Dylan Schiemann

Successful AJAX-based applications provide a better end-user experience than traditional Web sites. Fast performance is absolutely essential to deliver on this potential. The large number of technologies and the additional complexity that AJAX adds to the mix creates significant headaches in tracking down performance bottlenecks and related issues. So where do you start tracking down performance-related problems? The answer is logical: by delving into the raw performance data of your application. Perhaps a pedantic suggestion, but by not adequately analyzing and measuring the data, you're relying only on hunches and past experience. Fortunately, we now have a number of highly useful open source and commercial tools available to assist us in this tedious process. The bes... (more)

iWork Numbers and the iPhone

Dylan Schiemann's Blog Apple’s new application, Numbers, is a really nice refreshing blend of Excel and a general diagramming tool. It is surprisingly feature-rich, making actually somewhat more complex to use than a typical Apple app. It’s interesting that the new iWork suite has the Leopard theme or skin. Because of the Leopard delays, Apple seems to be in this weird hybrid s... (more)

Engaging Interfaces with AJAX and Comet

Ajax and comet are great techniques for getting data to and from the server, But they do little to address the requirements of sophisticated web application user interfaces. Cross-component interactions, synchronization, state management and other requirements for such applications may be solved through an event-driven approach. Dojo and other toolkits significantly extend the browser-pr... (more)

iPhone DevCamp

Dylan Schiemann's Blog The iPhone DevCamp begins Friday night. I won’t be able to attend, though we’ll be sending Jason Cline to the event to represent SitePen. We’ve been blogging quite a bit about the iPhone on the SitePen blog, and running a lot of tests to find out all of the various things that don’t work on the current Safari version found on the iPhone. The ... (more)

Facebook Has Completely Replaced MySpace

Dylan Schiemann's Blog In my annual informal review of social networks among our cousins and other people under 21 that are still fickle, Facebook has completely replaced MySpace in their lives. In fact, the only people I hear talking regularly about MySpace are a bit older and just learning about social networking. I know, I know, small sample size, but why are social networks so fleeting... (more)