I've been playing with a Ruby micro-framework for web apps called Sinatra.  Billed as a DSL (Domain Specific Language) for minimal effort web apps, Sinatra actually seems to excel at a particular task near and dear to my heart:  URL-based web services.  If you're not familiar with a REST API, this is basically a web service queried entirely through structured URLs.  Something like http://twitter.com/statuses/public_timeline.format for the Twitter public timeline in RSS or XML or whatever.

Control of the desktop browser market (or at least a chunk) continues to be a big focus of some of the major players on the Internet:  Mozilla (the open source foundation), Microsoft, Google and to a lesser extent Apple, Opera and other smaller % players.  The latest salvo has been fired off by Google with the release a few days ago of their Chrome browser.  If you're not familiar with Chrome, I think the comic book introduction actually does a great job of highlighting the differentiators, the architecture and generally why you should care.I've been using Chrome for a bit now and have to say that I'm initially impressed.  I think Amith (our usability wizard) is a fan as well.  I've been using Chrome with Trading Grid Online, for example, in advance of qualification testing--they aren't kidding about client-side javascript performance improvements from what I can tell. 

A busy discussion bubbled up in the usability community recently regarding a trip logging app a company developed for the iPhone.  The UI's front screen is quite busy and tons of people rapidly chimed in to criticize the design on Flickr.  The creator responded by pointing out that the design, while busy, is optimized to let you accomplish the task that you would use the app for 90% of the time (not the other 10%) linearly in one shot.  No need to use menus, tabs or change screens.  His response was later reviewed on the 37signals blog, discussing the balance between a well-designed screen that's busy but effective and a poorly-designed screen that's clean and simple but inefficient for daily use.

Cloud computing continues to heat up since I blogged about my experiences with Heroku (on-demand Ruby on Rails development using the Amazon Web Services).  If you work in the IT industry, the cloud ware concept may be creeping in to your lexicon, your discussions, your Gartner reports and your Friday afternoon, 4:30pm daydreams [ed: I admit *no* guilt].  Here are some highlights related to web apps, in non-chronological order.

In the very early days of humanity, primitive cave dwellers were forced to use software installed directly on their office computers.  They would have to run from cave to cave (often in bad weather, possibly dodging wild animals like the giant sloth) in order to install "updates" whenever the software was improved, to make sure each cave was doing consistent, compatible work.  Sometime after the invention of the wheel and the Enlightenment, a few cave men came up with the Internet.  I'm glossing over lots of important things.  Eventually, people realized that the Internet would be a great way to deliver software-like services without having to maintain individual caves.

No, that's not a typo.  I recently received an invitation to Heroku, a Ruby on Rails platform that seems to me to really highlight what's possible in the new age of the web.  Heroku is both an on-demand, web-based development environment for building web-based apps in Ruby on Rails and a scalable deployment and hosting service using Amazon's platform services.  This means that apps built on Heroku have on-demand access to virtual servers and bandwidth to simply scale with performance.  Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) provide both "machines" and database.

Blame Bryan Larkin for this one.

Recently, a few colleagues, friends and pseudo-random internet acquaintances have asked for usability/web-related blog recommendations.  Today's post is a link list of blogs that I've found to be either useful, informative or interesting enough to foment some of my own ideas.  My goal is not to deflect anyone for continuing to ask me for recommendations (honestly).  I'd be interested to know if any feed readers already check out these blogs or have their own recommendations to share.

Time to drag out the old usability soap box.  It's starting to bend in the middle, and so I might need to buy another year's supply of bulk soap to get a replacement.