May 2008

I’m currently working on some Rails project which makes use of the great attachment_fu plugin by Technoweenie (which led to my first bugfix for an Open Source project).

Yesterday I stumbled over some glitch with Lightbox (or Script.aculo.us, I’m not really sure) which results in a mal-sized picture. For the sample, go here. The fix is quite simple, you have to explicitly set the width of the image (that should be around line #260):

imgPreloader.onload = (function(){
    this.lightboxImage.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0];
    // The following line will fix the glitch:
    this.lightboxImage.width = imgPreloader.width;
    this.resizeImageContainer(imgPreloader.width, imgPreloader.height);
}).bind(this);
imgPreloader.src = this.imageArray[this.activeImage][0];

I just did some research with Google Finance. Some facts:

• Did you know that if you would have bought shares from Yahoo at the beginning of 1997 and sold them at the end of 1999, your gain in investment would have been about 13.000%? Even after the year 2000, you would still have a again of 700-1.000%.

• Apple (and about the same for Google): Beginning of 2005 till now: +400%

• Microsoft: 1986 - 2000: +55.000% (okay, that’s lame, 14 years).

Any tips for the next big thing?

• Their design looks so 1999 (and their markup is even 1994)
  What’s one of the reasons why Google’s search is so successful? Because it doesn’t offer any distractions. You have a search box. That’s it. Simplicity is the key.

• It’s time for RSS
  When I’ve clicked through all the search criterias (you do not need to refresh the page as soon as I’ve select one district of ten) I want to store these results, and, just to be able to keep an eye on the thing, get a link to an RSS feed. So I can quickly see if there are new offerings.

• Ads all over the place
  I don’t know how they make money (I guess they take fees from the estate agents) but distracting ads all over the place are a thing which are common for every site I’ve found.

• I really wanna do search for all attributes
  You can search for price and area but then you can’t search for the number of rooms. Or you can search for the district but can’t tell them that you wanna have an eat-in kitchen.

• Pictures? Yes, resized, unreadable and low quality
  Okay, bad quality pictures are often the fault of the estate agent. But badly scaled images which become unreadable (floor plans) are really not necessary. Not resizing them at all and just setting the size of the image container is really bad practise.

• Prices? All included, please
  Just yesterday I’ve stumbled over a site which didn’t let you enter an all-included price but instead just considered the rent (without taxes and service charges). Really helpful, thanks. When you’re looking for a flat which costs 700 Euros you will get rents as high as 900 Euros.