‘Help me Obi Wan Kenobi’ – Musion make Holograms a reality
Added on 05/31/2008 at 11:45AM

Findability Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Added on 05/30/2008 at 12:45PM

Zebra Stripping – does it help
Added on 05/30/2008 at 12:28PM

Improve Page performance with lazy loading
Added on 05/30/2008 at 12:17PM

Bill Gates – Windows 95 was a nice milestone: Seesh. That was a long long time ago
Added on 05/30/2008 at 08:54AM

Maps and iPhone
Added on 05/29/2008 at 04:38PM

Times machine – Browse NY Times archives from 1865
Added on 05/29/2008 at 04:25PM

Difference between a fifty-year-old carpenter and a novice

A novice needs multiple projects to learn how to able to build iteratively without mucking up the whole project
Added on 05/29/2008 at 12:04PM

Heroku – Rails hosting management system: WOW
Added on 05/28/2008 at 11:44PM

Earthmine – 3D maps are coming
Added on 05/28/2008 at 11:20PM

The art of not finishing
Added on 05/28/2008 at 10:47PM

OK / Cancel or Cancel / OK
Added on 05/28/2008 at 10:29PM

Cool big scary metal statues
Added on 05/28/2008 at 07:45PM

Yodeler – YUI extensions
Added on 05/28/2008 at 10:00AM

Google Ajax Libraries API
Added on 05/28/2008 at 09:30AM

Buses as mobile sensing platforms
Added on 05/27/2008 at 01:41PM

Nat Torkington posted about this presentation by Cloudfour on their research of the mobile web – Going fast on the Mobile Web. It contains some fantastic insights of how iPhone is changing the way that people are using the mobile web.



It also outlines their research into how mobile browsers deal with compression and caching. And details 8 tips on how to deliver content on the mobile web.

And tips for the iPhone.

When you partner that with Steve Sounders research on iPhone caching.

The iPhone cache experiment suggests an additional performance rule specific for developing web sites for the iPhone:

Reduce the size of each component to 25 Kbytes or less for optimal caching behavior.

Given that the wireless network speed on iPhone is limited and the browser cache is cleared across power cycle, it is even more important to make fewer HTTP requests to achieve good performance than in the desktop world…

Also, the maximum cache limit of all components is 475 – 500 KB. Minify all the JavaScript, CSS and HTML.

The future of the mobile internet is small webpages.

Finally, here is the slide deck, its well worth a read.

| View | Upload your own

Om Malik has just wrote a post about broadband usage in London. In London there are a numer of providers and they have quality services for WI-FI, Broadband and 3G. Here’s the full report from Ofcom .

In London:

* 40 percent of people watch TV or video content online.
* 20 percent make VoIP calls.
* 32 percent are using their mobile phones to access the Internet.
* 19 percent listen to audio content on their mobiles.

The evidence is mounting better broadband and mobile services will result in more usage and more opportunities for companies / content providers to create new revenue streams. Let’s hope things will change for the better this decade!

Google has just released the AJAX Libraries API. Google has created an API that allows developers to access a number of popular javascript API from the Google Cloud.

You can use the Google AJAX Libraries API to reference:

• Prototype
• JQuery
• MooTools
• Scriptalous
• Dojo

Why is this good idea ?

1. Its Fast – its hosted on the Google CDN.
2. The libraries have already been optomised ie. minified, delivered via compression
3. It enables better caching of key libraries from one site to another. ie. Visit site A that uses mootools it downloads the javascript. Visit site b that uses mootools and it fetches it from the cache.

How do I use it ?

Its really easy to use. Either call the scripts directly eg.

<script src=“http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js”></script>

or use the Google API to load them scripts.

<script src=“http://www.google.com/jsapi”></script>

<script>

// Load jQuery

google.load(“jquery”, “1″);

A couple of requests to Google

The AJAX Library API is a fantastic idea, but it could be better. We have a couple of requests .

1. can you host more of the legacy versions of the libraries. (We use an old version of prototype. The recent versions are a little bloat for what we need).
2. It would great if you could provide stats on how many sites in a particular country are using the libraries. Then we can see if there are other sites in that are using the same libraries and then we get the benefit of caching
3. Properly minify the scripts! Thanks for to Eric for pointing it out.
4. Fix the Website. The FAQ and Groups links are going to the wrong place !

Here is a digest of interesting links as discovered by the ProjectX staff.

This Is Funny Only if You Know Unix
Added on 05/27/2008 at 12:00PM
OMeta – Object oriented Language for pattern matching
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:57AM

Rolling with Rails 2.1 – part 2
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:55AM

Rolling with Rails 2.1 – part 1
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:53AM

21 ruby tricks
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:52AM

Javascript information visualisation toolkit
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:52AM

Super Mario Cart in Javascript
Added on 05/27/2008 at 11:49AM

Faster Wireless Networks
Added on 05/26/2008 at 09:55PM

Web users getting more selfish
Added on 05/26/2008 at 02:24PM

Advice to Twitter – Think ahead
Added on 05/23/2008 at 03:30PM

2nd gen OLPC is an e-book
Added on 05/22/2008 at 09:39AM

Top 10 worst entry level tech jobs in US
Added on 05/22/2008 at 09:36AM

Hash Functions – Theoretical basics mixing and evaluations of Algorithms
Added on 05/22/2008 at 09:26AM

Seth Godin – How to read a business book
Added on 05/22/2008 at 09:22AM

Geohashing comic – its easy really
Added on 05/22/2008 at 09:20AM

A selection of awesome business cards
Added on 05/22/2008 at 08:37AM

Doloto – splitting up ajax calls
Added on 05/22/2008 at 08:33AM

How to deploy a skunkworks application
Added on 05/21/2008 at 09:17AM

PC World – Top 50 Technology visionaries
Added on 05/21/2008 at 08:51AM

Evolutionary algorithms now surpass human designers
Added on 05/21/2008 at 07:33AM