Software As She’s Developed

.... Wherein our protaganist awakes to the power of CSS ... CSS is as important to Ajax as Asynchrony and XMLHttpRequest. Which is to say, it's very useful, even though it's not essential. Due to an accident of the English language, JJG's creative mind, and the propensity of certain terms to rise to buzzdom, it doesn't [...]

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This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: [...]

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Nate's talking about functional specs. How much doco happens on a project is one part opinion and one part "what do you want to optimise for?". I generally find there's a dichotomy in attitude to software documentation. 1. Definitive (aka normative, exhaustive, complete, bureaucratic, rigourous, formal). The ideal here is that everything should be covered in documentation [...]

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I'm all for Web 3.0 gadgetry in the browser, but how about some JS love for those ancient radio controls. It should be easy and portable to: * Get the current value of a radio group, without looping through each radiobutton to find the one that's checked! * Catch onchange events (no luck with IE). Right now, it's [...]

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Props to the Touchstone team for receiving funding, getting a glowing TechCrunch reception and generally heading in a positive direction. Touchstone is an "Attention Management Engine" - it's a combo of Growl, RSS aggregator, and Widget system. The trick is that it tries to be intelligent about what it notifies you, and how it does it. [...]

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I can feel a case of the Wiki Twitch coming on ... Victims of the Wiki Twitch have a perfectionist tendency which causes them to optimise content they come across, for the benefit of others and for reasons of "enlightened selfishness" - the motivation to improve what they will likely read again in the future. Many [...]

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Via the APress mailing list, I just discovered no less than six new Ajax books are coming out, covering Ajax and .Net/ Ajax and Java (by Nate and Ryan, authors of Foundations of Ajax), etc. I was gonna post them here, but I thought I may as well add an Ajax Books page to the [...]

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This is the second in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). The guest for this week is Dave Johnson of Nitobi (the Ajax component developers formerly known as E-Business Applications), widget guru and author of the upcoming Enterprise Ajax book. Dave helps me walk through the patterns and [...]

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Another day, another round of VC. From TechCrunch this week: Online social network Multiply has closed a Series A funding round with $5 million from Transcosmos and $1 million from the company’s founders. Multiply is a service that filters all networking functions, from highlighted users to visible tag clouds, through a proximity filter with a slider. [...]

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And so, a new series begins, based on the Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). We've already looked at the technical details, now we're looking at what Ajax can do for users and how to implement these features. I'm asking guests to join me for most of the remaining Ajax Pattern podcasts. [...]

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