New release of like/diss

We just released a major upgrade of our social network site like/diss and I became so excited that I generated 20 new private beta testing signup codes. We are still is in private beta mode.

When you have signed up you can invite three more friends to like/diss. Currently, you also get five more invitations for your friends for each bug you find and report.

Each invitation code below can only be used once, first come, first served. To signup, go to:

http://www.likediss.com/users/register/

Invitations codes (if one is already used, try another one):

bwhaxxbdqzu
nfehbxjqnk
dajlddhbzrw
zjoeieusbmdkk
isglumjtvtgyd
yrqadfuxbtu
leyyeozoqm
icfoqpqijoz
xelwdilaocdr
yfbdviytcbj
gjlxipmii
fzjjvrerz
xvncibndzega
pxalazwqucw
zmxgskisuas
vrjxolpacih
wzspfktfw
nwwguctqa
rgzpqeovkjlu
vyhfaazqnm

UI Jane Doing YUI

Toby and I played around with Yahoos open sourced UI library YUI yesterday. It is a high level lib containing widgets, Ajax features and a lot of DOM scripting utilities that reminds pretty much of UI toolkits for desktop applications. While PrototypeJS with Scriptaculous are frameworks for coding JavaScript and Ajax in a clean way, YUI is more of a platform with ready-to-configure-and-use stuff.

The upside is that you can get fancy things like desktop application like widgets like sortable and re-sizable tables, expanding trees, and tabs with Ajax XHR data bindings up in a short time without writing much JS code. The downside is that you get a lot of code to send over the network. Although the library has whitespace compressed production files and fragments you can use if you only use some of the widgets, you get pretty soon up to 500kb or 1mb of client side scripts and style sheets. On the other hand, if you compare it to the other major high level web UI framework Dojo Toolkit you get a much more stable and standards bases solution that don’t crash and ordinary browser like Dojo does.

It is obvious that the YUI framework takes the web one step further down the road to replace the rich user interface desktop application without losing the interaction and user experience. That being said, we will not use it on our social network site because of the files size overhead, but continue to use PrototypeJS and to some extent Scriptaculous. But if I were about to build a web based application for an organizations internal use or for a stock broker firm, I would definitely give YUI a chance.

The iPhone Shuffle

It’s been a long time since iDay and my neighbor Pete says I’m the last one at the block to get an iPhone. Down at AppleStore today I asked the young salesman if they had the new iPhone Shuffle model. He replied that he was not allowed to talk about future releases. Gee, after selling thousands of iPod Shuffles, he didn’t get it at all. Okay, I said, then I’ll take the regular model.

New Orkut Design

Anyone using Orkut nowadays? I’ve totally forgot about it till I saw on Techcrunch that they have made a re-redesign.

Scriptaculous Autocompleter

The sponsor of our social network site came in a few days ago and was upset about the autocomplete behavior of the tag field at our site. He said: “when there’s only one tag matched and suggested in the list I cannot choose it”. I was kind of confused, but maybe he is more an ordinary user than me.

The End of the Masthead

So I made this new masthead for our Social Network Site™ and I came to wonder what a masthead has to contain, look like and why it needs to be there at all.