Thought Garage

Cool infographic illuminating some differences between Web Designers and Web Developers. Source : SixRevisions

This is pretty cool online show application built  on Silverlight technologies. Silverlight streaming video, excellent typography, really cool art work,  slick animations and tons of relevant content synchronized with the video. http://everybodysbusiness.msn.com/   Content all spread out nicely.

Here is a great opportunity to learn more about Silverlight. A FULL day FREE Fire Starter Event on Silverlight on 2nd Dec 2010.  Great news is that the event is streamed online so you can watch from anywhere in the world.  Register for the event here .

Windows Live Spaces, the Microsoft’s Blogging platform will be shutdown early next year (16th March to be precise) and is offering to migrate your current blog to Wordpress.com . The email I received announcing this is quite confusing. The email subject says ‘Changes coming to your Windows Live Space’. I expected that it may have been upgraded with more features.  But they are simply shutting it down, and they appear to have trouble saying it. We are very excited to announce our collaboration with a premier and innovative blogging service, WordPress.com , to offer you an upgraded blogging experience. We'll help you migrate your current Windows Live Spaces blog to WordPress.com or you can download it to save for later. On March 16th, 2011 your current space will close . With the new release of Windows Live services, we've made a series of changes and improvements across our products. We chose to partner to provide our users with a fantastic blogging solution. However...

Groupon 's Unsubscribe screen asks you to ‘Punish’ a team member that recommended Email Subscriptions whenever you unsubscribe to those Email notifications. Nice, personal, playful and bring you back to interacting with their site, even after you decided to go away. Loved it.

Just watched Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" on Active Player . Source : Velocity 2010: Aladdin Nassar, "Worldwide Inventory of Last-mile Bandwidths & Network Latencies" from O'Reilly Velocity Conference ( Feed ) via Active Player It is totally surprising to see that Hotmail is actually better/faster in Safari browser on the Mac than any browser/OS. ( Source : PPT )

Chris Anderson and Wired offer yet another riveting conclusion (sounds like a prediction for some of us) that the Web as we know is dead as we are getting more and more connected on the internet with apps and devices. You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone. -- The Web Is Dead. Long Live Internet, Wired I agree 100%, as it is just a fact for how I consume content on the internet. Almost (99%) everything I do on the internet is done through a custom application (mostly on iPhone and iPad) rather on the web. Active Learning Suite In fact the applications I have been building as part of Active Learning suite exemplify the same conclusion about web.  Active Player lets you enjoy and learn from your favorite videos and podcasts without ever visiting a single web page. If a website doesn’t offer an RSS Feed, you can create your own RSS Feed of any content available on the internet with Active Feeds and help the rest of the world...

While posting through TweetButton , Twitter translates your URL to a short URL, say in this example, http://active-player.inspions.com to http://t.co/0toCfbl .  This is all but normal. But a nice improvement Twitter did was instead of just posting the short URL in the tweet, it posts a readable URL while still linking to the short URL. It totally cool improvement and makes tweets more readable. Compare it with this following tweet of this very post, but using Google’s short URL.

Just watched Lifecycle of a Wireframe by Nick Finck on Active Player . Wonderful session. Dive deep into the process used to create wireframes, a key deliverable for user experience designers. Hear about the principles that guide this process, how to create great wireframes (all the way down to the nitty-gritty page or screen level), and how to identify and deliver solutions that meet your clients' business goals and solve their problems. Walk away with a better understanding of what delivering awesome wireframes entails - from methodology, to process, to delivery - and how to do it yourself. If you're an information architect, interaction designer, visual designer, or regular old user experience-curious creature: this one's for you. Source : Lifecycle of a Wireframe from MIX 2010 ( Feed ) via Active Player While we can just start with a white paper and pencil to get started with wire-frames, We could also create great wireframes right in MS Power Point itself...

Look at this funny error displayed by Youtube when some thing went wrong on the servers. Is Google referring to its developers as monkeys? or am I missing some joke? “Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information :”

While discussing about the trend charts of .NET Versions over lunch yesterday, the discussion led to ASP.NET MVC and how does it fare against Ruby On Rails (ROR). Ofcourse, we are just talking about Search Patterns here.  So here is the search Patterns chart between RoR and ASP.NET MVC. It is quite a surprising chart though. Try interpreting the chart and let us know your thoughts.

Apple Safari version 5 makes it easy on your eyes to read content on websites. It smartly figures out what is real content and just shows up that. And you can easily resize content and even print the content. Printing a webpage just with content, makes it my best feature of all. Its sure the best way to read content on the web. The best way to read on the web. Safari Reader instantly banishes those blinking and flashing ads that distract you from your online articles. Say you’re browsing your favorite news site. Safari can tell if you’re on a web page with an article. Simply click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article — every page of it — instantly appears in a continuous, clutter-free view. Email, print, or zoom with a click using convenient onscreen controls. And if you change the size of the text, Safari remembers it the next time you view an article in Safari Reader. - Apple

Thanks to Google , now any web developer can have stylish designer Fonts on their web pages. As simple as including a <link> tag to a CSS file hosted on Google’s servers. For a long time, the web has lagged print and even other electronic media in typographic sophistication. To enjoy the visual richness of diverse fonts, webmasters have resorted to workarounds such as baking text into images. Thanks to browser support for web fonts, this is rapidly changing. Web fonts, enabled by the CSS3 @font-face standard, are hosted in the cloud and sent to browsers as needed. Google has been working with a number of talented font designers to produce a varied collection of high quality open source fonts for the Google Font Directory. With the Google Font API, using these fonts on your web page is almost as easy as using the standard set of so-called “web-safe” fonts that come installed on most computers. The Google Font API provides a simple, cross-browser method for using a...

Trying to download a Wordpress plugin and saw this cute error thrown by Wordpress. When something doesn’t work in software, you often get annoyed and may well get infuriated some times. But errors like this immediately put a smile on your face and let you forget all the hassle you have been going through. More over, you are more likely to love the software, a bit more than ever. Goshdarnit! Something has gone wrong with our servers. It’s probably Matt’s fault. We’ve just been notified of the problem. Hopefully this should be fixed ASAP, so kindly reload in a minute and things should be back to normal. Yet another reason to love Wordpress.

Stack Overflow has been making available ALL public data on its site as a dump every month. Though, it looked obvious now (after Stack Overflow did this) to release community contributed information back to the community, it is the first of its kind and the only site as far as I know. The community has selflessly provided all this content in the spirit of sharing and helping each other. In that very same spirit, we are happy to return the favor by providing a database dump of public data . Any body can play with that data, like do some profiling on usage patterns of the site or something. I really can’t think of any better use at this point.  Or, upload on an intranet server so that all employees can use the knowledge shared on this site (Some Indian IT companies don’t allow employees to access internet at office).

I wondered last night why NDTV.com is so desperate ? Desperate enough to put Advertisements right on top of content and those ads won’t let you read content unless you click on them. This morning, out of curiosity I checked how NDTV.com is doing by looking at traffic on the site at Compete. And this graph may explain the desperation. Unique visitors to NDTV.com dropped by 40% in 2009. Source: NDTV.com Profile on Compete.com However, the site was able to maintain number of page views more or less the same. So, it sounds little obvious that as they are loosing on unique visitors, they may want to monetize those still visiting and make up for the difference. May be! Or that Ads on top of content may be just a bug. Hopefully.

We have created a custom News Paper called “ On The Cloud ” to stay on top of News around Cloud Computing and platforms of interest to us. As of now, we have included news on the following topics : Google App Engine Microsoft’s Windows Azure Amazon Elastic Cloud Force.com and all general topics around Cloud Computing Here is a screenshot of the news paper on NewsCred.com NewsCred allows anybody to create their own news paper based on topics of interest. Unlike others, NewsCred also allows to write your own editorials that will go with the news paper.

iPad is now official and awesome. And in my view, there are two categories of products that will suffer a great deal if not completely get ignored in the market: Netbooks and e-Book readers (like Kindle) .  iPad will be a real break-through not because hardware (despite gigantic touch screen) or for software, but for great and intuitive user experience in consuming content. Finally, consuming content on web feels like reading a book or magazine, close to your heart. Something I always wanted. Hmm, I will be poor by at least another $500. The fact that any of those 140K apps that run on iPhone or iPod touch run on iPad without any modification is quite irresistible. And for those who already have an iPhone or iPod touch, using iPad is just natural and hence nothing exciting. It not only looks and feels like a gigantic iPhone or iPod touch, but powered by the same software core.

If you are investing in stock market, it pays to understand how a company (that you love to invest in) works. Like,  how does a company makes money: what kind of products/services it sell, where it is making money, what markets it operate and what are its strategies for both short term and long term revenue generation. Easier and the cheapest way to understand where the money is made, is to look through the Financial statements. But, sifting through 100s of pages of SEC filings and financial statements is not easy and decipher the meaning hidden in complex market jargon. If you are looking for a simpler way, meet Trefis . Its a nice tool, that will help understand the revenue part, in a way that is quite intuitive and easy to understand. It breaks down revenue stream as a % of each product/service a company is offering. Another wonderful part of this tool is it will let  you forecast each of those based on your understanding of market conditions. For instance, you can...

Here is the list of most watched videos on Youtube in the year of 2009. Evian Roller Babies is one of my all time favorites. Most Watched YouTube videos (Global): 1. Susan Boyle - Britain's Got Talent (120+ million views) 2. David After Dentist (37+ million views) 3. JK Wedding Entrance Dance (33+ million views) 4. New Moon Movie Trailer (31+ million views) 5. Evian Roller Babies (27+ million views) Most Watched music videos on YouTube (Global)*: 1. Pitbull "I Know You Want Me" (82+ million views) 2. Miley Cyrus "The Climb" (64+ million views) 3. Miley Cyrus "Party in the U.S.A." (54+ million views) 4. The Lonely Island "I'm On a Boat" (48+ million views) 5. Keri Hilson "Knock You Down " (35+ million views) Source: Broadcasting Ourselves! - Youtube Blog