Nuno Prospero dos Santos

LaLaClick is a web application to visualize and explore similarity relations of music artists. Warning: if you love music, you’ll get addicted to this site!

It works like this:

• The engine starts with the pre-loaded example: Radiohead. Music starts to play and some nodes appear on the screen.
• When no more nodes are added, you can simply select the option Clear All
• In the search band box, type the name of a band or singer and press the Enter key. Click on Add Aura. You can repeat the process over and over and produce a giant tree of alike artists.
• The nodes added, are bands somehow related to the name you typed! This way you can learn about bands similar to your taste :)

How does this work? Quite simple and interesting – the similarity is based on the principle that people who listen to this artist also listen to that one. The information about these “listening preferences” is powered by last.fm, a music community website which gathers about 20 million users.

Have you read the Ten principles that contribute to a Googley user experience?

1. Focus on people – their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

The main article explores every topic. It’s a must-read for any engineer!

Opera has just lauched Dragonfly! Today!!

I’ve been waiting for a decent javascript/css debugger…

http://www.opera.com/products/dragonfly/

I’ve playing around with the Google Maps API and I like it. Well documented, with nice examples. The question is: what’s the next step? How can I create value from it? :)

I’ve noticed a little tiny annoying bug: if you want to have more than one map with directions, you have to put them in the same table! If you close the table tag, only one of  the maps will be enable! The other one will be an empty, grey google map. (Some technical details: 1 – I don’t like to be forced to use table; 2 – I don’t understand… the map is identified in the DOM structure: why do I need to create a parent called table?; 3 – only one table tag? how can I put text or other elements, with putting them in table rows?!; 4 – how can I control the ajax request? try to write china and wait a couple of minutes for the result…)

I’ve been digging for a long time in this framework: CakePHP. Nothing new here, I just wanted to shout that I love working at the bakery!

After many projects in web apps, mainly using PHP, I’ve noticed the huge amount of time that any developer spends creating support structures – such as: database connection, reading/writing data, form validation, basic string functions, etc. A framework can reduce this waste of time, letting you focus on what really matters: user interaction, services and data.

The most famous framework, nowadays, is Ruby on Rails, which combines multiple programming paradigms and fits like a glove in agile software development models. Includes nice features as scaffolding (so damn cool!), Active Record, MVC structure (so KISS!!), etc. Cool, huh? Maybe at first sight… I’ve spent much time trying to read the RoR Bible, but I get quite lost in Ruby’s details. Good framework, complex language.

The founders of CakePHP took the RoR concepts and created a whole new framework, combining the best features from both worlds. Since I prefer to read (and write) in PHP, they’ve created something highly useful for me. Combined with the traditional web dev artillery, there is a plugin for syntax highlighting and the other old buddy for content upload. For the skeptics, here is the traditional demo: how to setup a blog in less than 15 minutes.

EDIT: However… I hate when they change the API. That’s why they call it “beta”… :)