Daring Fireball Linked List: jQTouch
But the demos show just how far short even best-of-breed iPhone web apps fall compared to native apps.
John Gruber writes about jQTouch demos saying they “aren’t great.” It made me wonder what in particular he finds lacking – as those demos look exactly the same as their native counter parts to me. Or – was it that they lacked “features” which would be “not the fault of the framework.”
I think you can do *so* much in safari on the iphone now days… it really hasn’t been explored very thoroughly.
First, Do No Harm :: UXmatters
Being able to make the necessary tradeoffs between conflicting constraints takes skill. I’ve always viewed constraints as my friends. They make me more creative. By thoroughly understanding the limitations that constrain a design solution, I can make the right tradeoffs and come up with the best design solution possible under those constraints. Plus, balancing different constraints often forces me to think outside the box, so inspires innovative design solutions.
Excellent and long article talking about various user-time-wasting or user-annoying things to avoid in your UI.

If you were able to say: “Fuck IE6″ (at least being able to say: “it will work, but will be old school.” Do you think we live in a world now where the browsers have “enough” features? That is to say – the javascript engines are fast enough to simulate features of other browsers and frameworks are pervasive enough to have already done that for you?
I watched this video last night (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/storage/) which was well done. Basically – YUI has taken the html5 spec and ported it to other browsers. There’s Raphael: http://raphaeljs.com/ which has taken SVG and moved it to other browsers.
It seems to me that, while I can’t wait till IE9 or 8.5 support stuff that Firefox and Safari have supported for years, the modern landscape is looking pretty good.
Computers are getting fast enough and the javascript engines are good enough that we are consistently better able to simulate APIs in the “crappy browsers.”
What do you think?

Hey all,
I’ve been working on a little website called Croon My Tune with my
friend Mike. I’d love it if you’d check it out
(http://croonmytune.com). Basically, you just type in any words you
want, pick a tune, and then someone will sing those words for you
(it’s like a modern, online, singing telegram). You then have a home
for your song (or “croon,” as we call it) that you can send via email,
IM, Facebook, etc. It’s worked really nicely so far for a bunch of
uses (invitations, weird emails, etc). I want to hear how it works for
you.
At this point, it costs $4.99/croon (we’re working to reduce that).
We’re still actively developing the product,
but I think it’s at a point now where I can share it with my greatest
advisors: you, my friend, family and blog readers.
Thanks for checkin’ out the site. I think you’ll like it. It’s really
fun to work on, that’s for sure.
Want to hear this post sung?
http://croonmytune.com/songs/90d5a220-b839-11de-8ded-1231390a4e28
2 other examples? http://croonmytune.com/welcome/examples
Support the VRF
Seth’s Blog: Things to ask before you redo your website
I think these are perhaps the tenth and eleventh questions you should ask, not the first two. Here’s my list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel:

We were seeing a json error in the couchdb logs. Apparently 0.9.1 (because of MochiWeb) doesn’t like certain UTF characters. Unfortunately, this causes replication to totally hang. That’s a bummer. It looks like it’s been patched:
http://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/COUCHDB-333
However, that’s not in the 0.9.1 release.

Confused about CouchDB changes API?
If the couchdb book confused you regarding the changes api that supposedly exists:
http://books.couchdb.org/relax/reference/change-notifications
I think that’s a 0.10 release feature (and not yet in 0.9.1). I stumbled upon this API which seems to do something very similar: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_Document_API?action=show&redirect=HttpDocumentApi (scroll down to “all_docs_by_seq”).

Avoding the “Dog pile” effect
How to avoid the dog-pile effect on your Rails app | Plataforma Blog
Imagine that in a certain hour, this page on your application receives 4 requests per second on average. In this case, between the first request and the query results being returned, 5 seconds will pass and something around 20 requests will hit your server. The problem is, all those 20 requests will miss the cache and your application will try to execute the query in all of them, consuming a lot of CPU and memory resources. This is the dog-pile effect.
Nice article on how to prevent multiple requests from triggering the same long-running query.




