Tireless patent troll Intellectual Property holder Eolas has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas against, well.. nearly everyone. The issue at hand deals with two patents in Eolas' possession -- the first of which was the subject of a successful lawsuit against Microsoft back in 2004.

The second patent, what Eolas refers to as "a continuation of the '906 patent" claims to hold as the sole intellectual property of Eolas, "fully-interactive embedded applications [...] through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques." The second patent is so far untested in court -- and ostensibly covers more popular websites than you can shake a knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag at.

I haven't had time to delve into the language of the patent, but this reeks of utter nonsense to me so far. In my layman's oppinion, Eolas may have made a crucial mistake however, taking aim at so many large targets at once -- with one untested patent, and another which Microsoft already came rather close to beating.

Take the leap to read the whole extortion demand press release, and see the enormous list of publicly traded web firms included.

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Google I/O round-up
• Use Google to reference your JavaScript libraries
• Google Web Toolkit 1.5 RC
• Other random Google bits

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google, the day-late, extra-tasty edition!

This edition covers:

• AJAX Language API
• Google Analytics benchmarking goes live
• YouTube 2007 Video Award Winners
• Google Apps get newest Gmail features

Compfight fits all the most important Flickr search options into its minimal design. You can switch between tags and all text, turn Creative Commons on or off, and decide whether clicking thumbnails will take you to the default photo page or show the original size. It takes some fiddling to do all of this at Flickr.com, but Compfight uses the Flickr API and makes everything easy.

Oh, and about those thumbnails: a blue line at the bottom lets you know that Flickr has an original photo, and you can mouse over it to see the photo's dimensions. It looks so good that you might be tempted to completely give up going to Flickr.com for your searches.

[via JoshSpear]

There's a lot of garbage on Craigslist -- including vowels, apparently. Crgslst cuts to the chase, providing a quick Ajax site that switches between cities and categories on Craigslist with one click. It looks a lot prettier than the real thing, too!

Since there are hundreds of different city pages on Craigslist now, you can save a ton of time by jumping between them within the same search. Crgslst doesn't allow a simultaneous nationwide search, although it could easily do so, because that feature has gotten sites shut down in the past. This is the next-best thing, though, and we hope it lasts.

Crgslst has another leg up on the built-in Craigslist search engine because it lets you quickly save what you're doing. You can pick up to 10 favorite cities, to avoid having to reselect your city from the map or the popular cities list every time, and you can save interesting listings to a compact sidebar. If the folks at Craigslist do want this site shut down, they could do worse than to steal from its design, which a huge improvement on the original.

[via JoshSpear]

It isn't every day that Douglas Crockford (the father of JSON and JSLint) pops up with a new tech talk. In this one he discusses the current state of Ajax development, why mashups are inherently insecure, why the standards process is broken, and how our best hope for a newer better platform may be mobile. Say what?

Basically he proposes the idea that because the replacement rate on mobile phones is so quick (around 2 years) it would be possible to move that industry to a new platform for website interactivity. The traditional PC market moves slowly and requires that you support many many legacy platforms. But with mobile, you can run and gun with your technology and count on people upgrading. A new web platform for mobile could be Flash, it could be Silverlight, it could be a future version of ECMA Script (JavaScript) with a better CSS implementation.

The video also gives a good overview of the history of computing over networks and why the web has lagged behind on everything from rounded corners to security.

Bloglines has just packed a bunch of new features into its online news feed searching, subscribing to and reading service, and it all begins with a start page.

Bloglines headlines its new feature developments with a personalized start page. This is the page that brings everything together in a quick and easy view with an AJAX interface. There is nothing like starting feed reading off with a view like this to help you distinguish and gravitate towards your top interests first, before they get lost in a sea of unread material. Users can also now drag and drop feeds to add them into a three panel interface. To make things even easier, Bloglines has integrated mouse over previews to get a quick snippet of the content for a more in depth look at the article. Two other views are also available to complement the three panel view, a full view, and quick view mode. The quick view lists out titles for an easy news scan, with the full view listing out full article content.

This new redevelopment comes more than two years after the Bloglines acquisition by IAC interactive, the company that owns the popular ASK search engine. It can be accessed at http://beta.bloglines.com.

How often have you visited YouTube to watch online video and thought to yourself, "wouldn't it be great if these video windows acted more like desktop applications?" Well, YouTubeDesktop is stepping up to solve a problem we didn't know anybody had.

The web based application is basically a front end for Youtube. When you first visit the site you'll be presented with a thumbnail view of popular videos. You can browse or search for more videos. Click on one and a window will pop up and begin playing the video.

Here's where things get interesting. You can drag the window around the screen. And you can resize it by clicking and dragging on the corner. You can also use a slider at the bottom of the screen to resize all of the icons on the "desktop."

Want to download the video as an FLV file? Just click the Flash icon. Want to convert it to AVI, MP4, WMV, MOV, or 3GP? click the download button and YouTubeDesktop will convert the file for you.

YouTubeDesktop is currently in private beta. We're not convinced it will draw too many users away from the YouTube community. There's no easy way that we can find to view more videos submitted by the same user. And there's no way to leave or read comments on videos. So while YouTubeDesktop does provide a nice interface for watching videos, you sacrifice some of the community aspects of YouTube that make it attractive.

[via Last100]

Jumptags takes off where other social bookmarking tools might have left off. The web service not only allows users to collect, store, share and distribute web bookmarks, but it also does the same for notes, rss feeds and contact lists.

This Web 2.0 application is built with AJAX and officially jumped into beta at the end of April this year and has been achieving a nice following. Signing up for an account is of course free and only takes a minute.

Jumptags corporate blog is lacking a bit, and now that they are stirring up some attention, we hope they would increase the communication with users.

Other competitors in the marketplace include Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Yahoo myweb.

As you know, anything you can do on the web you can do on web 2.0. In the case of checking to see if a domain is available, we've recently come across two new services, Ajax Lookup and Instant Domain Search.

Both services will check to see if a domain is taken as you type. At a first glance Ajax Windows would appear to have the edge. It has a prettier interface, and lets you search for 9 different domain types including .biz, info, us, ca, and uk.

But Ajax Windows is a bit on the slow side compared with Instant Domain Search, which, true to its name, shows results pretty much instantly. On the other hand, Instant Domain Search only checks for .com, ,net., and .org extensions. Of course, those are pretty much the biggies, right?

[via Killer Startups]

Ryan Stewart, Evangelist for Adobe's Integrated Runtime project (AIR), takes a few minutes to tell us what all the fuss is about. Ryan taking part in Adobe's live cross-country bus tour to promote AIR. The tour kicks July 10th at the Elysian Brewing Company in downtown Seattle.

DS: Can you briefly describe Adobe AIR?

Ryan: Adobe AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows you to build desktop applications with web technologies. It runs on top of your operating system so that developers can build applications in AIR that take advantage of OS features without having to develop the application for a specific operating system. And instead of needing to learn desktop languages like C or Coco, you can take Ajax or Flash and build desktop apps with them.

DS: Why should consumers and average computers users be excited about Adobe AIR?

Ryan: I think the biggest reason that users should be excited is because they'll have a lot more applications to choose from. Web apps have become all the rage and part of the reason is that they're easy to build and people can jump in quickly. We wanted to capture some of that with AIR and bring it to the desktop. Hopefully users will see more apps like the Pownce desktop client, Finetune and Tweetr.

DS: Can you give an example of how an Adobe AIR application could use a web service and a person¹s computer hard drive to build something that isn¹t possible with the web alone?

Ryan: Being able to read and write to the hard drive gives you a lot of storage options and also lets you hook into parts of native applications. For instance the Finetune desktop client looks at your iTunes.xml file and figures out which artists you might like. It then allows you to listen to a radio station based on those artists. With AIR you can also associate files with your application, so you can create your own new file format or write a viewer for other file types.

DS: What is the coolest AIR application you¹ve seen so far?

Ryan: I really like the way Finetune integrates with their website, but I just got to check out Pownce, Kevin Rose's new project, and their desktop client is pretty cool. For pure silliness Dryerfox is classic. There are a ton of AIR applications at AirApps.net and ApolloHunter.com for people to try.

DS: What type of services or assists can Adobe AIR applications connect to?

At the Google Developer Day a little while ago, Google announced a Mashup Editor that they were releasing. It was by invitation only, and known as an interactive development environment that would allow users to edit, compile, test and manage applications.

We recently got the opportunity to check out the interface, and play around with it a bit. The Google Mashup Editor is built off of an AJAX development framework, and supplies users a set of tools that users can quickly and easily create simple web applications, smashups, and Google Gadgets using Google's applications like Google Maps. As long as you have a familiarity with XML, JavaScript, CSS and HTML you can build smashups. Of course there are ways that advanced developers can take advantage of the Smashup Editor, and its starts with using the JavaScript API.

After a smashup has been created using the reusable modules, users can test it in the Sandbox, and then publish it to a sub domain under googlemashups.com. Google does all the work there, from setting up the server, hosting, database and authentication.

Check out some samples of smashups created with the tool:

• Fourth of July Celebrations around the U.S.
• Tasklist
• Google Base Real Estate search
• Earthquake Central

Got a Google Mashup to show off? Drop us a line.

Google has launched an interesting new program that sees developers who design and develop sustainable Google Gadgets, sizable funding grants.

The Google Gadget Ventures funding program is open for businesses and individuals who apply to a $5000 grant, not a loan, for further developments on their creation. So what's the catch? To be considered into the program, your gadget must have more than 250,000 pageviews per week. Together with those stats, you must also write a one page proposal on the improvements that you would add to your Gadget.

If you pass those tests, Google has another $100,000 in seed investments for companies that start a Gadget, or rely on the Gadget for their business.

So what are you waiting for? Here are some links to help you get started:

• Google Gadget
• Google Mashup Editor
• Google Web Toolkit
• Google Data API
• AJAX Feed API
• Google Gears

And if DLS readers need some extra pageviews, submit your gadget to the tips line!

The iPhone isn't even out yet and there are scheduled conferences, iPhone specific applications and now an iPhone developer's platform.

A company called Morfik has created a platform that will give developers the ability to build applications on Apple's new iPhone. This new platform is said to be the first of its kind, and usually the first ones to market hit it big with consumers. Morfik has said that its WebOS AppsBuilder will be able to make web applications that are optimized for Safari running on iPhones. Don't have a technically included background? Morfik will also enable everyday users a way to make their own AJAX powered web applications with writing any code.

Morfik already has one application ready for the iPhone called ichess. http://ichess.morfik.com

It's been said that Google Gears and Adobe's AIR could also be big with iPhone developers.

Ben Forta and Adobe are getting into full swing with ColdFusion 8 Scorpio Pre-Release tour. Last night Ben gave us in Seattle a taste of things to come. Here is why it will kick the tar balls out of everything else on the market.

1. Built in AJAX widgets. Create AJAX windows, auto complete forms, calendar popups, grids, WYSIWYG editors, and much more. All using simple ColdFusion based tags and generating industry standard solutions such as Prototype and Yahoo User Interface Javascript.
   
2. Native JSON support. ColdFusion components now know if they are called by a web browser and will return JSON formated data automatically. You can also create JSON packets directly or consume them and turn them into native ColdFusion objects.
3. .NET (and Java!) integration. Pull in .NET objects and use them like native ColdFusion objects. Combine .NET and Java on the same page if you like. Easily the best web based middleware solution.
4. Microsoft Exchange integration. Love it or hate it, most organizations use Exchange religiously. Now you can read and update email, calendars, tasks and much more. No change to the Exchange server is required.
5. Flash based presentation builder. Combine HTML, Audio, Flash Movies, Images, and CFCharts to create spiffy flash based presentations on the fly. Just wrap your existing pages in CFPRESENTATION and you are on your way.
6. Full PDF integration. Create, combine, update, and interact with PDF files using CFPDF and CFPDFFORM tags.
7. Native image manipulation functions. Blur, sharpen, draw, rotate, stream to browser, and much much more. This finally brings ColdFusion's image support in line with PHP and other frameworks while keeping it so simple that even I could use it.
8. Across the board enhancements. Improvements in security, speed, Flash Forms, Report Builder, and more.
9. Administration API. Now you can access, audit, and snapshot all the information the server knows about itself. No longer is ColdFusion a black box. Audit long running processes, most frequently run queries, and bottle necks. SnapShot the server before making your change or doing a reset so that you can analyze potential problems later.
   

Admittedly I am a ColdFusion fan boy, but I know that it isn't for everyone. Still, ColdFusion is easily the BMW (both in price and in raw engineered quality) of the web application languages out there. With ColdFusion 8 it now becomes possible to build and integrate a vast amount of functionality with only a few lines of code. Imagine letting users quickly create their own presentation by uploading photos and editing slides using a WYSIWYG editor. Then, when they are all done, they can view and share it on the web via Flash or push it to a PDF file. ColdFusion 8 lets you wrap up all this up into a tight package using heavily documented yet extremely simple tags. No scripting required!

ColdFusion 8 Scorpio should land sometime in mid-2007. You know I'll be there.