Weaver’s Loom

I recently attended the Google Technology User Group Campout at the Googleplex in Mountain View. This was a three day sprint to build something interesting with the latest Google product: Google Wave.

Google Wave, as it turns out is a very interesting experiment in social interaction. Google is trying to reinvent collaborative communication with a piece of software that is one part chat, one part Wiki, and one part WebEx.

I’d seen this product at the Google I/O conference a few months back and was impressed with the demos. Basically you get these shared documents (called Waves) that all of the collaborators can update at the same time. You can watch the hour and a half demo at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_UyVmITiYQ

The demo included things like interaction with blogs, Twitter and other web technologies, as well as interesting programming doing things like on the fly grammar checking. I signed up for a sandbox account the day of the presentation (using my iPhone of course), and got set up a week or so after that.

Wave was written by the brothers Lars and Jans Rasmussen, who are the architects of the Google Maps API. In some sense, this is an experiment in building software caused by the lessons they learned with the immensely popular Maps API. By giving the developers access early in the build process, they hope to build a more solid platform that will serve the developers needs.

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Recently I’ve been doing some web page work again, and trying to push the envelope on my CSS knowledge.

I was at a talk at 360|iDev where Brian Fling was talking about UI design, and he pointed out that your site should work without your CSS. Now while I know this as a design principle, it seems like something that we probably overlook more often than not.

So, out of curiosity, I thought I’d take a look and see what some of my pages look like without their stylesheets applied.

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I spent some time yesterday figuring out CSS problems for Job Connections.

The Job Connections site was built using a CSS for printing that wasn’t including all of the parts of the page that should be printed. They use a stylesheet called print.css, and when somebody would try to print a page, they weren’t getting anything but the text in the middle of the page.

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