Alex's home on the web

I've been neglecting my blog for some time, so this is my attempt to at least give a gist on what had me interested this week in tech-land.

I'll have to finally admit it: it seems as if Twitter actually can be used for more than inane blurbs on what people had for breakfast (and where that breakfast went). While Twitter is anything but revolutionary, it is being put to an interesting task of communicating events from and within the burgeoning revolution in Iran. Of all sites, Fark and 4chan especially have been instrumental in helping Iranians overcome the hurdles of government censorship to get the word out.

Naturally we shouldn't give Twitter and Fark too much credit: in the end it is up to the people in the streets. Even so both have made insightful compilations like Tatsuma's possible.

I've been looking at the HTML5 canvas tag. There are a couple of interesting articles over at Opera (introduction, Wolf 3D using canvas), and Mozilla with Bespin and Thunderhead are also actively investigating (they have an interesting canvas tutorial up here). Google has given us excanvas so the road is open to cross-browser, plugin-less graphics, games and possibly even applications.

Despite all the great JS frameworks, I can't help but think application-style programming in HTML/JS/CSS is a kludge every time I do it. Will canvas be able to give us proper web applications and leave the HTML/JS/CSS-combination to sites? I don't know. It would be pretty awesome to design an interface in a Glade-like UI designer and handle the callbacks in pure JS. Then again HTML/JS/CSS are more easily made accessible and canvas is still a moving target so it is not without difficulties, but a web without the need for Flash or Silverlight would have me smiling.

Speaking about Mozilla, I've been using the Tree-style add-on for firefox for a while now. I decided to switch it off, but I simply can't stand normal firefox tabs anymore. It does take up more screen real-estate than conventional tabs, but it saves time scrolling and/or guessing. Especially when you have 20+ tabs open, which I always seem to have.

I've also been fooling around with Google's Wave designs, seeing how far I can come up with a Django/Python implementation. I often code up small prototypes around things I find interesting, it helps me understand the problems (like why and how OT works) and think about ways to solve them. Most of my prototypes don't go anywhere though. We'll see.