Philipp Heintze

If you are one of the countless people that condemn the iPhone for its inability to emulate the Palm OS, then it may be time for you to take another look at Apple’s wonder device. StyleTap has announced that they plan to bring this capability to the iPhone in the near future, whats more the iPhone runs the Palm OS better than most Palm devices, so this is a very interesting feature to add to the long list of things that the iPhone already excels at.

You will be able to grab the software needed starting in July, when more information is released by StyleTap. When the information comes forward, they will also announce price points, how to get it, and how the software will be marketed. StyleTap also said that they will have members from their team attending WWDC. They will be available for interview, and hopefully a demo.

The question really though is how well does the device’s capacitive touch screen work for the resistive touch driven OS? After all, Palm’s OS was designed for a stylus. Though the smallest parts of the interface may be a little hard to use with your finger, the answer is surprisingly well. Check out the demo video to see the software in action.

[Via SlashPhone]

Shared by Robert Scoble
Hmmm, Bloglines never shows up in my referrer logs while Google Reader usually is near the top of my logs.

Heather Hopkins of Hitwise has a new post for all you Blogliners out there. She's a VP of Research at Hitwise, a leading web analytics firm. She writes, "It (Bloglines) is the most popular web-based feed reader based on share of US visits." Or in other words, Bloglines is beating Google Reader in the U.S. In an interview done by RW/W on August of 2007, I said it was a "2 horse race." It still is.

Heather goes onto write about the differences between the user bases.

• Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
• ...Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.

It would be interesting to hear from Blogliners on your blogs to see if you really do track more photography websites. We launched a Flickr feed module in Bloglines Beta for our photography enthusiasts. We hope you liked the feature and also like Bloglines Beta.

Enjoy!

- Eric Engleman and the Bloglines Team

Shared by Robert Scoble
Facebook is the ultimate data roach motel: your data goes in, but it will not come back out.

About six weeks ago, Facebook launched Feed Importing for the first time, allowing users to connect their Facebook accounts to Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, Delicious, and Digg and automatically syndicate their activity on those sites within their Facebook Mini Feed.

Today, Facebook announced Feed Importing compatibility with several new sites, including Google Reader, Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, StumpleUpon, and Pandora. Thus, whenever you upload a YouTube video, rate a Hulu episode, or share a story in Google Reader, your activity stream will be automatically syndicated to your Facebook Mini Feed (and thus to your friends’ News Feeds).

In addition, and potentially more interesting, Facebook also today enabled general importing of any RSS feed into your Facebook Mini Feed. While Facebook users have previously been able to import their blog RSS into Notes for a long time, the new Feed Importer makes it easy to syndicate multiple feeds directly to your Mini Feed.

Like FriendFeed, Facebook is hoping to be able to become an important channel for content discovery and thus a major referrer of traffic on the web. While Facebook’s Posted Items/Share feature seems to have never achieved widespread adoption, Feed Importing is much more likely to succeed. By integrating with popular sites and automatically publishing activity, much more content should enter Facebook for distribution and discovery via the Mini & News Feeds.

Here's a list of every function beginning with the letter "A" in the PHP function index:

abs() acos() acosh() addcslashes() addslashes() aggregate() aggregate_info() aggregate_methods() aggregate_methods_by_list() aggregate_methods_by_regexp() aggregate_properties() aggregate_properties_by_list() aggregate_properties_by_regexp() aggregation_info() apache_child_terminate() apache_get_modules() apache_get_version() apache_getenv() apache_lookup_uri() apache_note() apache_request_headers() apache_reset_timeout() apache_response_headers() apache_setenv() apc_add() apc_cache_info() apc_clear_cache() apc_compile_file() apc_define_constants() apc_delete() apc_fetch()

apc_load_constants() apc_sma_info() apc_store() apd_breakpoint() apd_callstack() apd_clunk() apd_continue() apd_croak() apd_dump_function_table() apd_dump_persistent_resources() apd_dump_regular_resources() apd_echo() apd_get_active_symbols() apd_set_pprof_trace() apd_set_session() apd_set_session_trace() apd_set_socket_session_trace() array() array_change_key_case() array_chunk() array_combine() array_count_values() array_diff() array_diff_assoc() array_diff_key() array_diff_uassoc() array_diff_ukey() array_fill() array_fill_keys() array_filter() array_flip()

array_intersect() array_intersect_assoc() array_intersect_key() array_intersect_uassoc() array_intersect_ukey() array_key_exists() array_keys() array_map() array_merge() array_merge_recursive() array_multisort() array_pad() array_pop() array_product() array_push() array_rand() array_reduce() array_reverse() array_search() array_shift() array_slice() array_splice() array_sum() array_udiff() array_udiff_assoc() array_udiff_uassoc() array_uintersect() array_uintersect_assoc() array_uintersect_uassoc() array_unique() array_unshift()

array_values() array_walk() array_walk_recursive() ArrayIterator::current() ArrayIterator::key() ArrayIterator::next() ArrayIterator::rewind() ArrayIterator::seek() ArrayIterator::valid() ArrayObject::__construct() ArrayObject::append() ArrayObject::count() ArrayObject::getIterator() ArrayObject::offsetExists() ArrayObject::offsetGet() ArrayObject::offsetSet() ArrayObject::offsetUnset() arsort() ascii2ebcdic() asin() asinh() asort() aspell_check() aspell_check_raw() aspell_new() aspell_suggest() assert() assert_options() atan() atan2() atanh()

I remember my first experience with PHP way back in 2001. Despite my questionable pedigree in ASP and Visual Basic, browsing an alphabetical PHP function list was enough to scare me away for years. Somehow, perusing the above list, I don't think things have improved a whole lot since then.

I'm no language elitist, but language design is hard. There's a reason that some of the most famous computer scientists in the world are also language designers. And it's a crying shame none of them ever had the opportunity to work on PHP. From what I've seen of it, PHP isn't so much a language as a random collection of arbitrary stuff, a virtual explosion at the keyword and function factory. Bear in mind this is coming from a guy who was weaned on BASIC, a language that gets about as much respect as Rodney Dangerfield. So I am not unfamiliar with the genre.

Of course, this is old news. How old? Ancient. Internet Explorer 4 old. The internet is overrun with PHP sucks articles -- I practically ran out of browser tabs opening them all. Tim Bray bravely bucked this trend and went with the title On PHP for his entry in the long-running series:

So here's my problem, based on my limited experience with PHP (deploying a couple of free apps to do this and that, and debugging a site for a non-technical friend here and there): all the PHP code I've seen in that experience has been messy, unmaintainable crap. Spaghetti SQL wrapped in spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML, replicated in slightly-varying form in dozens of places.

Tim's article is as good a place to start as any; he captured a flock of related links in the ensuing discussion. As you read, you'll find there's an obvious parallel between the amateurish state of PHP development and Visual Basic 6, a comparison that many developers have independently arrived at.

Fredrik Holmström:

Every solution I've ever seen or developed in PHP feels clunky and bulky, there is no elegance or grace. Working with PHP is a bit like throwing a 10 pound concrete cube from a ten story building: You'll get where you're going fast, but it’s not very elegant. ... I love PHP, and it's the right tool for some jobs. It’s just an ugly, cumbersome tool that makes me cry and have nightmares. It’s the new VB6 in a C dress.

Karl Seguin

From my own experience, and the countless of online tutorials and blogs, many PHP developers are guilty of the same crap code VB developers were once renowned for. OO, N-Tier, exception handling, domain modeling, refactoring and unit testing are all foreign concepts in the PHP world.

Understand that as a long time VB developer, I am completely sympathetic to the derision you'll suffer when programming in a wildly popular programming language that isn't considered "professional".

I've written both VB and PHP code, and in my opinion the comparison is grossly unfair to Visual Basic. Does PHP suck? Of course it sucks. Did you read any of the links in Tim's blog entry? It's a galactic supernova of incomprehensibly colossal, mind-bendingly awful suck. If you sit down to program in PHP and have even an ounce of programming talent in your entire body, there's no possible way to draw any other conclusion. It's inescapable.

But I'm also here to tell you that doesn't matter.

The TIOBE community index I linked above? It's written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the first page of anything you search for these days? Written in PHP. Digg, the social bookmarking service so wildly popular that a front page link can crush the beefiest of webservers? Written in PHP. WordPress, arguably the most popular blogging solution available at the moment? Written in PHP. YouTube, the most widely known video sharing site on the internet? Written in PHP. Facebook, the current billion-dollar zombie-poking social networking darling of venture capitalists everywhere? Written in PHP. (Update: While YouTube was originally written in PHP, it migrated to Python fairly early on, per Matt Cutts and Guido van Rossum.)

Notice a pattern here?

Some of the largest sites on the internet -- sites you probably interact with on a daily basis -- are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet?

The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn't be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can't argue with the results.

You've probably heard that sufficiently incompetent coders can write FORTRAN in any language. It's true. But the converse is also true: sufficiently talented coders can write great applications in terrible languages, too. It's a painful lesson, but an important one.

Why fight it? I say learn to embrace it. Join with me, won't you, in celebrating the next fifty years of glorious PHP code driving the internet. Just don't forget to call the maintain_my_will_to_live() PHP function every so often!

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Searching through Google News via your boring ol’ Web browser not doing it for you? Need something more visually engaging? Try Google’s new layer for it’s Earth application.

Introduced earlier today, the Google News feature for Google Earth (pardon the partial redundancy), which can be found within the Gallery section of the Layers menu, offers users the option to view headlines through geographically aligned data windows. That may not sound very captivating, admittedly, but it is actually quite interesting. If you’re not pressed for time and can spend a moment or two zooming about the globe and clicking small newspaper icons, the layer actually does show to work quite well. Maybe too well. Yeah, warning to those easily distracted: many, many minutes may pass while you “briefly test” this new release.

How thorough is the layer’s spread? It goes as far and as deep as the search engine’s 4,500 news sources will take the user. Canvas the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere and you really won’t be lacking for stories. If anything, there’s way, way too much to consume. So handle with care. And watch the clock. Unless someone else pays the bills. In which case, while away, dear friend, while away.

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Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:

Terrorists Using Google Earth to Target Israel
Google Earth Enterprise Version Update Released
Google Earth Shows Real-Time Traffic
Google Earth Updates Images
Twango’s New Google Earth Features
Google’s Earth Day Mashup: Maps + YouTube
Google Earth and NASA Complete Project

Shared by Ole Begemann
Great addition to the Google Maps API.

Posted by Keith Golden, My Maps team

When we launched the map editing tools in Google Maps, the reaction of developers was "This is cool, but how can I use it on my own site?" As someone who was originally drawn to Google in part because of the Maps API and the great developer community around it, I committed to making the My Maps tools useful for developers on their own sites.

Today, I'm pleased to announce that our user interface functionality for editable polylines and polygons is now part of the Maps API.

Say, for example, that you have a GPolygon you want users to be able to edit. Simply call GPolygon.enableEditing() and the poly will have draggable edit control vertices when the user mouses over it. To later make it non-editable, call GPolygon.disableEditing().

We've also exposed additional events for GPolygon and GPolyline so that you can easily mimic the MyMaps behavior (in mashups or Mapplets) by calling enableEditing on "mouseover" and disableEditing on "mouseout". To find out when the user makes an edit, listen for the "lineupdated" event. And if you want users to be able to draw a new GPolyline completely from scratch, just use enableDrawing as shown below:

var polyline = new GPolyline([]);
map.addOverlay(polyline);
polyline.enableDrawing();

Every click on the map will add a new vertex to the polyline until the user double-clicks or clicks again on the last vertex. You can also call enableDrawing to lets users append vertices to either end of an existing polyline. And just because everyone likes pretty colors, we exposed methods to let you change the style of a polyline or polygon: setStrokeStyle and setFillStyle. Have fun, and let us know what you think in the forum.

Shared by Phil
die Nutzung?!?

Gericht erklärt Nutzung eines privaten, offenen WLAN zur Straftat

Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.

If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.

Snackr was built by Narciso Jaramillo, a long time Adobe developer now working on the Flex product line.

Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.

You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.

The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.

Wishes

So far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.

Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too. Media handling could be improved as well.

All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.

Shared by Phil
wuchert?

Die Dätwyler Holding AG hat ihre Distrelec-Gruppe durch den Zukauf der Elfa-Gruppe ausgebaut.

Shared by Phil
dash is great!

Dash Navigation is opening up its in-car GPS device to outside developers through an API program. The Dash already lets consumers create Yahoo map mashups on teh Web which theycan then send to their car. (Read my earlier review). Now, companies that want to create specific applications for the device, which includes a two-way data channel through GPRS as well as WiFi, can join the API program.

The company’s API launch partners include:

—Coldwell Banker (real-estate listings application)
—Funambol (personal calendar access)
—Mediaguide (identifies names of songs playing on the radio through the Dash’s microphone)
—Trapster (shows drivers speed traps and lets them warn other Dash drivers)
—WeatherBug (live weather condition)

I have a feeling the Trapster app is going to be a big hit. Companies or developers who want more information about the APIs can send an e-mail to developer [at] dash [dot] net. (I guess putting the APIs on a Website is too advanced for them). But opening the device up as a platform should get a lot of cool apps on there.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0