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GPokr: Ajax Poker App

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase, Google — Dion Almaer at 9:35 am on Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Ryan Dewsbury has written a multiplayer ajax poker application written with GWT.

The front end is written with Java which the google web toolkit compiles to javascript. This is an impressive task that GWT does and so far, even though the toolkit is beta, seems seamless. The front end talks to a java servlet on the backend through an RPC layer on top of XMLHttpRequest. The server sends events back to the clients through the same RPC mechanism so that the players at the table always have an updated rendering.

Watch out Party Poker! :)

GPokr

Popup Politicians AJAX Widget

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase — Dietrich at 4:41 pm on Monday, July 24, 2006

The Sunlight Foundation has released an AJAX Widget called Popup Politicians.

This prototype consists of a callable remote API for getting info about politicians, and a tag-popup script which uses that API.

sunlightlabs.com_popuppoliticians.jpg

Usage
Add the following to your head element:

HTML:
  1. <script src="http://sunlightlabs.com/popuppoliticians/sunlightpopups.js">
  2. </script> 

Add links to your politicians like so:

HTML:
  1. <a href="http://sunlightlabs.com/tag/Sen.+Edward+M.+Kennedy" rel="tag">Sen. Edward M. Kennedy</a>

When the script runs, it finds all the tags that look like the above, and adds a popup. For more information, look at the source of this page and the sample pages.

From a look at the code, it seems that it is using the On-Demand Javascript pattern to create the popups. As of right now the database only includes the 109th Congress and even that may be incomplete. In any event, it's refreshing to see an application of AJAX that doesn't involve social bookmarking or comparison shopping.

Diigo: Social Annotation

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase — Dion Almaer at 10:00 am on Monday, July 24, 2006

Diigo is about “Social Annotation”, which, in our view, is a superset of Social Bookmarking, and much more. On the annotation side, Diigo allows highlights and sticky notes anywhere on any web page - a bit likewizlite or mystickies. On the social bookmarking side, Diigo is a cross between delicious, Google Notebook and Clipmarks.

There is a heavy use of Ajax both on the website and in the annotation tools. Users can highlight and sticky-note web pages without installing any plugin, by using a sort of “super-bookmarklet”, which is called a Diigolet.

Here we have an ajaxian post annotated for us to play with:

Diigo

Ningbar: Customizable, Dynamic JS top bar

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase, UI — Dion Almaer at 2:03 pm on Friday, July 21, 2006

Ning has replaced their bulky sidebar that “formerly hogging the right hand column of every Ning app” with a new Ningbar which is a nice JavaScript drop down.

The closed Ningbar

One opened state

The folding down top bar seems to be a new favourite pattern these days.

To begin with we saw “Login / Register” actions used as drop downs, and now it has grown to any other action.

The good news is that you get to reuse screen realestate. The bad news is that a user can not see what is in the drop downs until they click on it.

This means you need to think hard about what you place in the drop down.

DealsPl.us Combines Web 2.0 and Community Shopping

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase, Web20 — Chris Cornutt at 8:16 am on Thursday, July 20, 2006

What do you get when you combine one part Digg, some of the best, cheapest products out there and a little splash of Web 2.0? You get DealsPlu.us, a new social shopping site with a user-controlled rating system similar to Digg’s pioneering format.

Our mission is simple, to save you time and money. We offer a distinctive place where people can share hot-deals from anywhere within the Internet world. Our feature allows people to know what the most hot-deals are and what people think about the deals.

The concept is simple (as some of the best ones are) - users are presented with deals on a wide range of merchandise, from audio/video options to home and garden offerings. Each has a plus button (”+”) that can be used to vote if you think the deal is good or not. This then allows for users to come along and discover the best deals as voted on by the rest of the site’s community. Clicking on this button also stores the deal (as a bookmark) to the users profile page for later review.

There’s even RSS feeds that you can subscribe to to get the latest deals as they come in as well as the latest coupons and offers the site recieves. Users can also submit deals that they might come across - espeically useful for those “one day only” deals lots of stores offer.



SaneBull: Ajax Finance Portal Prototype

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase — Dion Almaer at 10:31 pm on Wednesday, July 19, 2006

The ideAjax group has put together a technology showcase that uses Ajax and Java to create a financial portal.

This is a single page application and the home page is really just this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">

<html>
<head>
        <title>Web 2.0 - SaneBull Market Monitor</title>
        <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
        <link href="css/index.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        <link href="css/themes/alphacube.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        <link href="css/themes/default.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        <link href="css/dtree.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
        <script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
                _uacct = "UA-84011-5";
                urchinTracker();
        </script>
        <script src="js/import/dtree.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="js/import/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="js/import/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="js/import/window.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        <script src="js/sanebull.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</meta></head>
<body>
        <div id="container"></div>
</body>
</html>
 

The bulk of the application is actually housed in sanbull.js

Yahoo! Redesigned Front Page gets hip to Ajax

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase, Yahoo! — Chris Cornutt at 8:21 am on Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Yahoo! has launched their new homepage version that includes Ajax-enbled content all over the place. It's a great improvement over their homepage from the past, but it does shift more away from the "we're mainly a search engine" idea they had before. The new site is a portal to the core, providing everything from entertainment and sports information to links to just about every service they offer (off on the left).

The search box for the site is still prominent, though, taking up residence at the very top of the page. The blocks below it, however, aren't nearly as static. Mouseover one of the blocks in the top right box (Mail, Messenger, Local, etc) and you'll be greated with a slide-down effect and dynamic content - most of them refreshing their content right there (like when you enter a zip code for the Weather option).

The actual results from the search (and really, pretty much everything outside this new front page) is still the same, but there's enough content here to keep you informed and up-to-date for most general purposes. One thing that's thankfully missing (well, almost) from this new front page - ads. I only see the one in the right-hand column (for an outside company). Nice and unobtrustive.

Personally, I'd say the redesign is very much a success and the addition of Ajax-enabled content blocks make it even sweeter.



Spotback: Personalized Portal

Filed under: Web 2.0 News, Front Page, Showcase, Portal — Dion Almaer at 1:41 pm on Thursday, July 13, 2006

Spotback is a new portal that lets you get very personal with new interest Ajax features.

Once you hit the site you can start to rate stories via slider instead of typical star ratings (I personally feel like stars are more usable as you don’t need to drag you can just click). As you rate items highly, new content “like that” will appear for you.

Other nicely done features are:

  • Drop down categories
  • Simple links to other people who like the content
  • The “more…” link opens content up inline
  • Simple settings for turning on and off animation, tooltips, high grade bringing in the new story etc

Quite nice really!

Spotback

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