TAE Keynote: Ajax Through the Looking Glass [31 Dec 2007|10:41pm] 10:16 31.12.2007 TAE Keynote: Ajax Through the Looking Glass Kevin Survance, CTO of MapQuest, gave a keynote speech at the last Ajax Experience show. Kevin came to the company and basically transformed the entire team to create the new MapQuest beta. MapQuest uses Ajax on a massive scale and also provides commercial Ajax APIs. In this keynote, Kevin shares lessons learned from recent MapQuest development projects and offers insight into opportunities for developers to profit from current industry and social trends. Watch video of the keynote. read more at Ajaxian rss2lj post comment

Untold JavaScript Secrets [31 Dec 2007|10:41pm] 12:08 31.12.2007 Untold JavaScript Secrets John Resig has some JavaScript secrets that he wishes to tell in a new book, and wants your help in getting more. Some on the tip of his tongue are: What is (function(){ })() and why is it so fundamentally important to modern JavaScript development? What does with(){...} do and why is it so useful? How can arguments.callee change how I work with JavaScript code? How exactly do timers work and how can I best use them? How do I identify and tackle memory leaks in web applications? How do I write a cross browser way of… Getting/setting attributes. Injecting HTML strings. Getting/setting computed css values. Managing DOM events. Writing a CSS selector engine. Doing smooth animations. How can I use verification tools (like JSLint) to my advantage - and write my own? What’s the best way to transmit JavaScript files? How do I write my own JavaScript compressor (like Packer)? This looks like good stuff. I am sure the likes of Dean Edwards, Neil Mix, Kris Zyp, Alex Russell, and many others have interesting things to add. A book that I would love to see is the equivalent of the Eric CSS books for Ajax. Take some real apps and build them in a book. Quality case studies that teach you a lot, in a nice glossy set of copy that makes you smile. What would you like to see? Maybe the entire piece could be made collaboratively :) read more at Ajaxian rss2lj post comment

Fluid puts hat in the “Site Specific Browser” ring [31 Dec 2007|10:41pm] 13:10 31.12.2007 Fluid puts hat in the “Site Specific Browser” ring Todd Ditchendorf has released Fluid, a Site Specific Browser that allows you to ditch the 30 tabbed browser, and run web applications in the own world (icon etc): Fluid 0.4 includes Dock badges and Dock menus for Gmail, Google Reader, and Yahoo! Mail, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB installation paths, and custom SSB icons. And, how cool is this… a Flickr group for shared Fluid SSB icons! How does it work? Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you’d like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Provide an application name, click ‘Create’ and you’ll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you’ve just created. What makes Fluid different from Prism? Fluid is very similar in nature to Prism, but is based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. And SSBs created by Fluid are true, native Cocoa OS X applications offering seamless integration into the Mac OS. read more at Ajaxian rss2lj post comment

Matt Webb on the Web 2007 Wrapup on the Web [31 Dec 2007|10:41pm] 13:30 31.12.2007 Matt Webb on the Web 2007 Wrapup on the Web Ah the end of the year, the time to write top ten lists and predictions. I am not going to go this here. We do that enough in our State of Ajax talks. What I will do though, is the digital version of something I dislike. As an experiment, I used a “highlighter” on Matt Webb’s piece on wrapping up 2007, which is a fantastic (and long) flow of consciousness that manages to say everything and nothing. Here are the yellow bits as I saw them: So what does phenotropics mean for the Web? Firstly it means that our browsers should become pattern recognition machines. They should look at the structure of every page they render, and develop artificial proteins to bind to common features. While browsers look for patterns inside pages, search engines would look for inter-page, structural features … I have a feeling that refactoring code is not a good thing. I am not in favour of deleting code. If there are problems with code the way it is written, there should be mechanisms to code over it gradually, and leave the old code there. A codebase should be its own source repository: seeing what the code was like a year ago shouldn’t be a check-out from source control, but archeology. … What the Magna Carta did - or rather, what the process that the Magna Carta was part of did - was turn the king into a thing. The thing-king is the king revealed. The important feature of the document isn’t the constraints put on the king, but rather the fact that it is possible to bind to the king at all. This means we’ll have metamarkets, in the end. Mini free markets captured and tuned to perform particular tasks, inside a society we can’t currently grasp, just as China held Hong Kong in a bubble to propel it into orbit, and the Large Hadron Collider intends to create new zones of particular kinds of physics in order to perform scientific experiments. … I want to think about social software in reverse. Can we take activities that are already group-based and irreducibly social in the real world, and make software that is good for them? Perhaps the login system could be based around questions: ‘what is a name of a blonde person in your group?’ … To generalise Flickr’s attributes, successful interactive systems will bend users back towards them, whether by play or not. … The cleverness of Getting Things Done is to wrap this finite-state machine in another finite-state machine which instead of running on the tasks, runs on the human operator itself, … Websites can also be seen as finite-state machines that run on people. Instead of a finite-state machine, think of a website as a flowchart of motivations. … Imagine popularising a method like Getting Things Done crossed with the creation and value of the diamond industry I am looking forward to see what you come up with in oh-eight. read more at Ajaxian rss2lj 1 comment|post comment

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