Web Things Considered

Local company Jive Software is readying what appears to be an extremely compelling team collaboration suite called Clearspace. I’ve seen a lot of job postings for Jive in the pdxMindShare newsletter, but never really looked into what they were building. Nino pointed out the the cNet review which has some nice screenshots.

Clearspace looks to be bringing together blogs, wikis, forums, and document sharing into a single product, perfect for teams. Clearspace reminds me a lot of SharePoint, but who likes using SharePoint? I’d love an alternative and this looks like a good one. Sharing information on teams is often a pain. I know my current team at work has come back to email again (yuck) as the primary means of cummunication, even after installing SharePoint. Email is horrible for team communication as messages are easily lost and ignored, and they are often disruptive to workflow. We occasionally use the SharePoint forums, but most of the time people have to send an email pointing to the discussion because it’s just not part of the natural communication flow yet (not entirely SharePoint’s fault).

Blogs, forums, and wikis are ideal for team communication because they can be viewed out-of-bound from your current workflow. You can view them on your own schedule and can much easily filter unwanted information. Say I find a great new tool (like Firebug), I can simply blog about it instead of emailing everybody. Plus I can have related conversations on the forum thread or blog comment thread that only involve the interested parties. The biggest weakness of SharePoint is that it lacks good tools for knowledge sharing. It’s ok for documents, lists, and some wiki-like functionality. But, I’m looking forward to seeing the blogs, blog reading, and wiki tools in Clearspace, and if they can really help facilitate discussion and knowledge sharing.

Though it’s not likely we’ll see Clearspace adoption on my team, because it’s currently so Microsoft tool focused, I’ll still be interested in trying it out for my own interest for use on side and future projects.

If you’re interested in more on collaboration suites, see the Wordpress/Knownow agreement and the Intel SuiteTwo release.

I’ve long thought Belkin was the home of crappy/cheap electronic accessories that fell apart easily or never worked quite right. This mainly comes from buying a few things in college, when the funds were low and you generally look for the cheapest version of whatever you’re buying. You get what you pay for right? Well, I thought they were improving with their current generation of products including their iPod accessories. I just bought a Nano as a present for my wife’s birthday and needed to get a car adapter for it. We stopped at Target on our way out of town this past week and I quickly grabbed the Auto Kit for $30, it said “Power and Play your iPod in your car,” that was all I needed right? Plus, it had a nice design and was a much better deal than the $70 Monster iCarPlay.

So, we’re heading down the road and my wife’s trying to get the thing setup and what do you know, the damn Auto Kit is just for power, there’s no way to actually play the iPod through this thing. WTF? I had assumed incorrectly it was an FM adapter, but it’s only a power charger and amplifier. What part of “play” are they talking about? You have to buy a separate FM adapter to actually play your iPod in your car, which when you combine the Auto Kit, adds up to about the same price as the iCarPlay. Guess which one I have now? Yes, the iCarPlay. Belkin may have been trying to provide flexibility with their separate power adapter and FM transmitter (and plethora of other combinations thereof), but they ended up providing confusion and distrust. I have finally learned my lesson with Belkin and I will never buy another one of their product’s again.

Dare has a good summary of the recent events surrounding web APIs, namely the Google and Del.icio.us moves away from server-side APIs to more Widget based functionality.

We talked about APIs back at the September PDX Web Innovators meeting, and much of that was focused around building mashups off of these services. I think it will be a real bummer if this trend continues, and less mashup-friendly services are offered. I agree with Dare that a site would be stupid to restrict ways to add stuff to your site. But it also strikes me that controlling the data extraction type of API would be a first step towards limiting a site’s viral uptake (though I’m sure Google’s not too concerned with that at this point in their existence).

Personally, I really like the Yahoo set of services, that give you a choice among different output formats (XML, JSON, and PHP), thereby making it easy to use on the server and client (kind of anyway, I can test easily by typing urls in the browser, but the cross-domain AJAX issue in most cases prevents direct use on the client-side).

If you’ve been waiting to try out Firebug for any reason, wait no longer. Skip right past the current release and install the the new 1.0 Beta.

I can describe this new version in one word: Amazing. Firebug will make debugging your web app a joy. No matter if the problem is in the markup, script, CSS, or HTTP request/response, Firebug will help you find it. You’ll actually want to have bugs just so you can use it. Great to see it’s going to stay open source too.

Need to run both IE 6 and 7 in order to test your sites? For that matter, you’ll probably want Firefox 1.5 and at the same time as well. Well, the IE blog announces the release of an Virtual PC hard drive with an authorized Windows XP image and IE 6 installed. They also provide the previously announced free VPC install.

There is a catch, it only lasts 4 months (treating us to a wonderful April fools). But at least it saves me from creating my own VPC hard drive and sitting through a windows install until then.