Gareth Simpson

I've already mentioned Joel Spolsky's ' Google Suggest raises the bar for web UIs ' essay, and I'm just one small voice in the great blog chorus . What I'd not noticed though, is that Flickr had already raised the bar far further, and with far less popular fanfare. Flickr's your photos page ( here's mine ) uses the XMLHttpRequest technique for actual, practical purposes. When logged into Flickr, you can click on any photo's title or description and edit it inline in the page and submit your change without any tedious page reloading. The effect is quite amazing. In terms of enhancing web usability it's a far greater advance than Google's glitzy but not ever so useful showcase. I would imagine that in eighteen months time we'll all be doing it. Or at least I hope so.

I write an aggregator in a very half hearted sort of way. I do this because I want certain things (chiefly fast start up times and a responsive UI) that other aggregators don't give me. It turns out that this must be pretty much all I want, since I don't seem to be investing much time in improving it. That said, even the current lameness that is FeedThing, is better (for me) than the incredibly mature and popular Bloglines . However, I think I'd really like to use bloglines if I could. The fact that it's centralized means I could happily read at work and home without tedious synchronization issues. What Bloglines really needs is a GMail / Google Suggest style kick up the backside in terms of usability. Joel Spolsky's ' Google Suggest raises the bar for web UIs ' essay seems to have been getting a lot of blogger traction so I guess it's not too much to hope that someone, peferably Bloglines themselves, will bring some of this to bear

Note to self. In ADO it is good practice to close your recordsets before they go out of scope but hardly the end of the world if you don’t. In ADO.NET, failing to close your OleDbDataReader causes your next call to ExecuteReader() to come crashing down around your ears. And they call this progress.