Another Twitter ( http://twitter.com ) API script announced today, Did Yuh’ Know? ( http://didyuh.com ). Did Yuh’ will allow Twitter users to prefix their messages with DYK: or YUH: to note that their message contains short fact, clipping, or idea. Messages with the prefixes will be displayed on the Did Yuh’ site. This service is similar to Sidebar Creative’s http://overheard.it/ and Matt & Mark Armendariz’s (they’re friends but not actually related) http://yayandnay.com

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I’ve been playing with Summize for a bit now. Their super-fast queries are just really gratifying. I’m also a fan of Get Satisfaction (and trying to get satisfaction in life in general as well), though my relationship with GS is much more recent. Yesterday I found an article that showed me something pretty cool that GS is doing. They call it Overheard.

What is Overheard?

Overheard is a new feature of Get Satisfaction that bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Overheard lists recent Twitter posts (”tweets”) related to a company and allows any user, employee, or customer to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic.

When somebody replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a reply to that person to let them know a conversation was started in response to their issue.

So now, whenever you post something on Twitter about a company, brand, service or product that’s been added to Get Satisfaction, you’re indirectly adding content to Get Satisfaction. It’s similar to when users of Facebook would accidentally add content to their profiles with Beacon, but not so creepy.

I think it went up sometime last week, but the first ever corporate website for Time Inc is now live.

Working with the great folks over at Rokkan I was asked to handle the front end dev for this project. With a streamlined version of Blueprint and without the use of any weighty javascript libraries (just SiFR and Swffix), we went from comps to done in about 10 days time. At the time of hand off everything was wcag and section 508 level 2 complient, and aside from inline images, it uses only 13 image files in the presentation layer.

So I came across some very exciting news today… Adobe Labs has released a beta of a Flex compiler that runs on your server.

The Flex module for Apache and Microsoft IIS provides web-tier compilation of MXML and ActionScript files on Apache and IIS web servers. This module lets you rapidly compile, test and deploy an application by simply requesting the main application file from a web browser, similar to working with server-side scripting languages such as PHP, ColdFusion or JSP.
…
You do not need a J2EE application server to use the web-tier compiler. The Flex module for Apache and IIS works with just the web server and a Java runtime environment (JRE).

So what does this mean to me?

No more compiling then posting, easier collaborative development, easier source management, lower step in for other developers into the world of Flex. I wonder what it will be like to develop an HTML/JavaScript app with Flex and then use this Apache Flex module… I also wonder how it performs and if that initial compilation time competes with just calling a pre-compiled Flex app.
In the meantime, I’m going to play with it on my local dev machine and see if it allows me to use a development process that’s more familiar to me.

It seems to me like I haven’t been posting lately, well, it’s because I haven’t. Now that I’m ready to get back in the swing of things it seems like there’s a good amount of news going around.

Firstly and closest to home…..

Ultra16 has a new home

Two weeks ago, we feverishly packed up all of our stuff and crammed all of the workstations, desks, books, mannequins, a couple hundred pounds of magazines, and a few small plants into two 24″ trucks and hauled them a couple of blocks up the street. We are now the neighbors of the lovely free weekly The Village Voice.
I don’t really feel like embedding a google map right now, so here’s a link: 36 Cooper Square

Apollo is no more

Now despite the catching name of Apollo, Adobe’s lovely platform agnostic application rendering engine thingy has be rebranded Adobe Air (Adobe Integrated Runtime). If you haven’t at least done any playing around with Air, I suggest you do. This is how the folks over at Adobe Labs put it.

Adobe® AIR™, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

The great folks over at Aptana now directly support Air as well as RoR. These are great times to be a clientside developer.

Safari for Win?

Ok ok, I know that if I had the couple of extra bucks to buy an Intel Mac I could run either OSX or Win either with Bootcamp, Parallels (which recently has made it’s way to V3.0) and I think there might be a few other choices. No matter what my choice, in order to do any testing with safari I’d still have to have a box to run OSX, until now.
Apple has now made the Safari 3 Beta public! And you know what? It runs on windows too! Now all of the great stuff from Webkit, will be available to me on my HP laptop. Only downside is in order to support Safari 1.3-2.0 I still need to drag out my old G4 from the far corner below my desk.

That’s right, in a couple of the few spare minutes I find every week, we managed to get a new blog together for Ultra16.
There you’ll be able to find some Ultra-specific posts, news, and general ideas that are going on around the office.
If you’d like to subscribe, you can find the feed here.

Location: New York, NY

URL: http://www.ultra16.com

Description

1. Love what you do, we do and that’s why we’re here.
2. Be great at what you do, we try our best to be great, so it’s fair to ask it of those we work with.
3. Never claim you know it all, unless I’ve bought a book with your name on it.

We’re not just looking for a specific skill-set, just smarts and personality.

So let us know if you can answer a few of the following, or have any other interesting stuff notched on your belt:

• Do you know all the basic standards compliant, unobtrusive, semantic and accessible stuff?
• Know $()?
• Have you worked with AS3? Can you Delegate?
• LAMP, .NET, Rails. can you sling two out of three?
• Are you friends with designers? Did you used to be one?
• Have you worked on the agency side before? If not, tell us why.

We are Ultra16, we have a big green wall, an office in NoHO, AirTunes, and often hang out at the office just because we want to. We also have been around since the 90’s and work with clients who you’ve probably heard of.

To apply hit us up at humanresources@ultra16.com

This ad was originally listed at
http://jobs.37signals.com/jobs/1019

I was flipping through the Google Blog and came across this article. Turns out that today marks the second annual World Usability Day. With events taking place today around the world the Usability Professionals Association has put together this international holiday of sorts to bring the issues of usability and “making life easy” back into the minds of web professionals.

World Usability Day, November 14, 2006, is for everyone who’s ever asked these questions. This Earth Day style event, focused on raising awareness and visibility of usability engineering and user centered design, is currently being organized by volunteers and local event coordinators from around the world. Whether a usability professional or just an enthusiastic (or frustrated) user, each participant is making a contribution to “making life easy”.

http://www.worldusabilityday.org/about

Earlier today Ajaxian mentioned Eric Pascarello’s proposal for an Ajax Boot Camp. A two day adventure filled with lectures and hands-on coding. Some of questions Eric plans to answer with this workshop are:

• what is the consequences of not using caching on the client?
• what happens with session?
• what causes that memory leak?

Current plans are to host the camp in the Baltimore/DC area (my old stomping grounds) sometime in september. You can read the original post and keep yourself updated here.

Now drop and give me twenty.

Since I’m the kind of guy, that’s always busy but somehow usually bored, I decided to give naterkane.com a new look and feel this past weekend.
It’s based on the Fauxed wordpress template, and over the next week, will continue to get a few more changes as well as I work out some browser degradation issues, and finish implementing back button and bookmarking functionality in the portfolio.

Also I finally got around to reillustrating my glasses for the first time in 6 years. I’ve had this pair for more than half that time now and I figured the logo illustration needed an upgrade as well. New NaterKane™ logo typography is in the works since I have now just realized that the font I designed for the original NaterKane brand was completely and hopelessly lost when my computer gave up the ghost last year. With that, I’m taking typeface suggestions from anyone who cares, if you have a favorite font that you’d like to see my name in, email it to me at nater at naterkane.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear from you, so please leave a comment.