Imified is an instant messenger bot that works on the AIM, MSN, GoogleTalk/Jabber (Yahoo IM currently offline) networks and offers access to a growing number of web applications (WordPress, Blogger, GoogleCalendar, MovableType and others), as well as productivity tools like notes, reminders, and todo’s.  Pretty slick.

Every time I see something innovative and creative as this I get the urge to take my degrees and throw them in the trash. Only thinking outside the box can take us to another level of human to computer interaction. The good news is that it seems that we’ll see some frameworks on the desktop that will allow us to do similar stuff as well (WPF, Core Animation, Flash).

I own a Radeon X1600, it’s a medium priced/performance card from ATI that belongs to the X1000 family and whose driver support is coming up gradually since last year. I’ve been waiting for the new drivers that should be out this year with the support for AIGLX for quite some time now and I said to myself enough is enough. I already knew that XGL was a quick and dirty fix and the latest drivers don’t hide that they contain some support for it so I said to myself “what the heck, let’s try this sucker”. I’ve tried it several times before but it always failed. This time however, bingo, following the XGL Gentoo HOWTO things went smoothly, even Beryl installed quite well. I suppose because finally things were getting more stable and official. All I can say is… Wow.

(pun on Vista’s Wow intended)

Check your knowledge of the GoF design patters by doing this crossword puzzle.

Here’s another nice keyboard modification, Jules Verne style.

Thanks to Snook, we have a nice cheat sheet for Prototype. Enjoy!

I’ve noticed this interesting wrapper to prototype that allows you to print some interesting Canvas/SVG graphs. It seems it’s a new trend these days and we can see dojo is also experimenting with a graphing component. On the other hand if you prefer a Java server side image generator that doesn’t require a browser with latest features check out the CeWolf graphing tag library, I’ll be adding it to my project soon. A bonus for our readers, bunch of ajax links on one page, we surf the web so you don’t have to .

One really nice and innovative approach to visualizing news comes from Marcos Weskamp that made a treemap implementation in Flash, aggregating news from the Google news service. It’s funny that something so Web 2.0 comes from 2004. Permalink notizie italiane.

If anyone of you has worked even just a little bit with the Calendar API I’m sure you have found that it’s very unintuitive and not very functional. An excellent library that manages to fix a lot of aches that the plain JDK delivers is Joda Time. I’ve started using it in my current project and made certain things trivial (and fun) to do. Modeling the time domain using a Object Oriented API is definitely a challenging task and no wonder it took so long to produce something of quality. What’s even better, the guy behind Joda Time is getting on the board of JSR 310 which should guarantee that JDK 7 will finally get a decent API for managing time.

I’ve stumbled over a blog that pointed me to a 4 part video lesson on javascript held by Yahoo! JavaScript Architect Douglas Crockford called “The Javascript programming language” and I must say I enjoyed it very much. It certainly cleared up some doubts that I’ve had so I’m recommending it to everyone. One excellent tip is the existence of JSLint tool and I intent on using it often when I write my own javascript. This whole thing lead me to the Yahoo! UI Library Theather video presentations where there is plenty of material to look at including more advanced stuff from Crockford and a presentation from the author of firebug Joe Hewitt.

I’ve always snubbed a little bit the entire Yahoo! development community but I must admit that all things I’ve seen so far are always of professional quality and excellent documentation. They really seem to digg Web 2.0 (pun intended) . One thing I noted is that Crockford doesn’t encourage the use of $ which is used quite a lot by my favorite javascript library prototype so I was put down to earth a bit.

I’m also getting interested in GWT and I can’t wait to see it grow with time. I really like that the js produced that gets to the client is custom made for the UI that you create and you can avoid sending huge js files which is an issue with most plain old js libraries.