Team WhiteBoarding with Twiddla - Painless Team Collaboration for the Web. i’m amazed you can do all that with just ajax.

ThickBox. very easy to use lightbox/modal dialog for use with jQuery. i tried out a couple different ones and this was the winner.

FancyUpload - a slick flash + ajax multiple file upload widget. uses mootools library. need to get something like this hooked up with jquery.

jQuery Form Plugin. nice and easy form to ajax request with jquery.

Learning jQuery. good site.

Unspace - Custom DOM Attributes for Fun and Profit. somewhat confusing (but interesting) article about how one might use custom attributes to write less obstructive javascript.

XML.com: What’s New in Prototype 1.5?. for all you javascript programmers.

adobe’s apollo project

Techcrunch has really great interview with Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief software architect for the Apollo project. The apollo project is a cross-platform runtime which will use existing Adobe technologies like flash, flex, & pdf along with standards based html and ajax to create downloadable web apps. These apps could then be used even when a user is not connected to the internet. The interview lacked a lot of technical detail but still made the project sound quite interesting. There was a follow-up article on TechCrunch which shows some screenshots of demo app developed by Adobe.

If Adobe can provide a solution for installable rich-client apps which can be easily migrated from current web-based apps and have an easy-to-use data storage/sync solution, I think it would be quite compelling. The flash player currently has something like 98% penetration and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a sizable developer community. There could be a lot of potential for web-centric sites like flickr, youtube, last.fm, etc. Flickr could have a standard rich client for managing and uploading your locally stored photos whereas youtube could provide a simple video editor and encoder so that users can upload their movies already encoded as flash video. Another interesting item is that Adobe has open-sourced their ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Actionscript, which is used in Flash, is simply an implementation of ECMAScript which is standard used for Javascript. This is a great move for Adobe. Besides getting the benefit of open-source development on the VM, Adobe will be using the same VM in Flash and PDF that Mozilla will use it within Firefox for Javascript. This provides a really great story to developers of web-centric client apps and should definitely help the platform pick up mass and steam.

And who gets screwed if this takes off? Microsoft. Microsoft has a similar competing technology called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF. The only problem is that it only works on Windows. Interestingly, the interview briefly talks about WPF and Lynch points out that WPF will only be supported on Vista and XP SP2 so Apollo will actually be supporting more versions of Windows (98, XP) than Microsoft itself.

ConceptShare. video tour of a web-based collaboration tool. pretty nice demo. really good mix of ajax and flash. seemed a little limited in scope but well executed.

FireBug. a very sweet firefox extension for debugging and tracing javascript and ajax.

LifeIO: most ambitious PIM yet? quick post on cnet about a pretty cool looking calendar/PIM web app that’s still in private beta. it’s also uses on a new opensource ajax platform called jitsu. looks pretty cool but no idea how well it works.

Relay: Ajax Directory Manager. pretty slick ajax tool. php/mysql though. via 3rdparty

Dabble DB: 7 Minute Video. basically a very user friendly, web based MS Access. done by a couple guys in vancouver who really like smalltalk, oddly enough. the video shows off some pretty slick features. I’m still not convinced people are dieing for collaborative databases though.

reBlog is one kick-ass feed reader. You can download the code and host it yourself or set up an account at my.reBlog. Lifehacker has a post about setting up your own version and a google video showing how to use the app. I just setup an account on my.reblog and it is fantastic. I copied over my blogline feeds (via their export tool) and I was off to the races. The keyboard shortcuts are awesome: ‘a’ to archive, ‘p’ to post, ‘e’ to edit the post before posting. There’s a few other keyboard shortcuts which are genius (like numbering other links). All of this makes it’s so damn fast. What you publish gets put into it’s own rss feed and reBlog even has plugins for wordpress and mt to integrate your reBlog feed into your own blog storage. this blows bloglines away.

Zooomr. flickr’esque photo site. not so much better as to get people off flickr but some cool features none the less. google maps is mashed right into it so photos can have geodata and you can easily find other photos taken nearby. i like how you can see higher-res shots and the google map via an ajax “lightbox”. site is slow as hell right now though.

SimpleTicket - Open Source Trouble Ticket System. very nerdy thing to link to, but pretty cool. i love seeing companies who’s biz model is open source / paid installation / hosted solution. gotta love ajax.

30 Boxes, Best… Calender… EVER!. looks pretty interesting. via funkaoshi.

splunk. It’s mad-ajax meets google for your log files. A very well done UI. And the flash demo saying “tired of writing one-off perl scripts and grep’ing logs?”. fuck yes, welcome to my life.

Some absurdly detailed satellite photos from Windows Live Local. welcome to downtown seattle.

squarespace. blogging site somewhat like typepad (clean, hosted, and not free) but holy shit is it slick. If you’re impressed by great ajax, sign up for a trial account cause it’s really impressive. it’s also really easy to manipulate the layout, very nice wysiwyg editor, and a mint-esque stats page. big thumbs up.