Recently, we tried our hand and developing a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, the Solar Viewer. We built the Yahoo! Widget version earlier in the year with some success–at least as far the number of downloads are concerned. Having developed now for two of the more popular widget platforms (we haven’t looked at Google Gadgets, Opera Widgets, or DesktopX, yet) there are few interesting sites in Dashboard and Yahoo! Widget world worth pointing out. These sites are great for finding new widgets or for promoting ones that you’ve developed.

For the Mac OS X Dashboard there is of course the official Apple Dashboard site, which includes a Top 50 listing. (The Solar Viewer is currently #34, is #20 moving up the charts (updated 11/16/06) between a Tarot Reading widget and one that links to movie trailers.) Yahoo! Widgets has a similar directory although it could use a Top 50 (or some other way of browsing) as widgets get quickly buried on their site.

Mac Update has an extensive list of Dashboard widgets and they actually went to the trouble of posting the Solar Viewer and then emailing us, inviting us to become a developer. Once you’ve signed up as a developer, you get access to tools to track the number of downloads, rating and comments. You can also start an adword campaign to promote your software, which is why Mac Update is so helpful in getting you started. Still, the tools are well designed and the site is relatively easy to use, whether you’re looking for widgets or promting one.

Dashboard Widgets has the latest news on Apple Dashboard widgets directed primarily at the widget developer. However, there is also an excellent showcase which contains over 1,500 widgets for Mac OS X.

Softpedia is a massive collection of software of all kinds widgets included, but I’ve found it difficult to search and to use.

Widgipedia has a decidedly “Web 2.0â€? look and feel and it is “Beta” (of course). The concept is a good one, although it doesn’t get as nearly much traffic as some of the other more established directories listed here do, perhaps it will in time. The site keeps track of the High Rated, Latest Widgets and has all sorts of “viralâ€? software tools for emailing and embedding links and RSS feeds of their categories. The site accepts and contains a variety of desktop widgets; Dashboard, Yahoo!, and even DesktopX ones can be found.

WidgetWorld is yet another widget directory this one is based in the Netherlands. It looks like they’re just getting started as they only have about two dozen widgets. Although, it was nice to see they already had the Solar Viewer in their collection.

Finally, I came across The Flip Side, a well-designed blog for Mac Dashboard widget developers. There’s a number of resources for developers including what must be the world’s only podcast for widget developers. There are also links to what appear to be “widget only” design and development firms such as Taco Widgets, WidgetMachine, among others. Flip Side promises more posts and podcasts soon. We’ll be watching.

Real World Software Development has posted an enormous list of Web 2.0 sites, the Best of the Best Web 2.0 sites. All of these site are (of course) checked by the Web 2.0 validator. Which is one step above (or below?) the Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator.

The list is extensive, but surprisingly there’s no mention of LibraryThing, Shelfari (which we wrote about recently, Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari), and Whatsonmybookshelf. Also missing is BlueDot (social bookmarking), JumpCut (video editing), and Splice (audio editing). Still there must be over 100 sites here many that I’ve never come across.

As someone who observed the first Internet bubble up-close in San Francisco, I’m finding the proliferation of Web 2.0 sites just as remarkable. Yesterday Business Week ran an article, Bubble 2.0? in it a longtime venture investor, Todd Dagres suggest a 1% success rate, “For every one that works, another 100 will fail.” I guess we’ll find out soon enough if he’s right.

We’ve just finished developing version 1.0 of the Solar Viewer widget this time as a Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X. Earlier in the year we developed a Yahoo! widget version that works with both Mac and Windows, although you’ll need the Yahoo! Widget Engine to make it go.
Both versions (Yahoo! and Mac Dashboard) show the latest images of the sun from NASA satellites and ground-based observatories. More information about the images and links to larger images are provided. We first collected all of the amazing solar images for the Sun Earth Viewer, a Flash-based interactive that we developed with NASA back in 2004.

If you’re interested we posted a how-to for Yahoo! Widgets when we developed the first version of the Solar Viewer. We hope to have some time in the next couple of weeks to do something similar for the Mac version.

The Dashboard widget should be available on the Apple site soon. In the meantime, you can download it from Solar Viewer Widget page in the Ideum portfolio.

Today is Election Day in the U.S. and we are once again reminded that voting is a right. (It is not a privilege as our highest elected official stated just this morning.) Over the last week or so we’ve come across some interesting sites worth sharing.

First, if you need to know where to vote go to Vote411.org. For an interesting experience in viewing the results, there is an election mashup that combines Google Earth and Google Maps (CNET has the story). It is available with the Google Earth pack. Unfortunately, it is a Windows only add on. For all platforms, the New York Times has an interesting Flash-based interactive Election Guide and Map as does the Washington Post.

To gain some historical insight and to see an interesting Web 2.0 application, take a look at the US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. Use the slider to see the top “keywords” in speeches over the last 200+ years. Finally, for a reminder about what today is all about, check out the Interactive Constitution at the National Constitution Center.

Flash is a great technology for presenting information to the user in an interesting, fun, functional and predictable way. It’s installed on nearly every internet-capable machine on the planet, and it’s perfect for deploying a rich media-driven experience. Despite its advantages the system has several noticeable drawbacks. Current cross platform support is uneven (although Flash 9 promises support for Linux, Mac, and Windows), textual content is displayed using a flash-specific renderer (native OS/WM text support is more functional, IMHO), and Flash files are impossible for search engines to index.

Re-enter the lingua franca of the Web: HTML. Supported (albeit at different levels) on every Internet-capable machine and utilizing the host system’s native libraries, standard HTML pages are visible to web crawlers, regular surfers, and users requiring special accessibility features. For example, you can link directly or bookmark the Ideum portfolio, or astronomy exhibits, or an individual project like Tour the Solar System. This was simply not possible with our Flash portfolio.

Considering our strong focus on video and exhibit development Flash was perfect for our portfolio. Things have changed dramatically in the past year, though. Server-side libraries are making client-side programming easy – the limitations of the infamous XMLHttpRequest object are more readily apparent, and mature libraries such as prototype and script.aculo.us make programming responsive desktop-like Web applications a breeze. An integration with Flash where we need to show video (like our Fuel Cell Q & A exhibit) fills multimedia voids that HTML/Javascript have yet to deliver. We decided things had advanced enough to make the Ideum portfolio a Web 2.0 application, and to create it we utilized some powerful, freely available software.

Ruby on rails makes the creation of some remarkable web sites very simple. We learned what Rails was capable of at RailsConf 2006, and decided it was time to give the system a shot. Remember CGI in C++? Validating user input was difficult, buffer overruns were all but avoidable, and actually creating something that looked halfway decent was impossible. When PHP made it’s debut the world (or at least those of us here) breathed a collective sigh of relief. PHP made it possible to quickly take user input and write to the browser. It handled Apache integration for us, and made web programming remarkably easy. Recently things have gotten even better.

If you’ve gotten this far you’ve probably heard of the MVC (Model, view, controller) architecture, as present in Ruby on Rails (and several other frameworks such as Django, CakePHP, and Struts). Instead of grabbing information from the request, looping through that information, and then echoing certain values to the response when the process comes across them, a ‘controller’ (ideally) contains all the application logic, and computed values are sent from it to a ‘view’ – a template that can be designed independently of the controller. Not only does the Ruby on Rails system offer MVC, but it also contains thousands of readily available functions for anything from html sanitizing to file serving. When swapping languages (in this case ActionScript to Ruby), you generally have to re-build your heavily used utility functions. Rails comes with most of what you need, so instead of laboring over input sanitizing and XML parsing, you get started with the real application immediately.

Development of the new portfolio was painless. Database integration, application processing and display is seamless and nearly automatic in rails. We were able to quickly set up a mailing list, a system for sorting portfolio items by category, and several other relatively static pages. Although in future plans, we currently don’t utilize a custom blogging solution. WordPress is a great tool, and we’ve no urgent need to dispose of it and start over. Since the portfolio is integrated with the blog in a number of ways, access to the blog information was essential. Our first attempt was opening a second database connection using the RoR ActiveRecord connection functions. We were successful in opening and querying the WordPress database for recent posts, but after five requests the connection would spontaneously close. This was a MySQL issue on the testing machine, but since one doesn’t always have unobstructed access to MySQL settings we decided to take another approach and simply merged the WordPress and portfolio databases.

Javascript plays an important, albeit relatively transparent role on the site. You’ll notice the “Screen Width” option in the upper right hand corner of the page. We made some adjustments to the standard prototype library to include stylesheet swapping and a few extra DOM functions. At first we determined that the “Screen Width” link would simply route to the javascript function which would swap between two stylesheets, the regular one and a smaller version. After the function was implemented we found that both Windows and Linux would resize the images without anti aliasing. A small script on the server now creates a second set of images, sized (with anti-aliasing) for the smaller screen, and a new routine swaps the image source when the screen width is changed.

Internet Explorer doesn’t like stylesheet changes (or much of anything, really), and refused to re-render the images. We wrote a special case procedure for IE, which sends a request to the server in the background, telling it to send images pre-sized for a specific stylesheet. After forcing a refresh, the new style is applied. As the site neared completion we began to integrate the flash videos, only to realize that we needed a procedure to resize them, as well. Resizing flash videos can be tricky, as the browser tends to cache them immediately. The simple solution? Just copy the HTML from the containing element, set the containing element’s HTML to nothing, and then insert the copied HTML. The browser will refresh the video. The same technique is used during the slide show to prevent and start playback at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, the same problem with image quality appeared with the flash video, and we were forced to resize each one for storage on the server side.

Our custom content management system also witnessed a few core changes during the portfolio build. The CMS is quite simple in concept: 1) track certain collections of components on a web page, and 2) allow those components to contain value maps and react to outside messages. We utilized the CMS in some static sites. The goal in which was to track the changes to the page, strip all unnecessary markup, and save the result to the file which was loaded. The result is an amazingly simple utility which is easily applied to any static page. When it came to utilizing it for the portfolio site we were able to fully explore the opportunities present in what became a very nifty little library.

Each piece of data on the page is tagged and aware of its relation to the database. Sound familiar? It’s pretty much the core concept of an ORM (Object-relational mapping system). ORM’s will take a database table, and transform it into a representation native to whatever language you’re programming in. SQLObject (Python), Hibernate (Java), and ActiveRecord (Ruby) are some pretty popular ORM systems for those with interest. To the best of our knowledge we are the first ones to ever create an ORM system that operates via Javascript.

Through a Ruby on Rails layer we’re able to allow Javascript to both pull information from the database, and insert/update the database depending on what changes are made – all via HTML. It’s truly interesting stuff, and allows for the addition of amazing and natural authoring ability to any page we build, while letting the designer maintain styles and certain aspects so the user doesn’t accidentally break the page layout with an edit. We’ll post an introduction to the CMS later this month.

The video interviews we conducted at the Future of Science Conference in Venice, Italy are now available on the Tech Museum’s Understanding Genetics site and on iTunes as a video podcast. We discussed issues surrounding human evolution and genetics with Peter Atkins, Daniel Dennett, Marc Hauser, and Ian Tattersall.
Along with traveling to Venice, one the great pleasures of this project was preparing for the interviews. All four of these scientists are accomplished authors and I can enthusiastically recommend the following books…

Galileo’s Finger by Peter Atkins provides an introduction to the “Ten Great Ideas in Science.” (Galileo’s actual finger is at the Institute and Museum of the History of Science in Florence.) Daniel Dennett’s controversial book Breaking the Spell looks at religion as a social phenomenon. While Marc Hauser’s latest book, Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong explores the concept that we all have an innate sense of right and wrong. Finally, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness by Ian Tattersall explores the story of own unique development as a species.

(You can learn more about Ideum’s work with the Tech Museum in the Genetics category of the Ideum portfolio.)

The Association of Science-Technology Center’s (ASTC) annual conference starts this weekend, hosted by the Louisville Science Center (pictured right). This year I’m co-presenting, The Next Wave: Emerging Internet Technologies at Museums with Bryan Kennedy, Science Buzz (Science Museum of Minnesota) and Kevin von Appen, RedShift Now (Ontario Science Center). We all collaborated at the Museums and Web conference back in March where we presented the paper, Community Sites & Emerging Socialable Technologies.

While some of the topics are the same, there are new findings and ideas to report. Back in March there were only around 30 museum blogs, now there are 80 at last count in the Museum Blogs directory. While that is still not a lot of sites, it does equal about a half-dozen new museum blogs a month.

One area that we’ll spend more time talking about at the ASTC Conference is the concept of museum’s entering (colonizing?) existing social spaces. This week a came across a few posts from Zeke’s Gallery on Art Museums on Flickr and Art Museums on MySpace. At the same time I learned about Ontario Science Center posting videos on YouTube. While those of you outside of the museum world are wondering what’s the big deal. It is still rather unusual for a museum to establish a presence in these spaces, the vast majority of their web efforts our focused on their own sites. Trust continues to be an obstacle.

We’ll discuss the concept of radical trust. This was a hot topic first in the Library 2.0 world, and later in our own museum blogosphere (Fresh + New explored, Radical trust & Web 2.0 as well). Finally, it will be good to hear the latest on Science Buzz and RedShift Now they remain two of the more interesting Web 2.0 examples in the science museum field.

We’ve set up a Flickr pool for the conference so if you’re attending please join up. If you’re not, you can still check out the pool at: http://www.flickr.com/groups/astc2006

Shelfari (Beta, of course) is “a virtual shelf to show your books” and “connect with your friends.” It’s an interesting concept and parts of it are well done, although some the limitations in organizing your shelf became apparent soon after I began to add books. It would be great to be able to reorder, or otherwise create categories (in ways other than using opinions or star ratings), but perhaps this is in the works as this site only launched this month.

Our shelf is at: http://www.shelfari.com/Ideum. For now, the books included are those that I thought would be useful for course I’m teaching at UVIC next month (The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World). I haven’t added much to our shelf in the way of tags or opinions to any of the books in the collection, but it’s a start. It will be interesting to see how things develop with Shelfari and with its closest competitor, the more established LibraryThing.

As the Web has evolved, so has our portfolio. I’ve always believed that a strong portfolio site not only demonstrates our capabilities, but also reflects our approach towards design and technology.

This is our fifth portfolio site in less than seven years and while it is never easy to find the time to redesign, we’ve always managed to squeeze it in between projects. There were several motivating factors at play here for this redesign.

First, as screen size has grown over the last few years our portfolio was looking increasingly small on the screen. Currently, 6 in 10 monitors are at 1024×768 pixels only about 17% use 800×600. This is according to designer Jakob Nielsen’s alertbox July 2006.

A larger size portfolio means larger slides and video. This is particularly important for the electronic exhibits that we create, that are not viewable on the Web. (For example, Tour the Solar System or Clean Power: The Promise of Fuel Cells are on the museum floor only.) Nielsen’s advice was to optimize the design for 1024×768 and then create a “liquid” design that would continuously resize based on a range of browser window sizes. We took a slightly different approach. The Ideum portfolio automatically detects browser window size and provides the option (top right under About and Contact) for the visitor to resize if they wish. Like Neilsen, we agree you can’t ignore 17% of your audience.

Another consideration was accessibility. While Adobe Flash has made strides in accessibility with each new version, HTML is simply more accessible. A screen reader or portable device can more easily access the information on our new site. (By the way, if you’re interested in accessibility issues in Adobe Products, check out their Accessibility blog).

When we launched our blog in January of this year, we quickly saw our page views jump in our Google Analytics and we watched them rise 1,500% according to Alexa.com. While there were certainly more pages generated, we noticed an improvement in the number of visitors site-wide.

Our all-Flash portfolio was basically a black box. Individual project pages couldn’t be indexed by search engines or even bookmarked by interested visitors. Also, browser navigation was problematic. For example, the back button would take visitors out of our portfolio. Don’t get me wrong, Flash is still an amazing tool, particularly for online and electronic exhibits. However, developments in AJAX and other Web technologies and the issues I’ve described make Flash less appealing in certain settings. Take a look at AJAX vs. Flash on the dotone site to learn more about this ongoing competition.

Our experience with blogging and other “Web 2.0″ technologies and approaches convinced us that a redesign was necessarily, not only improve the user-experience, but also to heighten our visibility. You’ll notice that we’ve added new features allowing visitors to email individual project pages and to post them to del.icio.us or My Yahoo!.

The structure of the main portfolio page is much the same. We kept the matrix of subjects (Art, History, Science, etc.) and media types (DVD/CD, exhibit, etc.) from the Flash version. It helps users easily find projects while showing the range of work that we’re capable of doing as well as the topic we explore (without having to say, “we do x, y, and z…”).

Finally, the new portolio was developed in Ruby on Rails and uses our own custom content management system (CMS). James here at Ideum will do a post later on the back-end of the site and our new CMS. Until then, we hope you enjoy the new portfolio. Let us know what you think.