Picnik.com

Who needs Photoshop when you have this: www.picnik.com.

Alright, it's not a Photoshop killer but it's all you need really for basic photo manipulation.

I'm just impressed with how slick the user interface is.

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Marrying SOA, RIA and OSS

In "SOA + RIA + OSS = Web 2.0" (stumbled upon it in delicious), Adam Michelson makes some interesting observations on what the next Net apps may look like once the idea of Web2.0 matures and goes beyond it's current buzzword phase.

Web2.0 is today's lip candy, but a lot of people who use this term to refer to its visual or interactive side of the Web2.0 architecture. We see a parallel in the use of the term "AJAX" that most people use to refer to what is usually is simply a Javascript enhanced frontend.

Those who understand the potential of what Web2.0 can bring know that the real power comes from the marriage of the thick client capabilities of the frontend and a standards-based seamless access to data through service oriented architectures (SOA). The result will be the blurring between whether the software we are using is a desktop or web-based app.

There are links in Michelson's article to some interesting developments in OS frameworks that combine RIA and SOA for various platforms, notably the Cairngorm framework for Adobe's Flex.

I think development in this area (RIA + SOA) will be the most interesting and exciting in this whole Web2.0 phenomenon.

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Doodle: Scheduling meetings

I realise that Doodle has been around for a while but having recently had the chance to use it, I can see now why it is such a brilliant little thing. All it does is polls. That's it. Plain and simple. And it does it well, without needing any fancy bells and whistles.

The interface is based on a simple grid and the results are shown as poll totals for each option at the bottom.

A poll, as a decision making tool, is great when you have a small selection of answers. I believe 3 is optimum. Anything significantly larger will probably make your life as poll organiser more difficult because, if there is lack of polarisation in the results, it will be difficult to come to a conclusion. Fine if you're doing a general opinion survey, but bad if you're relying on the poll to make a decision. See this example to see what I mean.

Still, Doodle is one tool that's going to stay in my toolbox.

Flock

I've just spent a few minutes downloading and trying out the Flock browser and within that short space of time I have to say that initial impressions are good.

Flock will particularly suite Web 2.0 savvy users as it has all the social networking tools built right into the browser making the user experience of doing things like blogging, sharing media and online bookmarking that much slicker due to the Java interface (as opposed to Javascript). Well, this is what Flock is built for, as the "Social Web Browser" strapline says.

I shall give Flock an informal test drive and hope to report on any interesting features here.

Blogged with Flock