I was browsing the web and came across this great iPad video review by PC Mag, its probably the only one you will need to get an overview of how iPad works, in the shortest period of time. I’m kind of wanting to buy the iPad immediately after watching it, see below to know why:

PCMag: Apple iPad video review from PCMag.com Reviews on Vimeo.

I was shopping around looking for an interesting story book for my nephew’s birthday, and came across one that says – Build Your Own ROBOX. It’s written and designed by Mark Rogalski.

I was attracted to the book, because the book itself doesn’t look like a book, it just look like a normal red box, however inside the box it contains other parts of the ROBOX (19 pieces), whereby the kids need to fix up themselves, in order for the ROBOX to take form which stands 16 inches tall. There are even stickers to personalize the ROBOX to their liking.

The box also contain a 32-page, fully illustrated story book, that tells the story of an unsatisfied young boy named Renny and his adventures with Rex, his ROBOX. It’s quite an interesting concept done up by the author himself, it allows the kids to believe that they can actually realize their dream one day…

Looking up for another book about Apple? Check out this revisited book (25 years later), which is the first biography of Apple and its co-founder and CEO, Steve Jobs.

Cited by many people, as one of the most comprehensive and accurate books ever. This book was actually written back in 1984 by Michael Moritz, then at Time Magazine. The book was originally titled as – The Little Kingdom: The Private Story of Apple Computer, and told the story of Apple’s first decade alongside the histories of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

Now, heavily revised and expanded, Return to the Little Kingdom is the definitive biography of Apple and its founders from the very beginning to the present time.

In case you have not heard about one of the latest products by Google, its called Google Wave. Google Wave is a product that helps users communicate and collaborate on the web. A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document, where users can almost instantly communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Google Wave is also a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves.

Today, I have just received the requested developer account from Google, in order to gain access to the Sandbox. The moment I signed in to the account, I realised that the interface looks quite similar, if not exactly the same in design as the Google Wave Preview Version, just that there is an extra ‘Debug‘ menu on top, which allow developer to test out their robots or gadgets.

The first thing I decided to try out, is the Embedded Waves, first of all, I went to create a new wave, and then go to the ‘Debug’ menu to get the current Wave ID. With this Wave ID, I will then embed it into the API code provided by Google, and paste them into the webpage. To my surprise, yes the same wave that I have created earlier on, do appear in my local webpage, and I can interact or post reply to the wave, and on the original end of the wave, my reply appears concurrently, it works like live chatting. Kind of interesting to see how it works, and pretty easy to embed. Furthermore, the wave can be configured in the webpage (e.g font, background colour), by using other API available.

Getting a little bit excited, I decided to move on to try out the extensions called Robots, its a little challenging for this one. I tried to follow their tutorial as closely as possible, by installing Eclipse, did all the necessary configuration, paste in their given testing codes, compile and upload to Google App Engine, but in the end its still not working, given a few more tries, but my robot parrot just refuse to give any response, when I try to add it to my contact. I have tested it on both the PC and Mac platforms, but the same errors in the coding still occurs. As for the next extension called Gadgets, its far more straight forward, the codes are based on Javascript, and later on parse to XML for processing.

It’s still very early to see anything now, but there is surely some potential in Google Wave for online communication. The development process now is still very troublesome, as there is no way you can test the robots or gadgets locally, as they are required to upload to the Wave server for live testing. Hopefully, some workaround will be available soon.

References:
Google Wave API
Google Wave Blog

It’s getting a little busy now for the site, in terms of the back-end coding. Almost everything right from the thumbnail boxes with slide-up texts, tabbed pages with sliding transition, to the Contact page with errors validation, its all integrated with jQuery, CSS and HTML. However, its certainly going to be more interactive, consistent and sleeker than before.

Two greatest challenges I have faced this time round, is firstly trying to get the site to look consistent across all major browsers, such as IE7-8, Firefox, Safari and Opera. The main issue actually lies with the tabbed pages, z-index property has to be added to the CSS tabs, in order for the tabs to look exactly what I want under IE7.

Another problem I have faced, is when integrating reCaptcha with jQuery. Although, I have done it with PHP before, but its a little more complicated when working with Javascript. I will be posting a separate tutorial soon, stating the exact problem and solution.

After working with jQuery for the past 2 days, I realised that its not too difficult to implement, as long as the online tutorials are available. However in terms of browsers compatibility, more time is required to test out the site. And for any future modification required for the site, its definitely going to take more time to adapt. Nevertheless, its still fun trying out new things, you should try it out too!

What is jQuery?
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript. – abstracted from jQuery.com

What is reCaptcha?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books, newspapers and old time radio shows. A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs. – abstracted from reCaptcha.net

Updated on 5th of Dec 2009:
Now even the portion for displaying the RSS feed is based on Ajax. To learn how is that possible, just read here.

If I have not remembered wrongly, the last website re-design that I found inspiring and functional is probably from Apple.com in 2007. And since then, I have not really find any site design that I really admire so much, that I would want to start a blog post about it. However, few days back I was surprised to see that Engadget has got a new look and layout. Things are certainly looking even bigger, bolder and happening for Engadget. Really like the new layout design, at one glance users can very quickly know what’s the hottest IT/gadget news online, interested to read more? Just click on the big thumbnail, and there you are.

The portion of the site that I like best, is the ‘Top Stories’ section, its quite interesting to see how the 5 different top stories thumbnails are being laid out in a grid manner, with their respective headings pinned below each thumbnail. The ‘Top Stories’ layout is pretty effective in gaining the maximum attention from the visitors. Not only that, the new sidebar looks and feel more functional than before, information like Latest Quote, Most Commented, and even Twitter posts, will help to provide visitors an overview about the hottest things posted in the site, kinda bringing the blog closer to the community.

Interested to learn more about the concept behind the re-designed Engadget?
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/19/welcome-to-the-next-engadget/