centre{source}

I made a fatal mistake… I thought I could start investigating PHP Frameworks and determine a clear winner. Unfortunately, I quickly realized that there is no clear winner… no clear Mr. Popular… and even worse, no clear source of info to even get started. Well, I hopefully made a nice step towards fixing the latter issue – I gathered every PHP Framework I could find and compiled them into a list at Wikipedia. Going forward, hopefully others will find this list useful for starting their investigation. Oh yeah – one more thing… Did I mention there were 57 Frameworks I found???? Give me a break – how in the world can the PHP community get enterprise traction if we don’t settle on a standard. No wonder RoR is rising in popularity so fast…

Gene McCabe, owner of FrugalReader.com, was kind enough to be a guest blogger this week. He shares his experience in working with a development firm (CentreSource) to develop the latest version of FrugalReader.com. For anyone looking to read an honest, realistic experience about Custom Web Development, I encourage you to read Gene’s commentary.

Opera 9.00 final is out, and they appear to have fixed the cookies bug. And there was much rejoicing.

Now I don’t have to switch to Firefox after all.

I can’t tell you how many times I will visit a website, read content that indicates it will cost me something, but try in vain to find any prices listed. This isn’t as bad for service websites where the price can vary dramatically, but now I’m even seeing it for websites that are a service unto themselves.

Jakob Neilsen, the Godfather of web usability, has co-authored a new book entitled “Prioritizing Web Usability”. WebMonkey has been kind enough to present an excerpt from the new book about Eight Problems that Haven’t Changed. These are eight of the original issues that they found with web usability between 1994 and 1999 that are still a problem today — even though technology and design has immensely improved. A high quality read when you have a chance.

I just finished reading (SmartComputing) a quick blurb about a Virtual Keyboard that uses lasers and infrared to produce a fully functional ‘virtual’ keyboard. The picture was awesome and I thought it was revolutionary… but upon doing a little research, it appears that virtual keyboards like this date back to 2002 – possibly earlier.

Time Magazine listed a non-production virtual keyboard from Canesta as one of their best inventions of 2002. Interestingly enough, it appears that Canesta abandoned the idea and decided to focus on electronic image processing.