Sunil Urs

Today, our new Gmail Plugin for Contacts and Attachments management has entered public beta. Its basically like Xobni for Gmail. It plugs into your Firefox or IE browser and shows extended information about your contacts whenever you open a mail which include

• Mail Trends
• Notes about your contact – which is editable and gets synced with your Google contacts.
• Recent Conversations
• All attachments that you have received from the contact, etc

Below is a Video showcasing some of its features.

For people who regularly deal with several documents and attachments, this tool is going to be of great help! I myself made use of MailBrowser heavily during the recruitment process in order to add notes and keep track of information regarding the candidates through multiple rounds of screening and it really saved me a good amount of time. Am sure you’ll like it.

You can download MailBrowser from http://mailbrowser.com

Do check out this blog post by Scobleizer wherein he talks about MailBrowser.

Yesterday TechCrunch reported Microsoft’s highly anticipated WorldWide Telescope which can be used by astronomers and non-astronomers alike to explore the heavens with a desktop client akin to Google Earth.

But after reading TechCrunch for years I’ve got into a habit of thinking hard on how can the mentioned software monetize on its efforts by giving it away for free to the mass. Yesterday I did the same with Microsoft’s new product. Of course Microsoft WorldWide Telescope is really a very good product which will help millions of astronomy enthusiasts like me to gain access to such a huge data. But when I started thinking on monetization, this what I pictured in my mind.

As one start exploring….

This is how I visualized. I know my idea is weird. There may be several other ways of monetization. This is just one way.  Microsoft will show you other ways of monetization. Keep watchin!…

Today MySpace has announced their “Data Availability” initiative along with data sharing partnership with Yahoo, EBay, Twitter and Photobucket. Here the key goal is to allow users to use their personal data on other networks and applications. As a simple example, one can display his MySpace profile on other networks. I will be very happy if I can change my profile info on MySpace and it gets automatically updated on LinkedIn, Orkut, Facebook, etc… Though it is not possible currently, it may happen in near future.

They are calling it as “Data Availability” rather than “Data Portability”. And it makes more sense as the third parties are held to strict terms of service, which prohibits them from storing / using the data once the permissions are revoked. So the data is dynamic. You fetch the data when ever it is required, use it and forget it.

It can lead to interesting applications

When it comes to the application, MySpace’s partnership with EBay can lead to some interesting features on EBay wherein once people buy a product on EBay, they can spread the word to all their friends, tell them what they feel about the product, then recommend the product to others. This will allow products to spread virally. Hmmm… Social Shopping!!.. Though this is not completely new, partnership between MySpace and EBay is going to be an interesting thing. MySpace can meet its revenue targets with this initiative. Currently as the Data Sharing is only between the partners, even EBay will be happy to pay them for this exclusivity.

As Michael Arrington says, MySpace has got a clear lead over Facebook this time.

After being in sandbox for months , finally Open Social is live on Orkut. Now members can add applications. Whenever you add an application, Orkut is sends updates to everyone on friends list. This will give massive advertising for all applications and that makes sure that applications spread rapidly.

Currently am seeing a total of 18 applications including iLike, Emote!, PhotoAttack, Horoscopes, TypeRacer, TopFriends by Slide.com, SlideTV, etc. Here is a screen shot of the application directory.

Now Orkut is allowing members to submit there applications.

Though Open Social development started as a competitor for Facebook Apps, its not getting much traction yet. Anyway, Orkut will be a bit more exiting now.

MySQL GUI,  SQLyog 6.52 has been released. This version of SQLyog has got a lot of new features and performance improvements over older versions. SQLyog is one among the best MySQL GUI tools available in the market. It has got an Open Source version and an Enterprise version. Here are some of the feature / improvements in the latest versions of SQLyog.

Visual Schema Designer:

Visual Schema Designer now supports zooming, printing and image export. The Schema Designer (introduced in SQLyog version 6.1) is a visual interface where tables and table structures can be defined,   displayed and manipulated.

The Schema Designer provides a convenient graphical way to perform common operations as an    alternative to the menu-based way of operation that was always supported. Also the Schema Designer provides a graphical overview of (complete or only parts of) your MySQL databases.   

Auto-complete:  Improved Auto-complete with Alias(table alias as well as column alias) support.

Performance: 10x speed improvements in many batch/bulk operations .

Some of the other features present in SQLyog are  backup and restore, object management, database synchronization, notification services, ODBC import, structure synchronization and scheduled backups.

You can get the latest version of SQLyog here.

With Visifire you can create nice looking Silverlight chart within minutes. Let me explain you in simple steps.

First of all you require Silverlight 2.0 installed on your system. You can download it from here.

Download and extract the contents of Visifire Charts package into a directory in your SERVER. You can download it from here. Visifire is Open Source and free.

Visifire requires the data in the form of XML. XML for creating chart is simple and intuitive. Minimum basic XML required looks like below

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc=”clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts”>

</vc:Chart>

The above tag corresponds to a chart element. But there is not data to plot. For now you need not worry about “vc:”. Just remember that you need to add “vc:” to each element.

Now let me add some data into the chart. First I’ll create a Column Chart showing Sales details for a fictitious company, for the first four months….

Then I’ll show you how easy it is to switch to other chart types just by changing One Word!

<vc:DataSeries RenderAs=”Column”>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Jan” YValue=”160021″/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Feb” YValue=”207223″/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Mar” YValue=”225542″/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Apr” YValue=”248827″/>
    <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”May” YValue=”273432″/>
</vc:DataSeries>

Above is the Revenue details for my company. Each value that you are required to enter is a DataPoint and a set of similar DataPoint represents a DataSeries.

Now I require a Title for Chart. So I will create a Title tag.

<vc:Title Text=”Company Revenue Details”/>

And finally a Title for the AxisY.

<vc:AxisY Title=”Revenue” Prefix=”$”>

So now I have all the data ready to create my chart. So the next thing is to put all the data in one place. So here is the final XML code.

<vc:Chart xmlns:vc=”clr-namespace:Visifire.Charts;assembly=Visifire.Charts”>
    <vc:Title Text=”Company Revenue Details”/>
    <vc:AxisY Title=”Revenue” Prefix=”$”>
    </vc:AxisY>
    <vc:DataSeries RenderAs=”Column”>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Jan” YValue=”160021″/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Feb” YValue=”207223″/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Mar” YValue=”225542″/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”Apr” YValue=”248827″/>
        <vc:DataPoint AxisLabel=”May” YValue=”273432″/>
    </vc:DataSeries>
</vc:Chart>

I’ll save the above XML into a file and call it as “data.xml”. Now you just have to reference this XML file from within the HTML page to get a chart. So you need to add these lines of code into your HTML page. make sure you have extracted Visifire.js and Visifire.xap in the same directory as the HTML page.

<script type=“text/javascript” src=“Visifire.js”></script>
<div id=“VisifireChart”>
    <script language=“javascript” type=“text/javascript”>
        var vChart = new Visifire(“Visifire.xap”,500,300); // Visifire path, width, height
        vChart.setDataUri(“data.xml”);//xml file path
        vChart.render(“VisifireChart”);// DOM element in which chart is to be rendered.
    </script>
</div>

And you are done. This is how the chart looks.

Visifire Charts Live Demo

Now you can change the RenderAs attribute in the DataSeries to Doughnut, Bar, Pie, Area and see the chart type change.

Also change the looks of the Chart by adding an attribute “Theme=Theme3″ to the Chart element.

In the next session I’ll be writing about some more cool features of Visifire.

Open Source Silverlight Charts, Visifire 1.0 Beta has been released. It has been released under GPL. With Visifire, you can create and embed charts in your web pages within minutes. You need not have any Silverlight knowledge to use these charts.  The input is XML containing data and the API is JavaScript.  So if you just know a bit of HTML and JavaScript, it is enough.

We started working on this project when Silverlight 1.1 Alpha got released. So most of the code in this project uses Silverlight 1.1 features. But soon we are going to refactor the code to make the best use of Silverlight 2.0 features.

Currently Visifire features 14 types of charts including Column, Bar, Pie, Area, Stacked, Doughnut, etc. Soon we’ll be coming up with more varieties. You can see all available charts in the Chart Gallery.

Looks are good and it comes with 3 built in themes and a variety of ColorSets.  You can get a quick understanding of some of the best features through the Chart Designer. Though Chart Designer does not feature all the possibilities of Visifire, it can help you in creating the charts very quickly. Once you design the chart, you can get the required XML data for your chart. Chart designer also gives you the embedding script. So not much HTML knowledge is required.

Here is a video showcasing the charts available in the gallery.

Soon I’ll be writing more on this explaining many of the features , tips and tricks with Visifire.

Here are a few changes that you need to do to port Silverlight 1.1 project to Silverlight 2.0.

After 3 days of hustle with my previous code and thousands of errors in that, finally I was able to port my Silverlight 1.1 project to Silverlight 2.0. But still it doesn’t use all the cool features provided by Silverlight 2.0 like Grids and all. But I hope to refractor my code soon for better performance by using Silverlight’s native controls rather than my own. While porting the code, few of the things I had to change again and again as I had used them heavily. So here I’ve mentioned a few of them and hope it’ll be useful for you guys.

This is by no way an exhaustive list, but it may help you to quickly change some of the commonly used code and get it running on Silverlight 2.0 and Visual Studio 2008.

1. As I mentioned in my previous article, you need to edit your previous project file.
2. Change HtmlTimer To System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer
3. HtmlPage.Navigate(link) To HtmlPage.Window.Navigate(new Uri(link))
4. You can directly use Static function HtmlPage.Document.GetElementsByTagName to get DOM elements.
5. You can directly use HtmlPage.Document.CreateElement("Div") to create DOM elements
6. XamlReader requires xmlns unlike Silverlight 1.1. XamlReader.Load(“<Canvas/>”); To XamlReader.Load("<Canvas xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/client/2007"/>");
7. FontWeights enumeration has been changed to a static class FontWeight.
8. Change System.Windows.Media.Color.FromRgb(118, 118, 118) To System.Windows.Media.Color.FromARgb(255,118, 118, 118)
9. this.MouseLeave += delegate(object sender, EventArgs e) To this.MouseLeave += delegate(object sender, MouseEventArgs e)
10. this.MouseLeftButtonUp += delegate(object sender, MouseEventArgs e) To this.MouseLeftButtonUp += delegate(object sender, MouseButtonEventArgs e)
11. In MouseEventHandlers, e.ctrl To ((Keyboard.Modifiers & ModifierKeys.Control) == ModifierKeys.Control)
12. ActualWidth of Silverlight Control

    System.Windows.Interop.BrowserHost.ActualWidth; To

    System.Windows.Interop.SilverlightHost silverlightHost = new System.Windows.Interop.SilverlightHost();

    width = silverlightHost.Content.ActualWidth

13. In Silverlight 2.0, Managed Downloader has been removed.So you’ll have to use WebClient.

For a complete list, visit http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189007(vs.95).aspx

I was eagerly awaiting for Silverlight 2.0 Beta and it did arrive. But there are a lot of breaking changes in this version as I expected. MSDN contains a list of breaking changes at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189007(vs.95).aspx

While trying to open the project in VS 2008, you will get an error:

The imported project
“C:\Program Files\MSBuild\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v9.0\Silverlight\
Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets (or VisualBasic.targets)” was not found.

and you won’t be able to open the project. Click OK and let it load the solution.

In the Solution Explorer you should see the project listed but unavailable. Right click on it and choose the Edit option. The project’s MSBuild file will open. Now replace

<Import Project=“$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\
VisualStudio\v9.0\Silverlight\Microsoft.Silverlight.Csharp.targets” />

With

<Import Project=“$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\
Silverlight\v2.0\Microsoft.Silverlight.CSharp.targets” />

Now you can reload the project after saving.Now you need to update the reference dlls with the new ones. So delete all the Silverlight 1.1 dlls referenced in the project and add the following new ones

1. mscorelib.dll
2. system.dll
3. System.Core.dll
4. System.Windows.dll
5. System.Windows.Browser.dll
6. System.Xml.dll
7. System.Windows.Controls.dll
8. system.windows.controls.extended.dll

Now you may have to fix other code related error. I’ll write about the soon…

First day of Mix 2008 was great with Microsoft announcing the beta release of much awaited Silverlight2.0 and IE8. Here is a roundup of the major announcements.

1. Ray Ozzie hinted at a new service in which Microsoft that will attempt to unite web applications across all devices. Ray Ozzie defined it as “World of small pieces loosely joined”.

2. Kicks off IE8 Beta. Finally Microsoft has decided to make IE standard compliant. Among some of the features of IE8 that caught my attention are,

. CSS 2.1 support

. Increased JavaScript Performance - almost 2.5 times the performance of IE7 according to the charts which they showed. They claim there has been a gain of 34% in GMail loading, 45% in opening a conversation and 27% in opening a thread.

. HTML5

. WebSlices - Using which you can get constant updates about a section of the page you are interested in any web page. Somewhat similar to screen scrapping.

3. Scott Guthrie announced the Silverlight 2 Beta1 release. Nokia announced that they will be supporting Silverlight in their S60 series of devices, offering consumers the ability to enjoy rich web applications on their smartphones.

. There has been a lots of improvements over 1.1 Alpha like, Multi-Language Support, WPF UI framework, Networking support, etc.