InContext Editing: A whole new editable web. All over again.

Adobe has just announced the preview of their upcoming technology, InContext Editing which purportedly allows Dreamweaver designers / developers to create static web pages and let their customers edit just parts of the web pages themselves.

The technology seems to be based around a public web based editing service (that’s run by Adobe) to allow people to use (surprise, surprise ) just their browsers to edit the page’s content. The designer is free to use locked zones where (Dreamweaver’s template features will no-doubt hook in) to create their designs and to pre-designate editable zones that the end customers can directly modify at will. All they need is their web browser with the Flash Player installed (9.0.124+) and Local Storage enabled (for the InContext service to store temporary data, probably).

Will this usher in a whole new wave of pre-designed, (and thus, much better looking) web pages that can be cheaply designed by graphics and web developers to look great and yet be editable by the end users themselves? Sounds logical:

Web designers can concentrate on what they’re good at, designing graphical, good looking web pages. They can completely ignore the nitty gritty details where the “developer” needs to get involved, data persistance, and dynamic UI, which they’re not good at.

End-users can get much more direct access to their websites without being forced to pay the web designers an arm-and-a-leg to create all the dynamic infrastructure that is needed to allow them to manage their own content.

The developers can concentrate more on where they’re really needed (building Rich Internet Apps ? ) and like being anyway - I mean who really likes to code “basic” dynamic web pages, anyway, right?

Looks like a win-win-win situation to me.

InContext Editing is currently free, at least in this preview stage.

Links:

• InContext main marketing page
• Adobe labs page for InContext Editing
• Features page

Jpsykes has a nice piece running on their blog about QR Codes. This looks to be much better than standard bar codes, and I’m sure I’ve seen these sort of codes on the back and insides of a lot of hardware (GSM phones and batteries especially).
Stumbling across an explanative tech for something that had aroused your curiosity a long time ago, is so typical when you’re looking around on the web.

• Numeric only Max. 7,089 characters
• Alphanumeric Max. 4,296 characters
• Binary (8 bits) Max. 2,953 bytes
• Kanji/Kana Max. 1,817 characters

Logged into my google analytics account after quite a bit of time, and I checked out the new Google Analytics release. The width, depth and length that they’ve gone to is quite impressive!

Of particular interest was the compare to past feature - you see dual graphs of comparative date ranges - neat! As is wont with Google, they tuck-away this feature, hidden inside the date range selector on the top right, but I guess their audience is that way too.

I don’t particularly like the blocky, and over simplified statistics, though. It might have been intended to provide a neat-and-tidy, and/or easy-to-use feel to the whole thing, but this has worked against them, I think.

For those of you who haven’t got the update yet, or are just too darn lazy, you could go through the new google analytics tour, as well. 

Was reading through my RSS feeds this morning when this gem from the Dilbert blog came to my attention.

To be happy, truly skipping-along-all-day happy, you need to be successful in the following 3 areas (and I quote):

“

1. Relationships
2. Health
3. Income

Realistically, you will only have time to accomplish any two of
those goals while bitching about the third. The day isn’t long enough
to do them all.”

I think happiness is a matter of balance. A person who can skillfully balance all 3 areas of happiness successfully is probably going to find himself/herself deliriously happy most the time. Such persons would definitely be violating some natural law and are only waiting for “the universe to smite them”, of course.

Streamburst is a company that offers a purchased video download service, that seems to be headed in a more correct way IMHO to solve the video playback rights problem.

Coming to the online purchased video market with unique piracy deterrent methods, the service would be quite effective if it could garner the support of Hollywood studios, but expectedly, the big studios will not be walking into Streamburst offices any time soon - Streamburst doesn’t DRM the content they sell, instead, it quite simply brands the video to show the end buyer’s name at the start of each video. Buyer’s themselves will not mind purchasing such video since not only does the service not DRM their content, they actually offer the same content in high quality formats for a choice of devices, which as I noted in a post earlier, would be quite cool as well.

Currently, the service is favoring documentaries like Ewan McGregor’s Long Way Round motorcycle diaries, but it’s a good start.

via an excellent review on arsTechnica

Click on the image on the right to watch one of the most amazing videos you’ve ever seen.

This one seems to be from Harvard and is titled “Life of a Cell.”. It looks like a sci-fi attempt at explaining the inner working of a cell. Really, really cool.

Digg Labs launched today with two new visualizations of Digg activity.

The Stack and The Swarm

 
(Click to see full size screenshots)

These delightful (and overloaded, at the moment) apps showcase the dynamicness of the Digg website.

You can click on a URL (yes, each of those circles in the swarm and bars in the stack are URLs!!) and they’ll expand up to show the story and the digg pattern like this:

All put together, very interesting viewer apps. Beats the Digg spy any day.

Oh, and Kevin says he’s putting up some more servers to handle the load on the apps.

I wonder when (if?) these will get to the main Digg site.

Kevin Rose announced today, on the Digg blog, a new set of submission specs for websites wishing to integrate with Digg.

More interesting is a zip file containing graphical badges with the new Digg v3 look and a script block that’ll let website owners display the number of “Diggs” a particular URL received.

The badges are nice and the pro-active website integration offer is a welcome sight. Most bookmark services don’t realize why Digg is so popular. I believe that one of the key reasons is that a lot of popular websites (recent additions include all CNET blogs) allow their users to digg their posts! If only more social bookmarking sites offered integration kits like digg does, I’m sure they’d be more popular.

I am forced to recall the hours I spent creating a recent batch of icons for my Social Bookmarking template. I’m no graphics designer and resizing favicon.ico files to work properly in a web browser was quite menial, for me, at least. Of course it did lead me to a point where I can show off a nice bug in IE. Internet Explorer has problems rendering an 8 bit PNG (admittedly super-optimized, in Photoshop) that Firefox renders just fine. Three of the social bookmarking icons I spent so much effort on only show up in Firefox. And I noticed it only recently (I mainly use Firefox).

But I digress.

Kevin’s post goes on to hint on a new Digg API that’ll let you do even more with these 2 features.

Over the past year, Digg has become quite the source for “interesting” news, and I anticipate that things will only get more so at digg.com.

Digg on, indeed.