GMail and other web applications have adopted a new technique coined Ajax (by Adaptive Path). It brings web applications a step away from the stateless web and closer to real applications. It’s harder to built applications with the applications, but it’s hot – and the most recent release of Rails (for Ruby) promises to make it much easier to do Ajax applications. Before you do too many Ajax applications, do think for a second. Tadalist is a great example which could have been so much better with less Ajax code. The application rocks in a browser – if you’re at a full computer where the browser knows about and fulfil the requirements posed by the Ajax technique.

For all the PHP freaks, the number one PHP Company, Zend, has released a new version of their Zend Studio 4. It’s probably the coolest way to develop professional PHP applications and besides a load of new features it seems to be running faster.

David HH has an interesting piece on “The false promise of template languages”. While neither Perl nor PHP may offer the same clean syntax in the code as Ruby can do, it does indeed raise a few interesting questions about how actually benefit from the templates and who does in the space between designers and developers. I do love some degree of separation between heavy duty code and the interface layer, and usually work with HTML::Template or Smarty – they work and the penalty for using a separation layer seems to be the smallest possible (at least in a balanced performance/ functionality view).

Providing feedback in user interfaces is quite important. If you have a task, which may take a while, one of the ways to signal to the users, that the system is working, is by displaying a progress bar. If you don’t know how to make one, we do have one available for you.

It should be a surprise, but most companies moving into the internet space doesn’t seem to get the fact that less is more. 37Signals just announced they cut 66% of the features of their next product giving them:

• faster time to market
• a product easier to design
• lower cost of change

It’s really no surprise - right? Yet so many product managers seem to insist that the 100+ pages specification is the product they need in order to bring the product to the market.