From CMSWire:

Optaros has announced the launch of a new user interface framework for Alfresco. DoCASU 1.0 is an open source initiative, bringing AJAX and Rich Internet Application features to the Alfresco Enterprise CMS platform UI. Docasu “is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface,” but rather is aimed at those who require a simpler and more user-friendly, yet highly configurable interface solution. Sounds like a sensationally good idea to me. It’s surprisingly difficult to get a team together that has the back-end skills required in terms of scalability, content management etc and the front end skills to create an intuitive UI for users. Or in graph form and Ephox specific:

iUI looks like a promising library for making the development of iPhone webapps much simpler.  Worth keeping an eye on since there’s no barrier to entry for iPhone webapps unlike with native iPhone apps.

I had two of our keen young developers (Dylan and Suneth) email me overnight to ask my CTO-ish opinion of trends in the mobile space and how they might apply to Ephox. It’s a very good question – with the advent of BlackBerrys first and now even more so with the iPhone, mobile internet is finally moving from “the future” to “the now”, even if it’s not evenly distributed yet. Of course, Ephox is squarely placed in the enterprise content creation business so no matter how popular the mobile world becomes we’re very unlikely to bring out a mobile phone game or a tip calculator. So here’s my take one where the mobile world is with regard to enterprise content creation.

I’ve quickly come to realize that the mobile worlds has a huge dependency on synchronization tehnology to make things work smoothly. Toucan read your email on the phone and reply from your laptop. Read rss items should be synced and just about everything else on your phone should be synced with somewhere else. The problem is that generally synchronization support is lousy. NetNewsWire is too slow syncing feeds, Mail.app doesn’t seem to notice if a message changes from unread to read and the WordPress iPhone app doesn’t seem to download drafts that you created in the browser interface. Sync is the killer requirement that goes unsaid on mobile devices. You can spend as long as you like polishing he UI but if your synchronization isn’t seamless your app will be a chore to use. If you get it right users won’t notice at all.

Brent has an excellent post up about his experience developing NetNewsWire for the iPhone and he manages to say what I tried to yesterday before I got caught up listing my frustrations with Mobile NetNewsWire:

I’ve always worked in public or semi-public: release, listen to feedback, release, listen, repeat forever. I worked this way for years UserLand. All of NetNewsWire was developed this way, beginning with the very earliest betas of NetNewsWire Lite back in 2002.

I’ve been looking forward to the iPhone 2.0 OS and the App Store for a fair while, not because there was new functionality I desperately wanted on my iPhone but because having access to native resources should make the few common webapps I use better. I was particularly impressed by Apple’s notification system and looked forward to say having a flag on NetNewsWire showing me how many unread items I had or being able to be notified me when someone sent me an instant message.

Jeff Atwood posted a rant about the iTunes Music Store requiring iTunes to be installed in order to access it. In particular, he didn’t like how a link to something on the iTMS resulted in an error page if you didn’t have iTunes installed.

Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don’t know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could have just as easily been delivered through the browser? It’s an exceptionally compelling argument but there’s one small flaw. If you’re not sure what it is, just drop me an email.

Since my wife and I will be in the UK by ourselves for Christmas this year, we figured we’d stave off home sickness by going somewhere so beautiful, so classic white Christmas and so enviable that everyone back home will wish they could swap places. I know it’s early to think about Christmas but we’re in a travel planning mood and flights are cheap if you book early.

So veteran European type folk, where is the best place to spend Christmas in Europe?

One of the challenges with many content management systems, and IBM’s is no exception, is creating short, clean URLs. As part of structuring and managing your content, the URL segments tend to build up to very long URLs. While most systems have a way to provide shorter aliases they need to be manually created and tend to just redirect to real URL rather than being the one canonical URL for content.

Mike Gunderloy provides an overview of the terms and conditions from three of the popular online office applications and questions who owns your documents? The more important point that comes out of it though is who is backing up your documents? When people move data into “the cloud” the often forget that ultimately having backups is their problem and they should only trust themselves to do it.

One thing that’s clearly missing is any sort of backup guarantee. While you may feel more secure storing your documents on Google’s or Zoho’s or Adobe’s servers than your own, that security is not something that you’re promised. Any of the three can lose your documents or terminate your ability to get to them at any time for pretty much any reason, and you’re out of luck. That’s precisely why I ensure that any data in a hosted solution of any kind is also backed up locally. I’ve already been through the experience of hosts going broke, or just plain stuffing up their backups and having to restore from my local copy and in time everyone will.

Some time ago now, James Robertson blogged about the poor state of Mac support in CMS products. Quite rightly he identified the WYSIWYG editor as the most common problem area which of course got my attention. It’s over six years ago now that Ephox switched over to Java from ActiveX to get support for Mac and it’s probably the smartest thing we’ve ever done. Not because we have vast numbers of Mac users, but because it only takes one Mac user to sink a deal.

It’s really amazing how many web sites have broken shopping carts in one form or another. It’s the ultimate form of stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. The favorite is always shopping carts that time out. Nothing like throwing your customers out of the store after they’ve decided to purchase from you.

British Airways seem to have perfected the art of displaying an error page just when you were pulling out your credit card. Bonus points for reporting that their systems aren’t responding as if that actually means something to the user who just got a response from their systems – the error page.