For those who are not familiar, FreshBooks is a great time tracking and invoicing tool for individuals and small business. As a FreshBooks customer I'm looking forward to digging into this new offering.
With the release of FreshBooks Report Cards, FreshBooks will provide an ongoing series of publicly accessible quarterly reports, detailing the financial performance of these workers through metrics like amount invoiced, average time to collect, amount invoiced per client, percentage of revenue from new clients, and percentage of revenue that is recurring.
While 1.7PR is not a feature complete release in the 1.7 series, it nevertheless contains some very important features scheduled for the 1.7 production release:
New Zend_AMF component
Dojo Toolkit 1.2.0
New ZendX_JQuery component
Support for dijit editor
Metadata API in Zend_Cache
Google book search API
Performance enhancements
Application-wide locale with other i18n enhancements
Jason Fried is something of a contrarian, his tiny, Chicago-based company 37signals has been a major force in the tech industry over the past few years. Sure, it doesn't have the market cap of a Google or a Sun Microsystem, but it also doesn't have the overhead, and a company like Sun would have gladly paid a few hundred million for the sort of reputation Fried's 37signals has developed from nothing.
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.
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr’s Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queueing system to do the rest.
Obfuscated TCP is a transport layer protocol that adds opportunistic encryption. It’s designed to hamper and detect large-scale wiretapping and corruption of TCP traffic on the Internet.
Guido van Rossum, a Google App Engine developer, has released into open source the Rietveld Code Review Tool at http://codereview.appspot.com. This web application ties into a subversion repository to create a work flow for the review and commenting of newly submitted code.
This tool was born from an Google internal tool that Guido developed called Mondrian. Guido gave a Google TechTalk on the Mondrian tool called Mondrian Code Review On The Web (YouTube link). This TechTalk provides insight into how the work flow operates and how helpful a tool like this can be. Perhaps something to play with on your next project…
IBM developerWorks has a great article by Kristopher William Zyp on the tools and methods used to analyze Ajax application performance titled Ajax performance analysis. It provides a good overview of what affects an Ajax based application, the tools to probe these aspects and actions developers can take to help speed things up. Much of the information revolves around YSlow and Firebug and provides a great overview for developers who may be unfamiliar with nuances of client side development.
So what makes Aptana Cloud different? From the looks of it they are offering an very specific LAMP based architecture stack that has tight integration with the Aptana IDE. They Offer developers synchronization and deployment management tools as well as an “integrated service management console”. Aptana Cloud offers administrators management tools, dashboards & stats, Google analytics integration, status tools and backup options. They offer development teams the ability to manage access to projects through Roles and Rights.
The interesting difference is that Aptana is partnering with Joyent to implement the Aptana Cloud solution on Joyents virtulatization platform. Aptana expects that in the future developers can select from a list of virtulatization providers including Amazon and Google.
From the sound of it Aptana is really looking to place their IDE at the center of web application development and give developers all they features they need to implement, deploy and manage web applications with one tool. The service is currently in closed beta but you can request early access (I signed up several weeks ago and no word yet).
This strategy is stated perfectly by Flickr’s Myles Grant: The Flickr engineering team is obsessed with making pages load as quickly as possible. To that end, we’re refactoring large amounts of our code to do only the essential work up front, and rely on our queueing system to do the rest.
Guido van Rossum, a Google App Engine developer, has released into open source the Rietveld Code Review Tool at 
