Tech Garden

Sarawak Tourism Board new interface

check out the new http://www.sarawaktourism.com Sarawak Tourism Board, the interface and useability is much more better then the old one.
They are using ColdFusion and Flash. I think is not done by local(Kuching) but maybe KL or Singapore team. Great Job!

TheLife.com.my

Check this out guys, http://www.thelife.com.my a web portal for local(Kuching). Is going to launch on 1 June 2006. Great to have such a website/portal for Kuching. Overall design is clean. Rich of content/information. Great job to those designer and technician.

front page screen capture of thelife.com.my

Feedsky Release New Version

Feedsky(profile in here), China?s answer to Feedburner, just released its new version in weekend. As its founder, Lv Xinxin, said in our interview, the new version made significant change in back-end technology and platform and simplify the features to make the basic functions much more robust.

I tried its new version, and have to agree that it is much better than the previous one. The statistics of feed subscription finally works well. That?s great, since it is the most important function that users require.

This time it seems they are moving towards the right direction.

Screencasts

Feedsky

FeedSky

[via China Web2.0 Review]

Google Web Toolkit - rumored Morfik partnership

Google has just released its Ajax toolkit, called Google Web Toolkit:

"Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java software development framework that makes writing AJAX applications like Google Maps and Gmail easy for developers who don't speak browser quirks as a second language."

Also an interesting rumor is swirling around that Google either partnered with, or licensed technology from, WebOS company Morfik. Am digging to see what if any truth there is to this...

Update, May 18: Bret Taylor, Product Manager of Google Web Toolkit, has dispelled the rumor:

"Morfik seems like great technology, but Google Web Toolkit is in no way associated with Morfik or based on its technology. There have been some rumors circulating on this list that have been causing some confusion, and I wanted to clarify.
Thanks,
Bret Taylor Product Manager, Google Web Toolkit"

[via Read/WriteWeb]

Design Magazines Online

Design Magazines Online

As the barriers to Web publishing continue to diminish, more design-focused publications are springing up online. Here?s a list of what I?ve come across. Drop me a note if there?s any good ones I missed.

UXmatters
A nonprofit Web magazine that delivers compelling content about developing effective user experience (UX) strategies and designing digital-product user experiences that optimally serve people?s needs and satisfy their desires. [my bi-monthly column about Communication Design]

Boxes & Arrows
Devoted to the practice, innovation, and discussion of graphic design, interaction design and information architecture, large and small. [my articles on Boxes & Arrows]

Digital Web Magazine
An online magazine intended for professional web designers, web developers and information architects.

Design in Flight
An online magazine devoted to art and design, be it graphic design, web design, illustration or architecture.

PingMag
The Tokyo-based magazine about & Design and Making Things.

Design Interact
Directed toward information architects, designers and programmers, a combination of news and feature articles explore the creativity and technology necessary for the completion of successful interactive media projects. [my article on Design Interact]

UX Magazine
UX Magazine sets out to explore, promote & discuss the multiple facets of user experience one article at a time.

Creative Behavior
An online design magazine that provides design information for new media designers, graphic designers, creative people, and any of you who take a keen interest in the area of creative industry. [my article on Creative Behavior]

Clear: IID/AIGA Journal of Information Design
Information design makes complex information easier to understand and to use, and Clear is dedicated to informing, inspiring, and defining the rapidly growing discipline and its participants.

A List Apart
Explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on techniques and benefits of designing with web standards.

Vitamin
Designers, developers and entrepreneurs are energized, refueled and producing some mind-blowing projects. Vitamin is dedicated to that new web industry.

BusinessWeek Innovation & Design
Strategy, Creativity, and Research

Treehouse
A Web development magazine.

[via Functioning Form:Interface Design]

Google Web Toolkit: Ajax Apps from Java

Google has released Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a code generation framework that lets you code Ajax apps in pure Java. It's not unlike Echo2, the open-source framework from NextApp. A compiler performs the Java-to-Javascript translation.

Use your favorite Java IDE to write and debug an application in the Java language, using as many (or as few) GWT libraries as you find useful.
Use GWT's Java-to-JavaScript compiler to distill your application into a set of JavaScript and HTML files that you can serve with any web server.
Confirm that your application works in each browser that you want to support, which usually takes no additional work.

GWT offers tools for remoting as well as a range of widgets: hierachical trees, tab bars, menu bars, and modal dialog boxes. There's no mention of using these widgets standalone, but hopefully they can be used as pure Javascript widgets in much the same way as Scriptaculous can be used without Rails.

A widget like tree has methods to manipulate the structure (e.g. addItem()) and event handlers (e.g. addFocusListener). Here's how a tree is created:

public class TreeExample implements EntryPoint {

public void onModuleLoad() {
// Create a tree with a few items in it.
TreeItem root = new TreeItem("root");
root.addItem("item0");
root.addItem("item1");
root.addItem("item2");

Tree t = new Tree();
t.addItem(root);

// Add it to the root panel.
RootPanel.get().add(t);
}
}

[via Ajaxian]

Google Notebook Launches: Ho-Hum

You no longer need to see the pre-release screenshots: Google Notebook is now live at google.com/notebook.

As I mentioned in my previous post, Google Notebook is a direct Del.icio.us competitor. You can bookmark content (a web page or a piece of content on a web page) either via normal Google search (click on the ?note this? link at the bottom of a search result), or on the open web with an IE or Firefox extension (highlight text, right click).

Once content has been bookmarked, you can add a note and categorize it. No tagging (and no multiple categories per item) are supported. However, I like the clean drag and drop Ajax interface for organizing bookmarks.

Multiple Notebooks can be created and any or all of them can be made public. There is a search function that can be used to search across your own Notebooks, or all public Notebooks.

But?

The lack of tagging is important: it is natural to be able to tag a piece of content to make searching easier in the future - its unclear why Google doesn?t support this proven model for describing bookmarks.

My final thought is this: Google Notebook will have some level of success just because it?s associated with Google, and built directly into search results. Like Aim Pages, I do not feel that it is a particularly inspired product, or one that I would give much of a chance if it didn?t have Google backing it up. Del.icio.us would have been a perfect acquisition for Google, right down to the user interface which is very Google-like. For whatever reason they let it go to Yahoo. I suspect that over time they?ll regret that decision.

I also wonder about Google?s dedication to its own projects. For example, what will be the fate of Google Bookmarks now that Google Notepad has launched? Google Labs is littered with half baked and half finished products. I see little or no product vision coming out of Google, sitting fat and arrogant on it its Adsense revenues.