The new yahoo mail - yes, they are turning their mail interface into AJAX. You can try it through yahoo.co.uk.

The interface is much similar to microsoft outlook express. One noticeable feature is the tabs. Not the tabs in your firefox, it allows you to open new mails in seperate tabs in your page. They have coded it nicely.

However, still gmail interface is much better. It’s more cleaner and easier to use. Yahoo is still living with their crappy web banners instead of going for context sensitive advertising like google.

Google Maps - That’s one of the most useful resources in the web. And a good usage of AJAX. Now, microsoft live team has turn into it; Live Local.

When I first saw the site… mmm.. it’s interesting - focused into colombo. ZOOM IN.. ZOOM IN… I was thinking like… ok. no more than that.. No. It’s going going.. WOW! Yeah! really. Then I realized that they are just rendering a zoomed version of earier images once after you reached level. Since, these are not real images, unlike in google maps, you can easily (err.. i didn’t really mean it.) do it.

Well, they have a traffic detials which is working and not going to work in Sri Lanka for at least for next few more years and a driving directions feature. I though that it’ll give the same result saying that this service not enabled in your area. No.. It’s not.. they are providing it. Well, it’s not realistic. They are just running something like dijktra’s algo and displaying the result, but with traffic detials and so on, I guess it’ll be really cool on some other countries.

I was thinking like, if **someone** can start an open source mapping service like this, so that anyone can enter detials here and there, I mean people can add data into the map such as roads, etc; then it’ll be really cool.

AJAX - Now it had been there in the internet for few years, and big companies in the world are moving into it. AJAX came so popular after google released their AJAX based email service, gmail. So, now people have done a lot of projects with AJAX, and a lot of cool services are on their way.

While I was hunting for new AJAX tools, I was redirected to google suggest site. It seems like really nice. When someone is typing something, it suggests words and the nice thing is infront of the word, it displays the number of results.

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

Since the beginning of this year, the most prestigious IT companies in the world focused their attention to one profitable large business, SEARCHING. A lot of companies were trying to be the best, but there was no clue, Google was the best. Few years ago, Microsoft was trying to overcome Google by their MSN searching but wasn’t able to make it success.

So, now they are trying to start over using the popular AJAX technology. Around two weeks ago Microsoft launched their AJAX based search engine, live.com which is a bit of threaten to google. Live.com isn’t only doing searching, but a web portal such as MSN and the most important thing is that you can customize your interface, and everything is AJAX based which means it’s really fast. Even though, it’s a portal, the interface is not overloaded with too much of information as in MSN. With the power of AJAX they have made it really descent and professional. The most amazing thing is that it is not only for IE, it is working fine in firefox under linux

But when we look at the search content and the quality of the search, Google is still ahead. As most people think, the search content might be a matter of time, but we have to remember that Microsoft is a large IT company which mainly focuses at their software, not in search, but the heart of google is searching and they are the first guys who launched a popular AJAX based service, GMAIL. So, their experience is, of course better than Microsoft. Even though most of the people don’t use, Google itself support customizable interface(Google News, etc).

As Sri Lankans, we saw a big step in google, they launched google.lk and their interface using Unicode. Earlier it was using English letters.But still google doesn’t support searching inside sinhala Unicode range. When we look at the live.com, there is no sinhala interface but the important thing is you can search using the sinhala Unicode characters.

I wonder why google doesn’t support sinhala Unicode characters, whenever it is not hard to implement. They are supporting almost every other Unicode character sets.

But still, no one of those giants don’t support ASCII sinhala searching using Unicode, so, still sinhalasearch.com rocks!!!

Ever wanted to have your own site? Then you might have a nice experience with thousands of hosting packages…… There are lot of them, and not sure what to choose? Then read this.

When we consider about hosting, there are several major facts you have to consider: storage, transfer rate and of course **cost**. Let’s look at them one by one.

Storage -

Most of the personal sites are smaller than 5 MB. And if your site is larger than this, the best option would be optimizing your graphics. There are several advantages on that. The major advantage would be, your site loads fast and it is cost effective. So, in that case there is no need to go for a big storage plan. Take only much as you want!

Monthly Transfer Rate-

This is a major fact that most people mess around. There are some hosting plans which provide you about 600 MB storage and 1GB monthly transfer rate. What it means is, your web site only allows you to do transactions up to 1 GB. For example, you have a big file about 500 MB, it is completely useless because once after two people downloaded the file, your monthly transfer rate is exceeded. You site will be down for the rest of the month. So, you have to think about the monthly transfer rate twice.

Cost -

There is no point of even talking about it. But when you are going to buy a new hosting plan make sure you compare the price with other hosting companies.

Last week, when I was trying to access google.com, there was a link to google sri lanka, of course, it is google.lk . They have bought .lk domain and they have integrated the sinhala interface into it. Anyway, the sinhala interface was bit old, and seems like they have managed to translate a lot of words to sinhala, in sinhala letters. Still, there are few words to be converted to sinhala letters(They are using english letters for those words). After all, they still don’t support sinhala searching. I think their indexer is ignoring the sinhala unicode characters. So, doing query in sinhala unicode characters won’t work out.

When they have started the google.lk, one of my friends told me that google will support sinhala searching soon, and sinhalasearch will be useless after that. No! It’ll not. Let’s think google supports sinhala searching. So, then people will be able to search in sinhala unicode. But the problem is, it only allows you to search pages in unicode font. Still, sinhala unicode is not popular. Lot of sinhala sites in the internet, use fonts like ‘kapuradotcom’,'aKandyNew’, etc. So, people will get only very few results.
So, in sinhalasearch.com we are converting all those fonts into the unicode font and then index the pages. So, query using sinhala unicode in the sinhalasearch will give you much more results.

Except that, lot of people complain that when they are browsing sinhala pages, they have to download different fonts for different sites. For example, let’s say you are reading lakbima newspaper, then you have to download their font. And of course when you’re reading divaina you have to download their font. But if you are using sinhalasearch you can easily overcome that. Since, we are converting all those pages into one common font, sinhala unicode, people can read everything without bothering downloading the fonts. They only have to download the unicode font.

Try sinhalasearch : www.sinhalasearch.com