Twitter / windcanical

Now Wind/KiteSurfers at Madeira island can receive Twitter alerts whenever optimal wind speed and direction are predicted.

3 day wind forecasts are calculated operationally for the Madeira islands using the MM5 meteorological model and using the GFS solution as initial and boundary conditions by the University of Madeira. Credits go to Rui Caldeira, Ricardo Tomé and myself.

The mashup itself was performed with some simple bash scripting and curl. More technical details are available at the archipelago wiki. I also aggregated all the twitter-bots into a single dapper application using Pipes, so you can add them as an iGoogle gadget on your frontpage.



If anyone whishes to forward their feeds to Twitter alerts, please contact me (guillaume dot riflet at gmail dot com) and I'll see what I can do.

Google Gears API Blog: Gearing up with Zoho Offline

I was moved when the other day I saw Zoho and Google, probable competitors for the web-office market, team-up informally in such a spontaneous and natural way when Zoho started using Google Gears, and trading details and facts about their own experience in web-development during an ad-hoc interview recently.

Zoho did it! They announced a read-only offline mode for their writer, the word processing unit of their full web-office suite. Interestingly they used Gears, Google's recent API that enables web-apps to go offline. This was a daring move from Zoho, particularly because Google itself hasn't yet used their Gears API on their web-based word processor, docs&spreadsheets (former Writely, recently acquired by Google). So far they only used it as a proof of concept on their reader. Is Google losing pace to the new web-office contestant located in India?

Nevertheless, this is a win-win situation as Google gets an ever growing big-gamer using their API. Google also revealed to be magnanimous by asking Zoho an informal meeting and to share experiences as peers would. Just for the record, their initial contact was made live and public in the comments section at Zoho's blog only a few hours after Zoho announced their "Geared" writer. This act of spontaneous collaboration is really touching. Big companies such as Google (and, in due time, Zoho too) are true role-models of fair-play and "don't be evil" lifestyle. Interesting times indeed.

Kirix Strata: Access and Manipulate Data from the Web

Not so long ago I relayed a cool screencast showing Orchstr8's AlchemyPoint. Today, a good friend of mine showed me a next-step essay of a specialized web-browser. Self-untitled "the data-browser", ladies and gentleman, let me introduce you to the next web2.0 world championship contestant, from Kirix's studios, the great Strata! (available in beta version).

Strata is basically a specialized web-browser, that allows to manipulate mysql, excel, csv data, rss, and html-table data thus performing desktop-mashups, presto. Didn't actually tested it, but I do can recommend the following screencast.



This next-generation essay of a web-browser is one step towards the Programmable Web concept, and basically, towards the webtop concept (you know, the leitmotiv behind this blog). I'm more inclined towards the Alchemy point demo style, or towards Yahoo!Pipes or even YubNub. They're all web-based and they abstract themselves from the browser functionalities.

However, I do believe that some changes in the functionalities of today's web-browsers would be interesting. In fact, they'd be so deep in implications that we wouldn't call the application a web-browser anymore, but rather a web-folder; and we wouldn't be surfing the web anymore; but rather folding it. If we were in Star Wars, it would be like acquiring an hyperspace jump drive to our old thruster-propelled web-vessel - i mean, space-vessel.
Just imagine yourself, folding space and time, humm, pardon - just an old Dune leitmotiv -, I mean folding data through the internet ... imagine folding the Web.

Online Office, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, Presentation, CRM and more

This blog is all about reaching the webtop stage: a web-based fully featured OS with very powerful collaborative and open web-apps.

The Office suite is THE desktop killer-app. Whereas Google has been for the last couple of years a front runner in web-apps, Zoho seems to take the lead with its impressive suite of web-based office-like apps. I didn't got the time to make a complete review, but the few ones I did saw (Zoho creator: the online database manager; and Zoho Show: the online slides creator) really impressed me a lot! Google hasn't got any, for starters. Nor Microsoft, nor Yahoo!



I guess that only time will tell what will become of Zoho, an AdventInc independent division, with business headquarters in the states, but with the lead development and programming headquarters in India.
But what really stimulates me, its their innovative approach to make great software:
They have over 120 passionate wannabe software engineers and one PhD only, the division's CEO and Zoho's arch-evangelist, Raju Vegesna. "It's about getting the right people. With the right passion." It appears that most of their developpers in India don't even have a college degree, but they train them as interns at their "Zoho University"; and that they all want to become great software engineers; with passion.
And the results ... impressive! It took them, I guess, less than a couple of years to code every app from scratch. I hear reports that they do updates several times a week for their new apps, and around every 10 days for their more stable apps. I mean, they even got an iZoho frontpage for the iPhone!



I don't know about you, but I'm really curious of the next couple of years ...

Pipes: CineCartazPublicoPT

Yesterday, I showed how to use feed43 to create RSS feeds from old webpages. As an application I created 5 RSS feeds scraped from the CineCartaz Publico webpage. To quickly aggregate and publish them, I used RSS mixer, which is alright, except that its limited to 24 new items only. Lisbon's the city capital, so there's a lot more than 24 films going on movie theaters near me.
So I went to Yahoo pipes to aggregate my RSS feeds into one long yet exhaustive list of items.



Once I created that, I went to Dapper to create a cool widget for my wife's startpage, which btw is iGoogle's.



During the process I also generated this cool flash widget to embed in webpages.

Add to your site   powered by Dapper

And below, you can see the Google gadget embedded in my page.

CineCartazPublico - RSS Mixer Prototype

It's amazing how people in Portugal still aren't aware of the possibilities provided by RSS. You'd be surprised by the number of respectable newspapers who go online but forget to add an RSS feed. Anyway, things are starting to change. Publico now has got an RSS feed. Unfortunately, the CineCartaz doesn't. It's the newspaper's movie theaters section. My wife asked me to make her a widget so she can see what movies are on theatres from her startpage. I've been postponing her request for quite a while now, but then I discovered feed43, and everything changed. Making feeds from webpages finally became a lot easier ...

feed43 is a web2.0 service that allows to turn old webpages with no feeds on them into cool RSS sharing machines. Basically, it allows to perform web-scraping via pattern matching expressions a-la-regexp served on top of a web-based interface. It really works well and it's quite easy to cope with, as long as you're familiarized with regexps.



Here's the only serious coding I add to do

<td width="456" class="fundoEscuro">{%}</td>{*}<td width="11" rowspan="3">{*}De: {%}<br>{*}Com: {%}<br>{*}<br>{%}<br>

So I had this page I wanted to turn into an RSS feed. In 5 to 10 minutes with feed43 and I had a nice RSS feed available. Neat. Unfortunately, this old php generated web-page only shows 11 movies going on per page. And Lisbon is the city capital, so I needed at least another 4 identical RSS feeds, one for each page. So I made them. It's too bad that feed43 doesn't let "save as" any previous work under a different name while keeping the original. That way I would only have had to change the input URL. But that's ok. 4 times 4 minutes and I required a little over 15 minutes to complete my task. Good thing that there aren't over 100 movies going on in Lisbon theatres.
But before actually summoning a startpage widget from these feeds I would still need to glue them together. So I used RSS mixer, the simplified version of Yahoo! Pipes. It automagically provides you with an embeddable xhtml widget, an iphone webpage link and an Apple widget. Sweet! ;)



Anyway, you can now check out the feed here; it might come in handy if you ever get to come visit Lisbon someday (no really, if you need a movie widget to do tourism, then you're hopeless ... ).

Slidecasting 101 � SlideShare

The guys over at Slideshare just took the obvious next step last week when they released a new feature at their site. They created the mashup between podcasts and slides that they called slidecast. Or in their algebra: slides + podcasts = slidecasts. For anyone familiar with these concepts (slides and podcasts), then you can probably guess what a slidecast is. For the others, well, you can just check out a quick slidecast example giving you a how-to on how to build a slidecast (man, I digg these recursive explanations):



I've never been much fond of podcasts. I mean they're ok, but I can't do two things at the same time, like listening to a conversation and work. Thus, I always had to abstract myself from whatever my eyes were gleaning upon. Now I can focus my eyes on slides while listening to the podcast. YAPR! Yet Another Procrastination Reason.

I don't know about you guys, but I for one, will create one about my web2.0 slides. I've received a modest 877 views since I released them. I wonder if this is going to boost their attendancy?