Jukka-Pekka Keisala

This is related my previous post about Microsoft Surface.

Jeff Han is a research scientist for NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Here, he demonstrates—for the first time publicly—his intuitive, “interface-free,” touch-driven computer screen, which can be manipulated intuitively with the fingertips, and responds to varying levels of pressure. (Recorded February 2006 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 09:32)

Microsoft Research Lab has done some cool work on “Microsoft Surface” -product. Based on multi-touch concept where they explore ideas how this could impact on future interface design. Worth of checking out.

See more PopularMechanics there is a whole article and another video about it.

Update: Microsoft released Microsoft Surface website.

We are moving back to Barcelona next Saturday. My 6 month working trip in Copenhagen turn out to be 6 years living and enjoying in Denmark. Since it’s been almost 6 years since I moved to DK we decided to take 3 months trial period. We are moving there for 3 months first and if it feels OK, we will come back to Copenhagen and sell our apartment and move there indefinitely.

I will continue building websites in Addition but you wont be seeing me in the meetings so often.  I am hoping this summer to go back to code a bit just to brush up. I also hope to find some companies in Spain that are interested developing their web or intranet on Sitecore.

I am keen to get to know web development community in Barcelona. If you are a .NET or just any type of Web/CMS Developer in Barcelona area please drop me an email. I would like to hear what you do? In exchange tell you about Sitecore CMS and how is it to build CMS solutions.

Sorting Sitecore data to multicolumn html table is quite hard in XSLT because data in XML is not sorted by item/@sortorder.

I finally found out how to do this so it will actually work and I am not loosing data. The trick is creating data first into a flat XML Nodeset and looping this data then to a multicolumn table using following-sibling::item commands. Here is the small sample code for this where I take abstract content structure from the Sitecore to a XML Nodeset <ul><li>xxxxxx</li></ul>.

First let’s make a variable.

<xsl:variable name=”keywords”>
<ul>
<xsl:for-each select=”$keywords”>
<xsl:for-each select=”descendant-or-self::item[(@template='keywords')]“>
<li>
<xsl:value-of select=”sc:fld(’text’,.)”/>
</li>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:for-each>
</ul>
</xsl:variable>

Then using msxsl:node-set -function (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hz88kef0(vs.71).aspx) I create nodeset out of the XSL variable and loop data to the html table.

<table>
<xsl:for-each select=”msxsl:node-set($keywords)/ul/li[position() mod 3 = 1]“>
<tr>
<td>
<xsl:value-of select=”.”/>
</td>
<xsl:for-each select=”following-sibling::li[position() < 3]“>
<td>
<xsl:value-of select=”.”/>
</td>
</xsl:for-each>
</tr>
</xsl:for-each>
</table>

I would be very keen to know if you have done this in pure XSLT because msxsl:node-set seems to be quite slow.

I was amazed about Flex when I first saw it but even more amaze I got when I realize that as a developer I was not able to get even trial without paying. Like I posted about it in 2004. I never installed it to my pc where I evaluate everything before recommending to a customer. Macromedia clearly had forgot something that Microsoft does quite well.

Anyway, it seems that now that Adobe takes more developer friendly approach by announcing plans to open source Flex under the Mozilla Public License (MPL). I hope not too late, though.

Microsoft will be very strong on bringing Silvelight to their developer community. Many says that Microsoft will fail because they have no graphics community behind but I don’t think it’s entirely true. After all they do have directX and great developer tools and network. Also, penetration market on Silverlight is easy to fix by wrapping it to some security update from WindowsUpdate.

I have always loved Adobe/Macromedia desktop products but somehow they are not very appealing for me when  it comes to ServerSide. I think they should focus much more giving out to developers. After all it’s us who recommend products and it’s us who answers to our bosses questions if we should look deeper on the given technology.

Gez Lemon has been kind enough to do an analysis of a whole bunch of them for us and provides a great article on the pros and cons of each from an accessibility point of view. If you are considering implementing a CMS and care about accessibility.

Peter Krantz of Standards Schmandards has done some testing on web based editing tools. He writes: “Web based editing tools are becoming standard issue in modern content management systems. As more and more organizations discover the advantages of using structured markup it is important that these editing tools allow editors to markup content without knowledge of HTML.” Read the article

Good article for CMS developers

Funny stuff from Norway.