Are you tethering?

Connecting my laptop through the iPhone is extremely simple (go in Settings -> General -> Network) and a clear message is always available on top of the screen. Well done and very useful sometime.









What I found really useful is the landscape mode, when you need the keyboard is a big difference and a huge improvement for emails, blogging...



The last thing I tested so far is the copy/paste, this is a so basic feature but you end up using it a lot.
I'll come back as soon as I found new useful features...

-- Post From My iPhone

Charting Experiments

Data visualization on the web has been for a while an area without much innovation. You basically had 2 solutions:

1. Generating a static image on the server side
2. Using flash as a way to make more dynamic graphs

Unfortunately both solutions have their own limitations. For the server-side image generation it is obvious: the result is static. For flash: flash itself can be a limitation since it is not an open standard.
Since a year or so, we did see some simple solution based on canvas (html5) but now some groups are experimenting more advanced solutions based on web standard. 2 solutions that I really find interesting are Protovis from a Stanford University group and Processing.js from John Resig (Mr jQuery himself). They are still experimentation but they show a new approach with a real touch of innovation. Let's now wait to see if they will become more than lab research tools, I do believe!

(not) welcome to Macau

A drawing from South China Morning Post after a couple of HK residents have been rejected to enter in Macau (journalists, politicians...). Even China is accepting them...
Things are not really going well here related to human rights. There are more and more "VIP" people from HK rejected and nobody knows why. The local government did not explain anything...spring is going to be hot between Macau and HK ;-)



-- Post From My iPhone

Gmail on steroid

The guys in Google working on Gmail are not stopping their innovation while the crisis is around...and this is good for us! They have launched (in beta only, within the "labs") a couple of very useful features:

• Tasks. You can simply add email to a todolist, it is simple but extremely useful. From there you manage your task (due date, completed, related email,notes...). I started to use it and did not stop.
  
• Offline mode. This is a killer feature for sure! With Google Gears installed (while HTML5 is on the way) you can use Gmail even without any Internet connection. This is a big step forward to make Gmail a powerful tool. This offline is also available for Google Reader and Documents (Calendar is also coming). With those enhancements (plus a couple of smaller one), I gave up to use Apple Mail for my main pro email account, Gmail is really convenient.
• Gtalk plugin. A few month ago Google release a browser plugin to add audio and video to your Gmail chat. Basically you got a skype replacement inside Gmail, this is great too.

There are many more new "Labs" features that could be useful for anyone, don't miss them!

Since I know that all those good guys in Google are reading my blog everyday ;-) I would like to request a few more things:

1. please help us to easily manage multiple gmail accounts.
   
2. If Google Gears was able to install in Mozilla Prism we could have a kind of desktop client for GMail...and first point would be already solved!
   

Don't forget that all those new features are provided in "Labs" and are still experimental.

My view on CMS - the backend, part 1

CMS is a complex topic, everybody is talking about this and everybody has a different approach. I don't want to give my own concept here (should I have one ;-) but simply have a practical approach based on a project we have to do for one of our customer (largest casino in the world...). We did the first version of its CMS based on a typical Symfony 1.0/Propel/MySQL5.

We are now in the process to re-write the all application to make it useful for further projects and customers and optimize things based on our small experience. We decided to make the "big sf jump": symfony 1.2/Doctrine! It is not an easy choice since we did not have yet any experience neither with symfony 1.2 nor doctrine but we believed it was worth to make the jump specially due to the new admin generator and the form framework, not mentioning all the goodies from doctrine itself.

When you build a CMS, it is quite common to think first about the backend that will allow your customer to manage its content in an more-or-less easy to use interface. This interface is a key for a CMS success (along with its flexibility and extensibility). On my course to draw the backend interface I've tried to pick the best patterns (at least to me) from SPIP (a french CMS), Joomla and Wordpress. Thanks to Balsamic, I quickly draw what would be our CMS backend, at least for page management (the central part of the cms). See below for mockups.

List of pages

The list of pages should use symfony admin generator to keep its flexibility, therefore there is a lot of work on css and javascript fronts. A few things will become ajax (I will publish later my 2 cents jquery plugin to ajaxified a symfony admin generator list): pagination and the new live search.

For the list of filters, I wanted to make them less obstrusive, with some ideas from Google Docs search options (show and hide them) as well as Apple iTunes smartlist configuration. The latest will be a little bit more tricky to do...probably not for version 1!

For the need of a CMS we add the following elements to the default admin generator:

• Live search will "ajaxly" filter the list according to a search on title and content of the page.
• New batch actions such as "copy" and "move" pages.
• A left sidebar to navigate in a tree way (based on nested set). This navigation will filter the table in the same way as live search (ajax as well).
  

As we use Doctrine, we will use of lot of out-of-the-box behaviors: Nested set, versioning, i18n and of course Timestampable.

Next step we will look at the page edition view...see you there!

Finally, bats can use Firefox ;-)

Mozilla Labs is a team of guys building the future of the web. They are doing a lot of amazing work (most of it only alpha or beta for time being) and open doors for radically new ways for our future interactions with the web. They have been working on Weave, Ubiquity or Prism. I really like those projects and want to use them in the future.

Here is a video to show how to make Firefox accessible for bats.


Ubiquity Tutorial: Turn a page upside-down from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Of course, it is useless for humans (except...Batman ;-) but it shows the power of this kind of technology.

New Apple product: I don't want it!

It's really fun and well done. Enjoy!