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

• Alertle
• Masable’s take on Alertle
• Alertle Blog
• Alertle Docs

Following the success of the first barcamp in Kerala, we are organizing a second one. This time it will be at Cochin. The date and venue has not been decided yet - we want it to be decided by the community.

For those of you who don’t know what a BarCamp is, here is the Wikipedia definition…

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences - open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants - often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

Attending

If you are in or around Cochin at the end of January 2008, consider coming to the event. If you wish to attend, please add your name to this wiki page.
BarCamp Kerala 2. You can do that by filling out the following form…

Sessions

The sessions are decided and presented by the members themselves - here is a list of the proposed sessions(so far)…

Visual Programming Language, Demo

by Kenney Jacob

Search Engine Marketing

by Mani Karthik

Xtend IVR - A RAD Toolkit for Telephony

by Jayakrishnan K

Visual Studio 2008 - What’s in it for me?

by Jadeja Dushyantsinh

SAAS - Software As A Service

by Linoy Joseph

There are some more proposed sessions.

People

I hope I can meet my fellow Cochin bloggers at this event. Anand and Mani Karthik has promised to come. I hope Nirmal will be there too.

More Details Available at…

• BarCamp Kerala2 Wiki Page
• BarCamp Time for Kerala

Desktop and Web application needs icons. Icons make the app more usable than an all-text application. If you are building a desktop application, your framework may provide some stock icons. But if you are making a web application, you will need external icons.

I have seen a lot of pages that lists many icon sets…

• Icons For Your Desktop and Icons For Your Web Designs
• Quality mini icons
• 90 Free Vector Icons Set
• The Top 50 Sources for Free Designer Icons
• Top 50 Supercool Free Icon Sets
• Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• More Symbols, Buttons and Icons For Free
• Free Tiny Small Mini Icons Bullets
• Icon Finder - a search engine for icons

But when I want some icons I have a better place to look.

KDE and Gnome Icon themes.

I prefer using these icons because of the following reasons…

Multiple Size Icons

Most themes provide the same icon in various sizes. The available sizes are 128×128, 64×64, 48×48, 32×32, 24×24, 22×22, 16×16 and sometimes even a scalable SVG set. Not all themes have all the sizes - but most have. I don’t have to tell you how useful this is.

Lots of Choice

KDE Look Icons page have 86 pages with 15 icon themes per page. That makes a total of 1290 icon sets. And I am not counting the Gnome Look Icons.

That’s a lot of choice. Granted, not all will be good. Not all will have the icon I am searching for. Not all have the size I way want. There will be some duplication. But its still a lot.

Free - in both sense of the word

Most of these icons uses GPL and LGPL licenses. So you can use if for your application without paying for them. You can modify them. You can share it with others. You can… you get the idea. The point is there are no restrictions.

Even if you are building a proprietary application, I think you can use the icons because you are not compiling it into the application. But I am not sure about that - if anyone reading this knows, please leave a comment.

I have to warn you that not all icons sets use these licenses - so make sure you look at the license of an icon set before using it.

Great Icons

Most of the icons are created by professional designers. Sure there are some duds among the collection - but the majority of them are good.

Some Recommended Icon Sets

Crystal Project

Nuvola

Crystal Diamond

black + white icons

Crystal Clear

And there are hundreds more for you to find out…

Yesterday I went to the first Kerala BarCamp. It was held at Techno Park, Trivandrum. I had to travel 225 kilometers to attend it - and it was totally worth it!

Sessions

Open Social

By Kenney Jacob

About the new OpenSocial API provided by Google. The talk was concentrated on its application on Orkut - as it is the most popular social networking site here.

Game Development in Ruby

By Vishnu Gopal

This session was about creating small 2D games in Ruby using the ‘Gosu’ library. You can get a small sample game he created for this session at N3wton Google Code

Presentation

Home Automation using Bluetooth

By Hari Krishnan

Using your mobile phone as an universal remote for all applications within your home.

Asterisk

By Bipin

Asterisk is a Open Source software PBX(Private branch exchange)

QT

By Dhaneesh and Dev

Using QT Designer to create GUI applications.

Computer Memory Based on Bacteriorhodopsin

By Jidhu

A new way of storing information - by changing the state of a protein. This is done by shining a different colour light on the protein. It is much faster and cheaper than the fastest RAMs available today. Also, it is non-volatile - so it can be as both the HardDisk and as the RAM. I found this the most interesting of all session.

Open Network Project

By Linoy Joseph

A implementation of a mesh style open network.

Android

by Renjith Ramachandran

Developing mobile application using the Android SDK provided by Google. The presentation showed us how to do it using Eclipse.

PHP Wiz

by Sreekanth G S

A small introduction to PHP and Web Application Development.

The People

The best part of the camp is the people you meet. I met a lot of people who I only knew only through the internet. Some of the people I met…

• Mani Kartik
• Kenney Jacob
• Vishnu Gopal
• And Many More…

Until next time…

Back when I was using Windows, I searched for some language that would let me create GUI application. I knew C++ - but creating a GUI using C++ was very, very hard. After some searching I found Tcl/Tk - it was perfect. I liked Tk so much that I used it to create GUI in perl programs. And in Ruby. And in Python. I even wrote tutorials for Tcl/Tk and Perl/Tk. Then I discovered Linux. initially I was glad that I did not choose VB - that would mean that I have to throw away all my custom programs. But since I used open languages like Tcl, Perl, Ruby etc, they will run on Linux as well.

But when I actually ran the programs in Linux, I got the shock of a lifetime. The applications I created looked bad - really bad…

I still use many Tk programs - but because of the looks issue, I decided to stop using Tk for my new programs. So I decided to try GTK. I even created a small application using PyGTK(my first) to view the harddisk space usage in Linux - Frees.

It was a very simple application - all I had to do is run the ‘df’ command, parse its output, and display a small table using that data. I was expecting around 100, 150 lines of code at the most. But after I created the app, I have 500+ lines of code.

At first, I thought that it was a mistake on my part - I thought that I was not using the best method. But then I came across an article in Reddit - gnocl or PyGtk?.

PyGtk is still the most recommended binding for Gtk. A lot of programs in Linux is written using PyGtk. So naturally there are a few advantages for using it…

• It will be the more ‘road-tested’ binding.
• Many system will have it installed by default.
• Bigger community - so…
  • more support
  • more examples
  • more tutorials
  • etc.

One the other hand, I have to write more code.

Conclusion

If it is a private script - only useful for myself, then I will use Tcl/Tk or Gnometcl. If the script could be distributed, like Frees, then I will use Python GTK.

What about the other options…

• wxWidgets
• PyQT
• Ruby/GTK
• Perl/GTK

Any recommendations for me on which library to use? Please leave it in the comments.

There has been many ideas about a offline storage mechanism for web applications. Dojo implemented this in its Library. Firefox 3 promises this. Now we have a new arrival in this area - Google Gears. Unlike Dojo’s implementation, Gears require an extension for it to work.

Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.

See Gears In Action

To see Gears in action, first install the extension…

Google Gears

Then go to Google Reader - you will see a ‘Offline’ mode button in the top right corner. If you click on that the script will download 2000 entries into your local database(SQLite).

To see this database, open up the Firefox Profile folder and enter the ‘Google Gears for Firefox’ folder. You will find many Database files there. Just open any of these in a SQLite V3 supporting viewer.

After the download is complete, you can use the Reader without a net connection.

When you get the connection back, just click on the same button - all the changes will be send to the online server.

Advantages of the Google Gears

• Once the extension is installed, the script will work across all the supported browser. No JavaScript hacks required.
• Full featured Database support - this makes it much easier to work with.
• Supported by Google
• Open Source

Disadvantages of Google Gears

• The user must install an extension for this to work.
• Requires user action before going offline. If your connection breaks suddenly(as it often happens here in India), you are left with nothing.
• All browsers are not supported(yet)
• Beta software - some bugs are to be expected. But, this will be solved in time.

I am still exploring the code - expect a new post with working javascript examples soon.

Google Gear Links

• Google Gears
• Getting Started
• Tutorial
• Developer site
• Frequently asked questions
• Developer Forum
• Gears API Blog
• erik’s weblog
• Gears for Offline