ReadWriteHack

Alexia Tsotsis, who writes for TechCrunch, had this advice on Twitter earlier today: "Good tech blogger rule of thumb: Avoid using 'API' in headlines when/if you can." Usually, I'm all thumbs myself, but I can't find this particular rule on them anywhere. I suppose I'm not a blogger after all.

Or perhaps I just know my audience. The first rule of communication, as I have taught and been taught (both quite repeatedly, and often) is, "Know your audience." The API has become the principal communications tool of any company that does business digitally. Therefore, professes Netflix Director of Engineering Daniel Jacobson, when designing your API, you should identify, evaluate, and serve its audience just like with any other communications tool.

If you have kids (or you are one) and you're in or near the San Francisco area, you might want to sign up for the GitHub-sponsored CoderDojo coming on February 25th. CoderDojo is a free, not-for-profit movement with a strong open source emphasis on open source that seeks to teach young people how to code and make learning "a fun, sociable, kick ass experience."

The organization was founded by James Whelton and Bill Liao, and has focused mostly on Ireland until now. (There's also a CoderDojo in London.) The program is for kids between seven and 18, and according to GitHub's Cameron McEfee has been teaching "HTML, CSS, Javascript, iOS app development, and pretty much anything else they think sounds awesome." Kids also get guest lectures from tech mentors and tours of tech companies, in addition to instruction on development.

If you're looking to add change tracking to a Web app, you might want to take a look at Ice from the CMS group at the New York Times.

Ice (or Ice.js) is an implementation of change tracking for any content-editable element on the Web. It can track changes (inserts, deletes) from multiple users, and has some optional plugins for converting "smart" quotes and creating em-dashes.

Build a better mouse trap, and the world will beat a path to your door. Build a better mouse lock for Web browsers, and you might make browser-based gaming a lot more attractive. Vincent Scheib has been working on a W3C specification and feature for Chrome that will put browsers another step closer to competitive with native games.

This might sound like a little thing, but the lack of the mouse lock feature holds back browser-based games. Here's the problem: Unless you're using a plugin, the way that browser-based games handle the mouse is clunky. Let's say you're trying to play a shooter like Quake III in the browser. Because the game can't "grab" the pointer, when you scroll too far outside the game screen it sends your cursor outside the browser window and disrupts game flow. (And probably gets you fragged.)

My friend and colleague Esther Schindler has written a wonderful post over on SoftwareQuality Connection about encouraging user-centric design. The only trouble is figuring out the right set of users that your software is designed for. Put another way, this is the classic programming problem: the person who hires you (or who sets up the job) isn't the ultimate end-user audience for the actual program.

When mobile users feel they don't like how their apps perform after the first trial, some 75% of them won't launch the app again. That's the metric cited by engineers and marketers at HP Software, who note that this first wave of mobile apps brought forth by the iPhone has resulted in a glut of programs that make even the best performing mobile hardware into a pocket full of silicon cement.

This morning, HP begins a repurposing of the performance testing tools for websites that it gained through the Mercury Interactive acquisition of 2006, for the mobile apps era. It's unveiling what it calls "LoadRunner-in-the-Cloud," complete with hyphens. It will act as an off-premise testing platform for mobile apps that are deployed as services, simulating the activity generated by thousands of users simultaneously to gauge the resilience of servers and resources. This way, you might not have to disappoint three-fourths of them to learn how well your service holds up.

Mozilla's Dietrich Ayala would like to have one million contributors to Firefox in 2012. It's a tough, probably unreachable, goal that Ayala says he's kidding about. Kind of.

Ayala spoke at FOSDEM about developing Firefox in 2012, and new approaches that Mozilla is taking to try to reduce time and effort required for contributing to the browser.

In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we're dealing with?

Donna Burbank - who's a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies' long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. "When I talk to our customers, they tell me it's a whole new... thing, for lack of a more technical word. They've heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don't have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don't want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand."

What we today call the "mobile app" could, in a very short period of time, become known as the portable app, or just the "app." It tends to use such a simple and straightforward model of interaction that people are starting to prefer using their smartphones for certain tasks, even when their PCs are right in front of them. By this time next year, portable apps originally designed for use on smartphones and tablets may be running on laptops.

The extent to which this changes everything is a topic that no one, not even ReadWriteWeb, has fully fathomed. The Web as we have come to know it will be affected significantly. What users have come to know as Web sites will be willingly and eagerly substituted with Web apps. In Part 2 of our interview with the co-author of APIs: A Strategy Guide, Netflix lead API engineer Daniel Jacobson tells us the one huge difference between an app and a site involves the extent to which they rely on an API. It is part of every app's DNA.

If you're interested in Google's Dart as a potential replacement for JavaScript, you might want to take a peek at Dart Synonym. The Web app was hacked together by Aaron Wheeler and Marcin Wichary of Google to "map common JavaScript idioms to Dart."

Wichary is best known for his playable Pac-Man Google doodle. Wichary and Wheeler were curious about Dart, and decided to check out the language and libraries during a Dart hackathon with the team.