| ● iPhone, Wiimote, or newborn baby: which has the best built-in accelerometer? |
[02 Aug 2007|06:43am] |
20:13 30.07.2007
● iPhone, Wiimote, or newborn baby: which has the best built-in accelerometer?
In the Kottke/Hourihan household, much of the past 4 weeks has been spent determining which has the most sensitive built-in accelerometer: an iPhone, a Nintendo Wiimote, or our newborn son.
The iPhone was eliminated fairly quickly...the portrait-to-landscape flip is easy to circumvent if you do it slow enough or at an odd angle. The Wiimote might be the winner; it registers small, slow movements with ease, as when executing a drop shot in tennis or tapping in a putt in golf.
Newborns, however, are born with something called the Moro reflex. When infants feel themselves fall backwards, they startle and throw their arms out to the sides, as illustrated in this video. Even fast asleep they will do this, often waking up in the process. So while the Wiimote's accelerometer may be more sensitive, the psychological pressure exerted on the parent while lowering a sleeping baby slowly and smoothly enough so as not to wake them with the Moro reflex and thereby squandering 40 minutes of walking-the-baby-to-sleep time is beyond intense and so much greater than any stress one might feel serving for the match in tennis or getting that final strike in bowling.
read more at kottke.org
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| pzImageCombine: One image for CSS clipping |
[02 Aug 2007|03:02pm] |
10:34 01.08.2007
pzImageCombine: One image for CSS clipping
Various people have documented the clipping technique of taking one large image, and showing a piece of it in a particular place, thus combining X numbers of images into one download.
Alexander Graef has created a tool to automate this task for you called pzImageCombine.
It allows you to choose an image directory and combine all png images into one single image. It still has a ways to go, but does the simple tasks now.
read more at Ajaxian
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| InputDraw: Allow Drawing in Forms |
[02 Aug 2007|03:02pm] |
12:00 01.08.2007
InputDraw: Allow Drawing in Forms
Ever wanted to let your users draw in a form field?
<InputDraw/> lets you do just that, saving the results as SVG for you to include in a form field. It's based on Flash and is easy to use:
HTML:
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<script src="swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></a></script>
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<script src="inputdraw.js" type="text/javascript"></a></script>
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<div id="place"></a></div>
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<input type="hidden" id="svgdraw" /></a>
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<script type="text/javascript"></a>
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new InputDraw("inputdraw.free-non-commercial.1.3.swf", "place",
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{id:"svgdraw", width:"300", height:"300", animation:60, background_image:"/images/backgrounds/minorca_beach.jpg"});
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</script>
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The project also includes an SVG viewer. We're told that:
version 1.0 has more than 1000 real downloads and it is used in a lot of
funny websites and medical web applications.
read more at Ajaxian
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| Audible Ajax Episode 22: Joe Hewitt on Firebug, Firefox, and iUI |
[02 Aug 2007|03:02pm] |
14:00 01.08.2007
Audible Ajax Episode 22: Joe Hewitt on Firebug, Firefox, and iUI
This is Joe Hewitt week. We were fortunate enough to find some time to chat with Joe about a myriad of topics.
These topics ranged from:
- Firebug: How Firebug came about, tips and tricks and hidden toys, and YSlow
- Browsers: We had a fun chat about the history of Firefox, and how Gecko and Webkit compare these days
- iPhone: How Joe got interested in mobile development when he never had done before
- Misc: We also explored topics such as JavaScript 2, and how you can turn yourself into a 24 hour coding machine.
I had a really good time chatting with Joe. He is a solid bloke, and we all give him a hand for giving us Firebug.
Go ahead and listen to the interview or subscribe to the podcast.
Who would you like us to interview for upcoming shows?
read more at Ajaxian
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| YUI 2.3 Released: Rich Text Editor, Components, and Themes |
[02 Aug 2007|03:02pm] |
16:18 01.08.2007
YUI 2.3 Released: Rich Text Editor, Components, and Themes
YUI 2.3 has been released with six new components, as well as a skinning architecture and a new look for the components.
Features
- Rich Text Editor: Cross-browser support has always been a major challenge for RTEs, and we think you’ll be impressed with how well this editor works across the various environments. You can instantiate it with just a few lines of code for simple implementations
- Base CSS: Nate Koechley continues to extend and refine the YUI CSS foundation. Base CSS itself applies consistent and common style treatments for the foundation
- YUILoader: A mechanism for loading YUI components (and/or your own custom components) on the page via client-side script.
- ImageLoader: Allows you to defer the loading of some images to speed initial rendering time on your pages.
- ColorPicker: The Color Picker provides a powerful UI widget for color selection, featuring HSV, RGB, and Hex input/output and a web-safe color-selection swatch.
- YUI Test Utility: YUI Test introduces a flexible unit-testing framework for the YUI ecosystem and serves as the foundation for our own unit-test battery.
- Skins
read more at Ajaxian
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| Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for July, 2007: iPhone and the Plugin Wars |
[02 Aug 2007|03:02pm] |
05:01 02.08.2007
Monthly Ajaxian Roundup for July, 2007: iPhone and the Plugin Wars
The summer is traditionally a slow time, but this July had some fun happenings. The iPhone buzz continued, and Episode 2: The Plugin Wars continued. Mozilla announced that their front was moving the battle to enemy territory. Brendan Eich said, “If we fight them over in IE, they won’t come fight us over here” ;) He then launched his Iron Screaming Monkeys and Microsoft retaliated by hinting that “for performance reasons” they may have to take out the scripting host in future versions of IE.
iPhone
Frameworks
Dojo
Script.aculo.us
ExtJS
Yahoo! UI
jQuery
JavaScript
Offline
CSS
Browsers
Tools
Showcases
read more at Ajaxian
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| Bubble 2.0? |
[02 Aug 2007|03:03pm] |
11:30 02.08.2007
Bubble 2.0?
The sky is falling! Every publication has to have it’s resident curmudgeon. It’s a franchise, and PC Magazine’s is held down by John Dvorak. Now he’s moaning about a dot-com bubble redux involving Web 2.0 based companies.
Each of these bubbles had a distinctive theme. For the dot-com bubble, it was e-commerce—it really should have been called the e-commerce bubble. Everything was focused on how the Internet was going to destroy all existing brick-and-mortar operations. We were told that you’d be buying sandwiches over the Internet and having them delivered the next day by FedEx. Everything was about “eyeballs” and finding ways to attract customers, whether they bought anything or not. Every article in every newspaper in the country parroted the litany as to how you’d be out of business in a year or two if you were not present on the Web in a big way. Of course, this was all crap.
The current bubble, already called Bubble 2.0 to mock the Web 2.0 moniker, is harder to pin down insofar as a primary destructive theme is concerned.
He goes on to scoff at the various concepts that are in vogue in the Web 2.0 space, all of which could come tumbling down in a crash.
- Neo-social networking
- Video mania
- User-generated content
- Mobile everything
- Ad-leveraged search
- Widgets and toolbars
An economic bubble is defined as “trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance from intrinsic values”. Is that really where we are? I don’t see all that many “me too” or momentum investments in Web 2.0 companies — just a $10 million investment here or there by some VC’s. Facebook has a large valuation because they actually generate lots of advertising income (shoot, 1% of all online time is spent on Facebook), and online advertising it here to stay.
Most of the Ajax/Web 2.0 activity I see right now is existing companies retooling their online presence to take advantage of some of the new technologies and ideas.
Sorry Dvorak, no bubble here yet.
read more at Ajaxian
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| Ext 1.1 Released |
[02 Aug 2007|03:03pm] |
12:00 02.08.2007
Ext 1.1 Released
Ext JS is the Ajax community’s answer to, “Yes, but does it look wicked cool?” Several folks pointed us to yesterday’s release of Ext 1.1:
The Ext team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Ext v1.1 for download. The 1.1 version includes the new stand-alone version of Ext, a lightweight HTML editor, a new Ext.Ajax utility class, enhancements to DateField and DatePicker, expanded documentation and bug fixes.
We have mixed feelings about the new stand-alone flavor of Ext. It’s great that you can get a tight little optimized package if all you’re after is a little Ajax helpy whelpy and some eye-candy, but does the world really need another XHR wrapper API?
[Ext.JS includes a] new flexible API for making Ajax requests with Ext. Ext.Ajax provides features such as global headers and parameters, cross library file uploads and most importantly, global Ajax events. These events are very powerful and could be used to queue and combine Ajax requests into a single call, cancel requests, provide data locally, add parameters, etc.
Still, kudos to Jack et al. for a solid update to a fantastic toolkit.
read more at Ajaxian
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