On Message with Ben Gross

Coding Horror: Please Give Us Your Email Password: Jeff Atwood has a nice point outlining the unfortunately still too common practice of web services that request a user’s login and password from the major web services (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc.) in order to extract address book information. Not only is this an obviously bad idea, but there are API solutions in place from the major providers that provide authenticated access to contact information without requesting that the user give up their password to their whole account.

An interview with 280 North on Objective-J and Cappuccino: Ajaxian covers the recent release of a very well done browser-based online presentation creation tool called 280 Slides. The tool is very straightforward to use and has raised the bar for web-applications. Creation, export (to PowerPoint 2007), sharing are all implemented in an easy to use manner. Superficially it looks like a browser-based Apple Keynote, although with significantly fewer options. 280 North the creators of 280 Slides have created an objective version of JavaScript and JavaScript framework called Cappuccino which they used to create 280 slides.

Gmail Gets 13 Experimental New Features: LifeHacker covers Google’s release of Gmail Labs, which is a showcase of Google Employee’s twenty percent time projects and other Gmail experiments. Heavy Gmail users may find some of the features more useful than light users, in particular the ability to have more than one type of star (flag) called Superstars, custom keyboard shortcuts, as well as the ability to conserve space through hiding status messages and hiding unread counts for the Inbox and other labels. All of the features are opt-in.

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