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Salmagundi for December 20, 2011

salmagundi 2Salmagundi? That’s the word for a seventeenth-century English dish made of an assortment of wildly varying ingredients. Typically, they include some cut-up hard-boiled egg, but then after that, anything goes: meat, seafood, fruits and veg, nuts and flowers and all manner of dressings and sauces. The term comes from the French “salmigondis”, which translates as “hodgepodge”.

In this case, I’m using “salmagundi” as a term for a mixed bag of new items that you might find interesting as a developer.

The End of the Web? Don’t Bet on It

George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, said at the Le Web conference that the web is dying and that the “App Internet” – the internet as accessed via apps instead of through the browser – is taking over. Mark Suster disagrees and says that while Colony may be right, it’s only for the short term, citing these reasons:

  1. Workarounds. While native apps always have more capability in the beginning, HTML apps catch up thanks to workarounds like HTML5/CSS/JavaScript as well as frameworks like PhoneGap and Appcelerator.
  2. Browsers get better. We’re seeing it happen right now – even with Internet Explorer!
  3. Multiplatform development is expensive. And not only that, they’re moving targets.
  4. Phone app stores are now strangleholds. “The early allure of empty shelves in the App Store,” writes Suster, “is making way to the over-crowded shelve (currently tallied at more than 500,000 SKUs).”
  5. Data. With the app internet, you have to contend with data leakage and data management across devices, and that’s not easy.
  6. TCO. Maintenance costs on native apps are higher than for web apps.

Apress’ Ebook Sale

apress books

From now through December 25th, you save 40% off Apress ebooks if you use the discount code SNOW11 when you check out. This applies to all regular and Alpha ebooks in their shop!

“CoffeeScript is Not a Language Worth Learning”

reg braithwaite

When Reg Braithwaite speaks, a lot of geeks listen. And rightfully so; the guy’s constantly thinking deep thoughts about programming and what it means to program. I feel privileged that I can easily hang out with him reasonably often as we both live and work in Toronto.

There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth over his latest article, CoffeeScript is Not a Language Worth Learning. In it, he praises CoffeeScript but says that it’s more tool than language, and a great one at that.

The readers at Reddit and Hacker News, many of whom are a literal-minded bunch, have accused Reg of linkbaiting with his article’s title. Of course, if you know Reg, either personally or through his writing, you’ll know that he uses essays to think out loud and share gedankenexperiments. He also writes some interesting programming experiments for the same reason. My advice to those of you who are about to fire up your favorite text editor and do a point-by-point refutation of his essay: breathe deeply, and read it again.

Free Ebook: Best of Smashing Magazine

smashing magazine ebook

Smashing Magazine, a great resource for developers, designers and those mythical “desingineers” is turning 5 and celebrating by giving away a free ebook: Best of Smashing Magazine. It features what they feel to be the best articles they’ve published over the past half-decade. Here’s the table of contents:

  • “Thirty Usability Issues to Be Aware Of” — Vitaly Friedman
  • “Ten Principles of Effective Web Design” — Vitaly Friedman
  • “Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques” — Sergey Chikuyonok
  • “Typographic Design Patterns and Best Practices” — Smashing Editorial team
  • “Ten Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines” — Dmitry Fadeyev
  • “Setting Up Photoshop for Web and iPhone Development” — Marc Edwards
  • “The Ails of Typographic Anti-Aliasing” — Tom Giannattasio
  • “Mastering Photoshop: Noise, Textures and Gradients” — Marc Edwards
  • “Better User Experience With Storytelling” — Francisco Inchauste
  • “The Beauty of Typography, Writing Systems and Calligraphy” — Jessica Bordeau
  • “Web Designers, Don’t Do It Alone” — Paul Boag
  • “Making Your Mark on the Web Is Easier Than You Think” — Christian Heilmann
  • “Responsive Web Design: What It Is and How to Use It” — Kayla Knight
  • “I Want to Be a Web Designer When I Grow Up” — Michael Aleo
  • “Persuasion Triggers in Web Design” — David Travis
  • “What Font Should I Use?” — Dan Mayer
  • “The Design Matrix: A Powerful Tool for Guiding Client Input” — Bridget Fahrland
  • “Why User Experience Cannot Be Designed” — Helge Fredheim
  • “Dear Web Design Community, Where Have You Gone?” — Vitaly Friedman
  • “Make Your Content Make a Difference” — Colleen Jones
  • “Two Cats in a Sack: Designer-Developer Discord” — Cassie McDaniel
  • “Print Loves Web” — Mark Cossey

Want it? It comes in PDF, ePUB and Mobi formats and it’s free – download it directly here [55 MB .zip file] or get it from iTunes!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Up There with the Big Shots

Watch this video, which features some of the brightest lights in programming (a couple of whom I’ve been privileged to meet), to the very end. You’ll see someone familiar:

That’s right, after some serious programming luminaries — Matz, Guido, Linus, DHH, Bill Joy, James Gosling, Sir Tim, Marc, Woz, Rasmus, The Gu, Sergey, Dries and finally Zuck — whose face and accordion do they close with at the 1:04 mark? This guy’s:

joey devilla accordion laptop scotch

I laughed when I saw Mark Zuckerberg’s photo fade out and mine fade in. “Zuck’s my opening act!” I exclaimed.

My photographer friend Adam P. W. Smith (my old business partner; together, we were datapanik software systems and we worked on some pretty interesting projects back in the late ‘90s) took the picture back in August when I was visiting him in Vancouver. I’d arrived a day early for the HackVAN hackathon and was sitting in his kitchen getting some work done when he decided to get a couple of shots. He poured me a glass of scotch, set it on my accordion, which I’d set down on the chair beside me, and staring taking pictures.

I’d like to thank New Relic, a software performance monitoring service based in San Francisco, for picking my face to represent the developers out there. I’m honoured!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

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Deliberations

decisions decisions

A little while back, we announced the Shopify Fund, a one million dollar pool of money set aside to stimulate the development of Shopify apps, applications that made use of the Shopify API to extend, enhance and automate Shopify shops. We asked developers to submit their app proposals and if their app was chosen, we’d give them somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten thousand dollars to take a few weeks to work on their app idea full-time, complete it and put it into the Shopify App Store.

million dollar fundIn the end, we received 143 app proposals – many of which were submitted on the deadline date, November 30th — a considerable deal more than we’d expected. We’ve been spending the past couple of weeks deliberating over which apps should get funding in the Fund’s first round, in closed-room sessions not unlike the scene from 12 Angry Men shown above. We still have to have a few more discussions before we make our final choices, and we’ll announce which apps are getting funding in the new year.

If you didn’t get a chance to submit an app idea or if your app idea submission doesn’t get selected, don’t worry. This is just the first round, and we want to continue funding the development of apps through the coming months – both apps that you propose and apps that we have on our wishlist. The Fund will continue because:

  • We think it builds interest and excitement about the Shopify ecosystem. The number of responses we’ve received from the developers proposing apps seems to indicate this.
  • We want to make it possible for developers to have the time they need to build Shopify apps. By funding developers, we give them enough money so that they don’t have to take on any other clients and just work on an app full-time.
  • We want Shopify to be the ecommerce platform with the most capabilities. Shopify does a lot “out of the box”, and it does so much more when you extend it with apps. More apps means more capabilities and customizations, and we think that’s a good thing.

So keep an eye on this blog for announcements in the new year – not just about whose apps are being funded in the first round, but also for new chances for you to get funding to develop Shopify apps!

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Salmagundi for Thursday, December 15, 2011

salmagundi smallSalmagundi? That’s the word for a seventeenth-century English dish made of an assortment of wildly varying ingredients. Typically, they include some cut-up hard-boiled egg, but then after that, anything goes: meat, seafood, fruits and veg, nuts and flowers and all manner of dressings and sauces. The term comes from the French “salmigondis”, which translates as “hodgepodge”.

In this case, I’m using “salmagundi” as a term for a mixed bag of new items that you might find interesting as a developer.

The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications

tangled web

I’m currently in the middle of reading Michal Zalewski’s new book, The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications and it’s been a fascinating, enlightening and enjoyable read. At first glance, you might be tempted to simply sum it up as a “security book”; I think it’s more accurate to describe it as “a great review of how browsers, their protocols, programming languages and security features work, and how to write secure apps given this knowledge”. Given that web security is a rapidly moving target, especially with the browser vendors – even the formerly-pokey Microsoft – cranking out versions at a faster rate, Zalewski’s approach to the topic is the right one: make sure the reader is clear on the basic principles, and then derive the security maxims from them, giving the knowledge contained within the book a much longer “shelf life”.

The Tangled Web is divided into three parts:

  1. Anatomy of the web. A tour of the web’s building blocks, from URL structure, HTTP and HTML to how it’s all rendered: CSS, client-side scripting languages, non-HTML documents and plug-ins.
  2. Browser security features. All the mechanisms that keep the malware from 0wnz0ring your system – the same-origin policy, frames and cross-domain content, content recognition mechanisms, dealing with rogue scripts and extrinsic site privileges (that is, privileges that aren’t derived from the web content, but from settings within the browser).
  3. A glimpse of things to come. A look at some of the proposed security mechanisms and approaches that may or not become standard parts of the web.

Each chapter except the last ends with a “Security Engineering Cheat Sheet”, which functions as both a summary of the material within the chapter and a security checklist. The last chapter is titled Common Web Vulnerabilities and lists vulnerabilities specific to web application, problems to keep in mind when designing web apps and common problems unique to server-side code.

I’m going to be showing The Tangled Web around the office (especially now, since I’m physically in Shopify’s headquarters this week). I’m sure the developers know a lot of this stuff, but they’re a bunch who are always eager to learn, review and “sharpen the saw”, so I think they’ll find it useful. If you develop web apps, whether for fun or to pay the rent, you’ll want to check out this book as well.

CUSEC 2012: Montreal, January 19 – 21

turing complete

Ah, CUSEC: the Canadian University Software Engineering Conference. This for-students-by-students conference punches well above its weight class. I’ve been to tech conferences put on by so-called full-time “professionals” that can’t hold a candle to what the students behind CUSEC do every year in addition to their course loads.

Better yet is the caliber of speakers they’ve been able to bring in: Kent Back, Joel Spolsky, David Parnas, Greg Wilson, Chad Fowler, Kathy Sierra, Dave Thomas, Venkat Subramanian, Jeff Atwood, Tim Bray, John Udell, Avi Bryant, Dan Ingalls, Giles Bowkett, Leah Culver, Francis Hwang, Doug Crockford, Matt Knox, Jacqui Maher, Thomas Ptacek, Reg Braithwaite, Yehuda Katz, of course Richard M. Stallman, in whose auction I made the winning bid for a plush gnu, which I paid with my Microsoft credit card.

alan turingThis year’s CUSEC theme is “Turing Complete” in honor of 2012 being the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing. He established his place in history as the father of computer science by formalizing concepts like “algorithm” and “computation” with the concept of the Turing Machine, proposing the Turing Test in an attempt to answer the question “Can machines think?”, working as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park (I like to say “He beat the Nazis…with math!”) and coming up with one of the first designs for a stored-program computer. He even found his way into pop culture by getting name-checked in Cryptonomicon and The Social Network.

Once again, Shopify will be there as a sponsor and once again, I will be hosting the DemoCamp at CUSEC. If you’re a university student studying computer science or computer engineering, you should come to Montreal from January 19th through 21st and catch one of the best conferences you’ll ever attend. Bring your resume: we’re looking for talented programmers who want to work us!

HTTPcats

414

Cat pictures meet motivational posters meet HTTP status codes! It’s the Perfect Storm!

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This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Your Faithful Scribes are Working Away at Fixing the Docs

Woodcutting of a scribe working on a text, with the thought bubble "WTF?"

This is just a quick update to let you know that yes, we know that the Shopify developer documentation needs work. There’s a fair bit of information there, but it could stand some improvement. There’s some missing information, it could be organized better, there are parts of it that are confusing and there need to be examples in languages and frameworks other than Ruby and Rails.

This update is also here to let you know that we’re actively working on it, bit by bit, every day. As I write this, David Underwood and are are working on a wholesale reorganization of the developer sections of the wiki and clear writeups of all the API resources, including explanations of the parameters they expect and the attributes they return as well as how they relate to other resources and what effects they have on shops. We’re also working on more example code, in more languages.

If you’ve got comments, questions and suggestions about the docs or what we’re doing with them, please let us know — feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Featured Shopify App: Custard

Custard icon

One of the 100-plus apps in the Shopify App Store is Custard, which lets your customers talk – as in voice, not “chat” as in typing or email, but actually talk – to someone in your shop. Custard lets customers start a voice call using only the computer they’re using to browse your shop without the need for a phone or extra software. They just click the “Click to Call” button. Sometimes it’s nice to hear a human voice, and being able to talk to someone and ask questions can be the difference between your customer heading somewhere else and making that sale.

We talked with the people behind Custard and asked them a few questions about their app, and we’ve shared their answers in this article.

What does Custard do?

custard diagram

click-to-callWe created Custard because we want to improve the buying experience online. In brick and mortar stores we are used to having sales reps at our disposal to answer any of our questions, but when it comes to e-commerce we can feel pretty isolated. Sometimes email and text chat is just too slow. We want to eliminate loneliness from e-commerce sites and make it super easy for stores to connect with their customers in a fast and effective way. With Custard, your store comes to life and your visitors can get the instant gratification they want at the click of a button.

What are Custard’s key features?

custard screenshots

  • Click to Call: 79% of your visitors prefer phone support over anything else.
  • Widget Customization: You can customize your Click to Call widget to your liking and place it where you want it on your store.
  • Call Recording: We allow you to record each call so that you can review and improve your sales process.

There’s a a new feature called Custard Connect. Visitors to your store are extremely valuable and we want to help store owners extract that value. We also want to provide a seamless user experience. With Custard Connect, you can watch people navigate around your store in real-time right from your dashboard. With the click of a button you can initiate a call with your visitors and help them find exactly what they are looking to buy. We think this will be a great way for ecommerce stores to get more sales and to effectively engage with their customers like never before. Custard Connect will be rolling out this week.

Why should shopowners use your app?

79% of your store visitors prefer phone support over anything else. With Custard "Click to Call" we help you increase sales and improve customer satisfaction. We also believe the telephone is one of the best branding mediums out there. Not only can you instantly answer questions, but you have customer’s undivided attention. The customer remembers the experience you provide for a long time and tells his or her friends about it. The instant gratification you can provide with Custard has very positive returns.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

custard wordmark

We are a fresh startup based in San Francisco, CA. We want to maximize the value of customer conversations for online businesses. There are some really interesting developments we are making in the sales and support space so stay tuned :). You can find us on twitter:

How can I find out more about Custard?

custard on shelf

You can find out more about Custard on its page in the Shopify App Store.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.

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Featured Shopify App: Assistly

"Help is on the way" indicator on an elevator's control panel

If you go into certain elevators, you might notice an indicator on the panel that reads “Help is on the way”. In the event of an emergency, someone at the other end lights it up to let the passengers know that assistance is forthcoming.

Large Assistly "featured app" icon in the App Store

Assistly, one of the 100+ apps in the Shopify App Store adds a customer service help desk to your Shopify shop so that customers can easily reach you when they’re having problems, and so that you can reassure them that help is on the way. We had a Q & A session with the people behind Assistly about their app and we’re sharing their answers in this article.

What does Assistly do?

Assistly Logo

Assistly helps you deliver better customer service, which is critical to online retailing. It’s a free-to-start customer-service help desk that gives you everything you need to set up and deliver world-class customer service in minutes. With Assistly, customers can contact you through your website, email, Facebook, Twitter, phone and live chat and it’s all integrated for your team inside Assistly so no customer falls through the cracks. Start by installing Assistly through the Shopify app store and signing up for a free account. You can be wowing your customers in very short order.

What are the key features of your app?

  • We’re built for your social customer. Assistly brings in all your support requests and comments from traditional channels (email, chat, phone) and social channels (Facebook and Twitter) and collects them in a single, collaborative desktop where nothing falls through the cracks.

agent desktop

Pictured above: Assistly’s agent desktop.

  • We make you more productive — and faster. Our tools are user friendly, so you can take care of business efficiently and quickly.
  • Assistly comes with an out-of-the-box Help Center for your customers to find answers on their own. Add content as you grow, and watch your service requests drop.

help center

Pictured above: Assistly’s out-of-the-box Help Center.

  • We do the heavy lifting. Assistly is entirely “cloud-based,” which means that you don’t have any costly IT infrastructure. Everything is managed on our end.
  • We’re priced for small business. Assistly has fair and simple pricing (every account gets one FREE full-time seat!), and part-time “flex” users can participate for only $1 per hour of use. This means that if you only need one agent, Assistly will be entirely free for you. We are betting that great service will help you grow, and we will be there to support your success.

Why should shopowners use Assistly?

Today’s social customer expects to receive a high-touch and personal customer experience. Assistly turns customer service into Customer Wow. It coordinates all of the different ways your customers may try to reach you, and ensures every customer gets the service they deserve. Especially important for online retailers with a seasonal product line: Assistly is flexible, so you can easily and affordably add part time help, adjusting for your busiest seasons.

Assistly is designed for the online retailer who wants a quick and affordable way to provide spectacular customer service. Online retailers wear many hats and shouldn’t have to bother with complicated, expensive software that is hard to learn and difficult to use. Assistly is easy to use and affordable. Since time is your most valuable commodity, we make every product decision with your workflow in mind.

Tell us a little about yourself.

assistly siteAssistly, now a salesforce.com company, is a pioneer in the new world of instant customer-service help desk applications that can be set up in minutes. The application provides an all-in-one customer support system that turns customer service into Customer Wow.

Now even small and mid-sized companies can face massively complex support challenges. With Assistly, customers can request support from anywhere—website, email, phone, live chat, Twitter, and Facebook—and companies can deliver that support instantly, and in real time.

Here’s how you can get in touch with us:

How can I find out more about Assistly?

assistly icon

You can find out more about the Assistly app (as well as over 100 others) at the Shopify App Store.

This article also appears in the Shopify Technology Blog.