As much as I am annoyed with the web2.0 hype and a lot of products that are just clones of others (how many RSS readers are there?) I just had an epiphany of sorts when I was on the client site and had to do some work without my trusty laptop with Photoshop, Homesite, Word and all the other goodies.

It is pretty amazing how efficient you can work without your local software when you use what the web offers you:

• Writely allows for uploading word documents, changing them and saving them again (this has been bought by Google, so some privacy fanatical people might object to it). Works good for simple documentation, but of course it seems to break makros and change tracking
• Pixoh allows for uploading, cropping, resizing and turning pictures and saving them in an optimised fashion.
• Meebo is a browser interface for all of the Instant Messaging Networks out there and allows you to stay in touch with your work mates without installing MSN, Yahoo or AIM.
• Openomy allows you to store and share files with work mates (and stop you from abusing your personal FTP)

What I haven’t found yet is a cool online code editor that would allow me to upload JavaScript, HTML, PHP or CSS and edit in a color coded fashion. Has anybody web2.0-yfied the portable NVU yet?

Some good lists of Web2.0 apps:

• Best web 2.0 software of 2005
• More great web 2.0 software

And in case this bores you and you need the lighter side of the idea:

• Web 2.0 validator
• Beggr
• Isolatr

Just when I thought I am going research crazy I stumbled upon the AJAX/DHTML library scorecard at musingsfrommars.org.

The article reviews a lot and I mean a lot of DHTML/AJAX/JS libraries and categorises them into grades how cross-browser they are. If you want to pick a library to use instead of rolling your own solutions and you don’t want to leave a certain number of visitors standing in the rain, check this scorecard beforehand.

Great job!

The only annoying thing is the page itself. I’d have liked to print the lot out, but it won’t do that on Firefox.

Glenn Jones of Mapsurface.com just sent me my login details for this cool tracking tool.

Try it now by pressing ALT+X on your keyboard (seems not to work in Opera though).

What I love about it:

• The slick interface
• The validity – it stays in the head of the document as two includes and doesn’t do any document.write nasties in the body
• The on-demand nature – you might not want to wait for my tracker to run

What I think needs to change:

• You should be able to password – protect the stats

If that were the case, I’d try and approach a lot of clients with this goody.

According to news.com, Microsoft will stop Active-X controls like embeded media or flash to start automatically in the next security upgrade.

This is very bad news for Flash designers (and may give DOM scripting another boost). Microsoft recommends as a workaround to Activate the control dynamically by writing it out via JavaScript. The examples given are rather messy, and I wonder if Bobby van der Sluis’ Unobtrusive Flash Object wouldn’t have been a better example to promote as a fix.

I just stumbled upon Google Pages, which seems to be a cleaner geocities/myspace/homestead. You can create web pages in a live editing WYSIWYG environment and choose a style and a layout. The resulting code is not as grim as I expected it:

• A quick test of a googlepage

Googlepages creates CSS layouts with embedded styles, which is not really perfect, but a step in the right direction. You can edit, publish and unpublish pages quite easily. It seems even adult content is all right to publish, but I will not test that now! I created the demo page in FireFox 1.5 on PC, as Googlepages so far does neither support Safari, Camino nor Firefox on my Mac.

I’d like to see a chance to submit templates…