Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
Every millisecond counts.
Simplicity is powerful.
Engage beginners and attract experts.
Dare to innovate.
Design for the world.
Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
Be worthy of people’s trust.
Add a human touch.
Its hard to argue with this list. But as Google alludes to in their post, true success comes from the right balance of all ten. Something that always seems illusive when your in the thick of it, but extraordinarily simple when viewed after the fact.
A great podcast via IT Conversations, Technometria series. In depth discussion of Ajax implementations, design considerations and toolkits. It offers some great insight into Ajax application development by a veteran in field.
IT Conversations Overview
In this edition of Technometria, Phil and Scott talk to Joseph Smarr, the Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo. Plaxo makes great use of AJAX in its product offerings. The gang starts by discussing techniques for overcoming cross-site scripting limitations including Javascript workholes and JSON APIs (also known as JSON-P or JSON callbacks).
The talk turns to performance considerations for Web sites making heavy use of Javascript and some techniques for making AJAX faster. Finally the show ends with a discussion of the coming open social Web and the current state of the OpenSocial proposal.
The following email was sent to Amazon Web Services customers on 4/23/08 announcing the new pricing structure for data transfers
Dear Amazon Web Services developers,
We’ve often told you that one of our goals is to drive down costs continuously and to pass those savings on to you. We have been able to reduce our costs for data transfer, so we’re pleased to announce that we’re lowering our pricing for data transfer, effective May 1, 2008. You’ll notice below that we’ve reduced price at every existing usage tier of transfer out, as well as added an additional tier for the heaviest users.
Current data transfer price (through April 30, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.180 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.160 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.
New data transfer price (effective May 1, 2008)
$0.100 per GB - data transfer in
$0.170 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.130 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.110 per GB - next 100 TB / month data transfer out
$0.100 per GB - data transfer out / month over 150 TB
Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of the Amazon service. Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-US, Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon SQS is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB). Data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3-Europe will be charged at regular rates.
The result of this pricing change is that all customers will see a reduction in the price of transfer out. For example, a customer transferring 50TB a month will save 16% and a customer transferring 500TB a month will save 26% on transfer with the new pricing. Please see http://aws.amazon.com for full pricing information for each service.
If you arent farmiliar with Microformats you can get up to speed over at microformats.org. The Operator Firefox addon by Michael Kaply allows you to see what pages have microformat information embeded in them and allows you to do something with it.
It does what you expect, turns hCard info into downloadable vCards or shoots it over to your favorite email app. It turns hCalendar into iCal events for adding to Outlook, google calendar or yahoo calendar. Whats really cool is that its actions are extensible and are called “user scripts”. You can write your own user scripts targetted at whatever microformats you want to manipulate.
It also has a debug function which allows you to see the raw micformat data as well as view the html markup that defines it. An indespensible too for implementing microformats. Enjoy
I might be able to rattle off two or maybe three ways to do CSS image replacement, but not Nine. CSS-Tricks presents nine different approaches for swaping text with images via CSS. Some of these approaches I wouldn’t ever really consider a valid way to implement the solution. But there are some interesting approaches here and it was an enlightening read.
Amazon announced today, via an email to its EC2 subscribers, that they are working on a persistent storage feature for their EC2 service. It seems that it would be implemented as an attached volume to your EC2 instance. It will behave like an unformatted hard drive or block device. There will also be tools to allow developers to take snapshots of these volumes and back them up to S3. Sizes range from 1GB - 1TB. Multiple volumes can be attached to a single EC2 instance. Its designed to add a high throughput, low latency storage option to EC2 machines.
Here is the full email:
Dear Amazon EC2 Developer,
Many Amazon EC2 customers have been requesting that we let them know ahead of time about features that are currently under development so that they can better plan for how that functionality might integrate with their applications. To that end, we would like to share some details about a major upcoming feature that many of you have requested - persistent storage for EC2.
This new feature provides reliable, persistent storage volumes, for use with Amazon EC2 instances. These volumes exist independently from any Amazon EC2 instances, and will behave like raw, unformatted hard drives or block devices, which may then be formatted and configured based on the needs of your application. The volumes will be significantly more durable than the local disks within an Amazon EC2 instance. Additionally, our persistent storage feature will enable you to automatically create snapshots of your volumes and back them up to Amazon S3 for even greater reliability.
You will be able to create volumes ranging in size from 1 GB to 1 TB, and will be able to attach multiple volumes to a single instance. Volumes are designed for high throughput, low latency access from Amazon EC2, and can be attached to any running EC2 instance where they will show up as a device inside of the instance. This feature will make it even easier to run everything from relational databases to distributed file systems to Hadoop processing clusters using Amazon EC2.
When persistent storage is launched, Amazon EC2 will be adding several new APIs to support the persistent storage feature. Included will be calls to manage your volume (CreateVolume, DeleteVolume), mount your volume to your instance (AttachVolume, DetachVolume) and save snapshots to Amazon S3 (CreateSnapshot, DeleteSnapshot).
This new functionality is already being used privately by a handful of EC2 customers, and will be publicly available later this year. We will be expanding the private offering as we get closer to launch. Please sign up if you are interested in participating.
We hope this information is useful to you as you plan, design and deploy your applications in Amazon EC2.
Firecookie adds some much needed cookie viewing and manipulation tools to Firebug. It comes as its own Firefox extentension and adds a new “cookies” tab to your Firebug console. You can view cookies, manipulate them, remove them and even create new ones. It also plugs itself into Firebug search so you can easily filter down the list of cookies. Very handy extension. Thanks Jan!
The rumors are true. You can now share videos on Flickr… that is if you are a Pro member. Also the video’s must be 90 seconds or less. Check this sample…
If you interested in killing a little title with Flickrs new video feature then check out the Fridgets group. Whats Fridgets you ask? Per the group description:
Fridgets. Short films of people opening their fridge door (with the camera inside the fridge) and closing it again.
App Engine is a system for running applications on Googles infrastructure. It DOES NOT emulate a virtual system like EC2. Because of this, you have to follow Google rules for application development:
Current Python only
A YAML based app config file allows you to provide meta data about the app and do URL to “action” mapping
Most all python frameworks are supported - Google seems to make special considerations for Django
Some aspects of the python feature set are disabled like local file I/O, Sockets, ect
Google provides APIs for common app tasks like DB storage, User authentication, URL fetching and email.
A Windows, OS X & Linux based SDK is available that provides app engine emulation locally as well as the tools to publish your app
Some current limitations include: “500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.”
Its currently in Beta and theirs a waiting list to get an account. No cost structure announced yet (currently its free). It will be very interesting to see how this develops.
I ran across this post on the Google Blog describing what makes a web design Googly. Here are Googles 10 design principles:
The following email was sent to Amazon Web Services customers on 4/23/08 announcing the new pricing structure for data transfers
I might be able to rattle off two or maybe three ways to do CSS image replacement, but not Nine. 
The rumors are true. You can now 
App Engine is a system for running applications on Googles infrastructure. It DOES NOT emulate a virtual system like EC2. Because of this, you have to follow Google rules for application development: