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Learn about an idea I call "less," an approach you can use to build better web applications. Check out the video and find out what all this gibberish is about.

As a result of my last post about making Flash embed code validate, my buddy Jim and I decided a tool was needed. The result of our work is Validifier, a simple web service that turns Flash embed code into valid XHTML.

The code it generates is much better than the code I posted yesterday, so before reading what I said, I would go check out Validifier. This will definitely be handy for me when converting my Vimeo embeds to nice, valid XHTML!

Google Chrome is, quite possibly, the best browser ever created.

That's a big statement to make, but honestly, they just got everything right. It's a giant leap for the web, and I hope that the other browser developers take notice.

The user interface is exactly what I would expect from a contemporary browser. It brings more focus to the contents of a web app than any other browser that I've ever seen. Firefox is still king for web development (at the moment), and I admittedly miss a few plugins, but all that will come in due time.

The ability to launch web apps the same way you launch desktop applications, and the way in which they are presented (without the usual browser buttons), is absolutely monumental. Additionally, the brilliance of running tabs in separate processes, and having a full task manager, makes me wonder why nobody did this earlier.

It's official. Google Chrome has fully legitimized the web as the application development platform of both today and tomorrow. Now, where's the Mac version!?

Hey everyone,

Three more of my iPhone application made it on to Apple.com! :)

Check out "101 Spore Ideas" here:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/101sporeideas.html

Check out "Countdown to The Dark Knight" here:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/countdowntothedarkknight.html

Check out "101 Love Lines" here:
http://www.apple.com/webapps/entertainment/101lovelines.html

I'd love to hear thoughts on these. :)

Hey everyone,

I just finished up a new iPhone web app called 101 Love Lines. You can check it out here:
http://www.zoxide.com/101lovelines/

The idea for this app came from my dad. He provided all of the content, and I put together the interface. It has been submitted to Apple's iPhone Web App directory, so hopefully it makes it in!

Check out Unfortune in the iPhone Web App directory.

Here's the description from Apple.com's site:
"A revolution in fortune telling technology unlike any other. Using advanced randomization algorithms, you get a foggy window into the past, present, and future.

Do you know what’s in store for you? Find out, with Unfortune!"

Hey everyone,

Because the iPhone version of Arnold Quotes was such a hit, I decided to make another iPhone web app.

Using the worlds most advanced fortune telling randomization algorithms, Unfortune gives you deep insights into the past, present, and future. Check it out here:
http://zoxide.com/unfortune/

It was a lot of fun to make, and I want to make more iPhone Web Apps, so stay tuned!

In my previous post, I talked about how Web 3.0 (or the next decade of the web, as I'd rather put it) is about two main things:

• A shift in context ("the context is me")
• Widgetization of content

I try my hardest to practice what I preach, but technology can be a bumpy road. Fortunately, in most cases, persistence always wins out.

I recently started a new web site called Arnold Quotes. It's simply all the best Arnold Schwarzenegger action-star-pun style quotes, all in one place. The ongoing goal of this project is to widgetize its content, and the first widget platform on my list was iGoogle.

When I first started making the iGoogle gadget for Arnold Quotes I figured it would be pretty easy, but I had some trouble. My original plan of attack was to serve up XML from arnoldquotes.com, and parse it with JavaScript inside of the iGoogle content module. I ran into a lot of difficulty, so I took another route, and served up straight HTML from arnoldquotes.com and stuck it in an iFrame. This worked OK, but it wasn't really ideal. If the gadget ever became very popular, Google wouldn't be able to cache it very well, which could really tax my server. It was also difficult to make JavaScript calls from inside the iFrame that didn't make several browsers freak out.

So I went back to my original plan, and I'm glad I did. After some stumbling, I managed to put together a native iGoogle gadget, which should run properly in all modern browsers. I was having some weird scroll bar problems with Internet Explorer 7, but I mitigated those issues by making the iGoogle gadget dynamically resize its height. The reason I had a hard time at first was because I wasn't traversing the DOM tree properly with JavaScript. After doing a little bit of reading in the rhino book (O'Reilly's "JavaScript: The Definitive Guide"), I realized what I was doing wrong, and managed to fix the problem. If you're curious, you can add the gadget to your iGoogle page by clicking here.

All said and done, I actually had a really fun time making the gadget, and I want to make more now. What gadgets would you like to see?