• http://prototypejs.org launched along with the final version of Prototype.js v1.5. Finally a decent site for the prototype framework which still is one of my favourite javascript frameworks. The site offers good tutorials and finally some more than decent API documentation since that was the only thing prototype was lacking.
• Also Joe Hewitt, the creator of the famous and absolutely fantastic Firebug plugin for Firefox, took the time to write a debugging tutorial for Dr. Dobb’s. Be sure to check it out if you are somewhat into professional Javascripting.

What’s in a name you say … well in this one there’s alot. Netvibes just got so so much better. They added tabbed pages, speeded up RSS feeds, added icons (Famfamfam icons rule) and hover captions for feed posts, you can now aggregate feeds requiring authentication which means you can add all kinds of info to your netvibes startpage. There is simply too much to tell about … just go check for yourself!

Netvibes just got a worthy alternative to Bloglines as my main feedreader with their Anise version.

But it doesn’t end with just a free Ajax framework. They also introduced the Yahoo! Design Patterns Library, a resource for developers where Yahoo! professionals share their views and expertise on developing web 2.0 applications.

To top it all off the UI guys at Yahoo! started their own blog called YUIBlog. It’s already in my feedslist, what are you waiting for?

I went on and completed all the fields but accidentaly hit the enter button while still typing in my email. Ofcourse the site bumped me back to the same screen and displayed a nice message in Red that i didn’t complete all required fields but to my astonishment the site language suddenly seemed to be Spanish? Since i don’t know a word spanish i just returned to the homepage, looked for a language button, found in at the very bottom of the site (D’oh!) and went back to successfully complete my registration.

Musicstrands is a nice webapplication, it allows you to share, manage and explore you favourite music genres, playlists and artists. The idea behind it is great. Although i think some features are a little overkill. Don’t get me wrong, the MyStrands plugin for iTunes and Mediaplayer is great, there aren’t many websites who offer their own desktop applications along with their website. As is the wishlist, the ability to form usergroups, arrange playlists, upload photo’s. You can even start your own blog on musicstrands. This is a feature more and more websites are integrating. StockExchange (www.sxc.hu) recently added blogs to their functionality too.

If you find an artist or song you like you get served direct links to online shops offering the album or single tracks. This is based on your location, overhere in Belgium for example, I got redirected to discoweb, amazon or Fnac. All of them shops who deliver CD’s at your door or offer them for paid download. The only drawback is that they redirected me to the spanish sites of discoweb and fnac, and unfortunatly i don’t speak spanish. Result: one less CD sold. But they are forgiven, it’s still a beta.

One feature i’m missing is the ability to suggest artists. There are millions of artists around the globe and personally i found that many of my favourite artists weren’t listed on the site: dEUS, Absynthe Minded, Admiral Freebee, Zornik, Soulwax, Two, etc to name a few. Next to that the majority of artists are american but i guess that’s something we europeans will have to get used to since almost all web2.0 applications focus on the american market. That brings us back to my favourite artists, from which the majority is based in europe. Musicstrands does have offices in Spain but the european musicscene still has a long way to go on Musicstrands.

I was excited to start using musicstrands at first, but after half a day of browsing, adding, recommending and creating playlists i couldn’t say i found new artists to my liking. An option that would allow us to suggest new artists or just add your own favourite artists would help alot, but maybe that’s something for Musicstrands when they get out of beta. Overall Musicstrands offers great functionality combined with loads of content on some musicgenre’s and some great way of recommending music (although i wonder how on heavens earth i got a recommendation for Prince??).

• Todolist with colored items
• POP/imap email integration
• Yahoo! Mail integration
• Color Coding RSS feeds
• Gmail module upgrade

Netvibes is sure one of the best things that hit my browser lately. It’s absolutely wonderfull to have this amount of information (3 different emailaccounts, all my Rssfeeds, 4 Flickr modules and a Todo list) onscreen the moment you fire up your browser.

1. Tim Berners Lee Blog
   Timbl’s blog as he likes to call it himself, big daddy has finally started his own blog and it’s damn interesting to read about his view on how the web is evolving.
2. Netvibes Personal Homepage
   Netvibes is a customizable web 2.0 homepage solution that is just better than it’s competitors, just register for free and start straight away! It’s a marvel!
3. Mooflex CMS
   Mooflex is a totally awsome CMS built with PHP and completely Ajaxified. It uses smarty templating and you need to check it out!
4. Web 2.0 and usability
   D. Keith Robinson comments on usability and accessibility of what some of us like to call web2.0
5. Access by design by Sarah Horton
   A great book about accessibility and usability on the web

Via: Sitepoint.com

http://en.helldesign.pl/

http://www.mad4milk.net/entries/mooflex for more info and the demo!

Anyway, i went on registering and that went pretty smooth, nothing to complaint here. After activating my account they asked for all kinds of information like your home address, your bio, your status, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc … but you can just skip that part and get to uploading right away. The uploading of picture and video went fairly smooth, you can upload multiple files at once and label them individually afterwards. Nothing to comment on that, works like it should.

Personally i found navigating someone boltfolio not that easy, certainly if it contains alot of photo’s, video’s or audioclips. Smaller thumbnails would have helped alot. I would prefer something in between the size of tumbnails they use on your personal boltfolio page and those on your album page. Once on the detailpage of a photo though, the photostream navigation works good, but we know it works good as Flickr already uses this kind of navigation.

Last but not least i want to comment on the implementation of Ajax on the site. Boltfolio uses Ajax to manage item sets, add tags to assets, etc … Nice implementation, but when i hit the view-souce button something blew me off my feet. The site still uses table cells for site layout!!! I forgive them for this as they are still being in beta but please … if you implement Ajax, use CSS as layout method and make sure you have a proper DOM to work with. Don’t just slap up some tables for layout and start adding Ajax features to make it look fancy.

Overall Boltfolio has some nice features but some things really bother me and refrain me from considering to use this site regularly. Maybe they will fix several of the things i discussed above when the site leaves it’s beta phase but as with many other projects this site doesn’t feel like beta (What are google ads doing in a beta?).