Monday, December 26th, 2005
Category: Canvas
We pointed you to Romain Guy’s reflection in Canvas.
“Cow” took inspiration from Romain’s work and created reflection.js, to allow you to add this effect in a degradable fashion.
The more cool things we see with Canvas (only scratching the surface), the more we wish IE started to support it!
Category: UI, Usability
So you’ve figured out that your users would appreciate a Progress Indicator during those impatient moments of asynchrony. Coding it is easy enough, the hard part is coming up with a pretty animated icon. Well, you can hopefully skip that bit now, thanks to a nice collection of animated icons from Jakob Skjerning (via Deep Resonance).
Get your free progress indicators here.
Please mail Jakob any of your own icons and he’ll add them to the collection. He’s declared his icons “free as in speech and beer”, which I guess means you could also mod them and send them back … it would be nice to add some colour to the mix. Thanks for contributing the icons Jakob!
Sunday, December 25th, 2005
Category: Office
InnerPhaze has a detailed
summary of the “Ajax Office” offerings. There’s plenty of info here on
features and pros/cons. He’s focused on the word-processing side, rather than other Office-y genres like Spreadsheets and Presentations.
gOffice:
“This website produces
high quality output with almost no effort in part because we are careful not to
provide too many options.” http://www.gOffice.com
gOffice has some interesting features like free text you can use as a template
to get you started on whatever it is you are writing. There are hundreds of
these entries from apologies to sales letters, and even creative writing. One
of the things I liked the most was that you can donate your own original text
to the Free Text Library for others to use
ThinkFree
Office:
“ThinkFree Office is a suite of MicrosoftÆ
Office-compatible applications, which includes word processing, spreadsheet,
presentation graphics and file management software that all look, feel and
behave just like MicrosoftÆ Office. Additionally, ThinkFree Office is
delivered and upgraded over the Internet, giving users an unprecedented level
of computing choice and freedom.
- http://www.thinkfree.com/register.jsp
The first time you open ThinkFree Write you have to download a Java applet,
which can take a minute or two or three. It is supposed to be faster after this
point because the applet is cached on your local machine. It does get faster,
but not as fast as the strictly web based word processors or even the desktop
word processors … There are a lot of good things about this service. sign-up
is easy, you can save to Word, OpenOffice and pdf … Overall the minor
glitches are far outweighed by what ThinkFree offers in terms of features, ease
of use and polish. And although it is a bit slow at the start-line it is very
robust at the finish.
Writely:
“Writely is not a carbon-copy of existing desktop solutions. Rather, Writely is
an innovative, Web-centric word processor that leverages the connected nature
of the Internet to provide online storage, editing, sharing and communication
of documents
- documents that users can now upload and save in multiple formats.”
href=”http://www.writely.com/View.aspx?docid=afmc9ph7txv2″>(Writely) Source
page
Writely is the hottest web word processor out there right now.It has many
great features, a clean interface, and is very responsive. They are adding
features all the time, and just recently added Save as a PDF feature, but as a
paid service … Overall Writely is a great service and I think it deserves the
buzz. I just hope they keep the main service free.
Zoho Writer:
“… an online Word Processor to Create, Format, Store & Share Documents
online.” -http://www.zohowriter.com/Home.do
Overall I am very impressed with Zoho Writer, it is very close to Writely
already in terms of features, and (like Writely) will be adding features all
the time.
37Signals’ Writeboard:
“Writeboards are sharable, web-based text documents that let you save every
edit,
roll back to any version, and easily compare changes. Write solo or collaborate
with
others.” -http://www.writeboard.com/
There are nice features, like being able to keep all the revisions of a
text, collaborating with others, and subscribing via RSS, but overall this
could be more closely compared to Notepad than Word. If you just want quick and
simple this may be right for you.
EyeOS:
“EyeOS is a free, cross-platform Personal Content Manager System based upon the
style of a Desktop Operating System. The base package includes the whole
Operating
System structure and ten apps, as a Calendar, a File Manager, a Text Editor, an
Internal Messenger, a Browser and a Calculator.
EyeOSs is thought to provide a complete, scalable and free (GPL Licensed)
Organization and Work System. Its scalable, so everyone can port an existing
PHP
app to EyeOS and create a meta-package for installing it.” (from
http://www.eyeos.org/index.php?section=Whatis
(R)ight now you need your own server with PHP 4.2.0 or better to host EyeOS
… The word processor in EyeOS is called EyeEdit and is described as a text
editor, but it is really a full featured word processor, (much more feature
rich than Writeboard for example) … Probably the neatest thing is called
EyeApps, which enable you to download and install programs into your EyeOS.
Friday, December 23rd, 2005
Category: Showcase
Digg Spy has been upgraded with a bunch of new features. There are some nice new filter and extra event types covered.
But the most notable feature is the Periodic Refresh. It used to update at a leisurely pace of once every few seconds, and is now a kind of “Hyper Refresh” with updates around each second. It certainly has a nice live feel to it, but the links are rarely stationary long enough to click on them! To compensate, there’s a pause button, perhaps an Ajax first? FactoryCity draws the video game analogy: “I’m all for a more interactive web, but Frogger never seemed like an ideal interface for consuming news!”.
Maybe it would be more usable if it paused automatically when the mouse hovers over the link column.
BTW, there’s lots of Scriptaculous libraries under the covers, though it’s not clear that all of them are used at this time.
Category: Podcasts
Ben and I were speaking at an event in Belgium, and used the opportunity to record a state of ajax podcast that we have gotten out of the door before the holiday period!
What we learn on the podcast
Download Episode 11 MP3
Category: Toolkit
Backbase has given its clients a nice holiday present, with the release of a new version of its products: 3.1.1.
There are 26 pages worth of information on what is new, but they kindly summarize the high points.
New Components
The new version has a bunch more components to play with:
- Data Grid: view and edit tabular date
- Live Grid: scroll through large data sets
- Paging Controls: split up large data sets across multiple pages
- Populate Event: lazy loading of data
- System Skin: create applications with a desktop look-and-feel
Application Layer
In the applications layer we’ve improved drag-and-drop and resizing functionality. This makes it easier to implement complex user interface concepts, and makes it much easier to use desktop UI concepts in web interfaces.
Foundation Layer
The foundation layer is sometimes a bit hidden, but this is where the real power of Backbase is. We now support extremely flexible manipulation of XML (client-side) and excellent integration with JavaScript functions. It is now also possible to add Backbase commands to any HTML fragment, making it very seamless to integrate Backbase into an existing HTML application.
Tooling and Developer resources
When you have a lot of examples it’s easier to learn a certain technology. In this release we’ve again increased the number of bundled examples, tutorials and code samples. Many of them can be found in the updated Backbase Explorer. Also, the development tools are updated: they are running within the browser, and allow all kinds of advanced stuff, such as node inspection, and XPath query testing. Below you see a screenshot of the new tools.
Category: Dojo, JavaScript, Toolkit
Open source projects and documentation. It is often a tough combination, and a big differentiator for an open source project is to actually have a lot of quality docs out there.
The Dojo team were aware of this, and aware that they were lacking, so they started to build the Dojo Toolkit Manual.
If you want to learn more about Dojo, you have to check this out.
The project also needs more help with the docs, so if you want to get involved, you will be welcomed :)
Category: Editorial
For a geeky christmas:
All I want for Christmas is Ajax
I don't want a tall skinny tree
or lots of presents under it.
All I ask for are some Web 2.0 goodies
that are zipped and not wrapped.
I want PHP and not PAJAMAS.
Give me widgets and not gadgets.
Give me a torrent of flashy de.licio.us gifts that flickr brightly under MySQL clouds.
I want Wiki and not wassel.
I want Christmas feeds and not Christmas food.
I want shareware and freeware and not underwear.
I want my OPML Christmas list to be meta-tagged and checked twice by automated folksonomy-based aggregators exhibiting an emergent Christmas cheer that can be mapped visually and dynamically on my poor and miserable blog that limps along like Tiny Tim on the pathetic crutches of Web 1.0 architecture.
All I want for Christmas is Ajax.
And may God bless us . . everyone.
Happy Festivus for the rest of us!
Category: Canvas
Dave Hoover has written up a nice tutorial on combining ajax techniques with Canvas in Canvas, Ajax, and the Supertrain.
In this article I’m going to walk through a less complex experiment, using canvas to graphically represent the real-time state of a fictional railway system (live example). I’m not going to deconstruct the details of the Javascript and Ruby code, there are better and more comprehensive resources available if you need to get up to speed with these languages. OK. Let’s get to it…
The State of Washington has finally completed its Supertrain, a public light-rail system that has solved the Seattle area’s horrendous traffic problems. Part of the Supertrain infrastructure is a software system that informs the Supertrain command center on the whereabouts of their various trains. The team of developers that built this software did an exceptional job on the back-end, providing a message-based system that allows anyone in the network to listen for train status events. Unfortunately, they didn’t put much focus onto the front-end of the system, providing their users with a text-based web page that requires a manual browser refresh to view the latest state of the system.
I have been asked to write a new front-end that dynamically and graphically represents each active trains’ progress along its line. The State of Washington has asked me to do this for just one of their Supertrain lines initially, as a proof-of-concept.
Before I can start working with Ajax and canvas on the client-side, I need a way to collect train events from the server-side. For this proof-of-concept, I’ll use Ruby’s WEBrick web server to expose these events via HTTP. I like to take small steps, so I’ll start by getting WEBrick up and running as soon as possible, mounting a closure and an HTML page.
Thursday, December 22nd, 2005
Category: .NET, JavaScript, Prototype
Firstly, it has to be said that micro-benchmarks are the root of all evil.
Now that is out of the way, Jon Meyer took the time to compare styles of subclassing in JavaScript, based on what he sees in Prototype and Atlas.
He analyzes performance implications, giving numbers, and it allows you to see differences between the browsers (well, FF/IE).
Conclusion
In both approaches, there is a penalty for subclassing, especially on IE.
For a performance-critical class, set frequently accessed properties/methods directly on the this instance rather than placing them further up the prototype chain.
The Prototype idiom, generally speaking, produces code that runs marginally slower on IE, when doing general-case method/property access.
The Atlas idiom has the benefit of truly “private” instance variables – you can use closures to define variables that are only visible within a specific method. There appears to be no perf penality for accessing/updating these closure variables.
A major drawback of the Atlas approach is that constructing instances takes much longer. For a class where thousands of instances are constructed (e.g. a IsoDate class), this is a significant issue. For a class that is constructed once and lives the lifetime of the app, this may not be an issue.
The functional iterators of Prototype perform slowly compared to for loops.
Category: Articles
IBM developerWorks has a new article covering Automate acceptance tests with Selenium.
Acceptance, or functional, testing is designed to put manual tasks through their paces, but testing these tasks by hand can be time consuming and prone to human error. In this article, the author shows architects, developers, and testers how to use the Selenium testing tools to automate acceptance tests; automating the tests saves times and helps eliminate tester mistakes. You also are provided with an example of how to apply Selenium in a real-world project using Ruby on Rails and Ajax.
I wish that the article went into more depth (hopefully there will be a follow up).
We constantly get asked about testing Ajax applications, and Selenium is a tool that we can all use.
Category: Library, PHP
Groundwork Guava is a new PHP based application framework and environment.
You may ask, “Why another one?”:
This one has a bit of a unique aspect because it’s completely object orientated and abstracts the ajax functionality to the extremes. You develop using Guava just like you would develop a desktop app (with event listeners, message passing, etc).
The guava team is looking for contributors, so dive in :)
Category: JavaScript
Eric Pascarello has a nice tip on how to scroll to the bottom of a div.
var objDiv = document.getElementById(”divExample”);
objDiv.scrollTop = objDiv.scrollHeight;
Category: Showcase
AjaxTrans is an Ajax Translator (via AjaxBlog). Translate to and from English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and French (still waiting on Swedish Chef).
For comparison, the big translation tools: Babelfish and Google, neither use Ajax. So are there any other Ajax translators out there?
Some people have been pointing out that Live Search and even auto-completing Suggestions can be a distraction since it shows intermediate results that are pretty much irrelevant. AjaxTrans is a variant of Live Search that demonstrates it can sometimes be useful to run automated queries against something the user’s typing. In this case, the translation is updated after each word, not after each character or after each typing delay.
Wednesday, December 21st, 2005
Category: Editorial
We are proud to have joined the Web 2.0 Workgroup, which is “a network of premium weblogs that write content about the new generation of the Web”.
Web 2.0 Workgroup Network
| Category |
Sites |
| Analysis & Trends |
Read/WriteWeb, Dion Hinchcliffe,
Susan Mernit’s Blog, Web 2.0 Explorer, Get Real, Ben Barren |
| Companies & Products |
TechCrunch, SolutionWatch, eHub |
|
Design & Usability |
WeBreakStuff, Bokardo,
ParticleTree, Emily Chang |
|
VC & Business |
Jeff Clavier,
Nivi |
| Podcasting |
PodTech, Web 2.0 Show |
|
Tech & Development |
Programmable Web, CrunchNotes, Librarystuff, Alex Barnett, Ajaxian |
|
Commentary |
Scripting News, HorsePigCow, Scobleizer, Micro Persuasion |
Category: Ajax
Brendan Eich appears in the latest Gillmor Gang, an 86-minute discussion mostly covering the road ahead for Firefox.
There’s no shownotes available, but here are a few topics that were covered:
- Rich text editing
- Local storage
- Improvements in history and bookmarks
- Rich graphics and SVG
- Javascript roadmap
- The possibility of runtimes for Python, Ruby, .Net, others for XUL scripting
- “Spread Firefox” strategies
- Lots more!
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