Archive for February, 2008

Alertle Launched

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Alertle Screenshot

I am one of the geeks behind Alertle. Its a web based RSS Reader. I am responsible for a good amount of the JavaScript areas of this app :-)

Features

Single Page Application
The entire application is contained in a single page - everything is done through Ajax. I will not advice that you make something like this(its a maintenance nightmare) but I can say one thing about it - its Cool. With a capital ‘C’.
Keyboard Shortcuts
I got the idea of creating a Keyboard Shortcut Library for JavaScript when I was working on this feature.
Autoplay
You can view articles as you are viewing a slideshow if you enable this.
Feedpacks
You can bunch a group of feeds together into a feedpack - and see all the posts from such a group together.
Sharing
You can share your feedpacks with other users

Perfect for High Volume Feeds

There is one major feature that sets Alertle appart from other RSS readers - it does not tell you if a post is read or not. Yeah, first you will think its a missing feature - but its not. I have used a lot of feed readers - once you subscribe to a couple of high volume feed - like say, BoingBoing or Slashdot or something, you can say goodbye to your sanity. It creates so many new items that the only way of staying away the mess is to click on the ‘Mark all as read’ button once every four seconds. You know what I mean - I am sure you have unsubscribed from many feeds for this reason.

With alertle, you can subscribe all these high volume feeds. And there is no pressure to view all the posts.

If you are an info junkie, I can guaranty that your will get lost for hours in Alertle.

Problems

IE is not Supported

We are still working on this - and due to deadline constraints, we decided to release Alertle without IE support. So if you are an IE user, I am sorry - but What in the World are you Doing? Ditch that terrible browser and get a real browser right now!

If we can get a few people to switch to firefox before we add support for IE, I will say that Alertle gone beyond and above the call of duty to make the web a better place! ;-)

Posts don’t have a Read Flag (pun unintended)

Um., yeah, I know - this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This will prevent me from using Alertle for all my feeds. For my must-read feeds, I will still be using Google Reader. For the high volume stuff, I will use Alertle.

Getting to Know Alertle

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Alertle and sign up for an account. Its FREE!

But if you are still unconvinced, here is a demo…

Links

BarCamp Kerala 2

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

Barcamp Logo

The second Kerala BarCamp was a success. The presentations were very informative and the people were interesting. What more do you want?

Sessions

Xtend IVR - A RAD Toolkit for Telephony

by Jayakrishnan K

This was a demo for an IVR toolkit called Xtend IVR. This is a fairly comprehensive IVR toolkit - it supports Indian languages and had its own simple scripting language. A demo is available here.

Mobile Social Networking in 25 days

By Vishnu Gopal

This was an introduction about how to create a web application. Its a real life case study of what went into building MobShare. Slides for this presentation is available at slideshare.

JavaScript: The most underestimated, undervalued and misunderstood language

By Your’s Truly

A introduction to the power of programming in JavaScript. Its a bit about the functional programming aspects of javascript and an appeal to start using for other things than validation. Slides are available online.

Develop a webservice in 5 minutes using nuSoap library

By Sanil

How to use the nuSoap PHP library to connect to and create Web Services.

Game Development Using Flash

By Eldhose, Juwal and Anish

This presentation was about the simplicity of creating a game in Flash. They also showed how to port the game into FlashLite so that it can be used in Mobiles. To know more, visit their website - CSharks (WARNING: Sounds)

The People

An advantage of such events are that you meet a lot of like minded people…

More Links about Kerala BarCamp 2

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