Software As She’s Developed

Z-index is the CSS property governing how high in the stack an element is, if you visualise the elements as appearing in a 3D stack coming out of the page. The actual value of an element’s z-index doesn’t matter; just its value relative to other elements on the page. Elements with higher z-indexes appear on [...]

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I’m here at Google’s London office, where they’re streaming the IO keynote. Eric Schmidt talks about Ajax, always-on, simplicity, and how it’s improved life. Vic Gundotra’s on. We spent too long not fully using XML, CSS, etc., i.e mid-late ’90s they were there, but really started using them to the max around ~2005. Let’s not wait so [...]

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On URL Shorteners URL shorteners are enjoying their 15 minutes of fame right now. They’ve been around since 2002, but became flavour of the month as soon as half of the planet decided to compress their messages into pithy 140-character microblogs, and there is money it, driving a massive amount of new players into the market, [...]

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Why a Chameleon File? While most browsers support SVG, IE's unique brand of interopability does not extend that far; even the latest and greatest, incarnation v. 8 of IE, has no sign of SVG. And so, we citizens of the innernets are left with two vector graphics formats: VML for IE, SVG for standards-compliant browsers, which [...]

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I've just presented TiddlyGuv at the FOSSBazaar workshop, the event I wrote about yesterday. It's a good time to introduce TiddlyGuv - I've mentioned it in some talks and tweeted about it on occasion, but this is its maiden appearance on Software As She's Developed. TiddlyGuv (that's a code name we'll use for a while) is [...]

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Regular readers of this blog will know I am a big fan of Javascript on the server. Through its Jaxer project, Aptana has been at the forefront of the server-side Javascript renaissance. As I'm in SF right now (mail or tweet me if you'd like to meet up), I was pleased today to be able [...]

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Since we're planning to use TiddlyDocs internally, we're in need of some high-level documentation for TiddlyDocs in order to have it approved for certain uses. My starting point was to locate, solicit, or produce documentation for TiddlyWiki and TiddlyWeb, the technologies on which TiddlyDocs is based. For TiddlyWiki, useful sources are: Position Paper [...]

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I recently attended Rewired State with several fellow Osmosofties. Our group (Simon, Fred, Jeremy, Robbie and myself) developed a little mashup called Moving There (and a couple of other things not described here). After the demos, our mashup was mentioned by a representative from DirectGov as one of several projects they'd like to work with, perhaps [...]

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I've been creating a drawing plugin for TiddlyWiki (SVN trunk). It delegates the actual drawing editing to Project Draw (docs; demo), a browser-based drawing editor from Autodesk Labs. Here's a screencast: TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw from Michael Mahemoff on Vimeo. Autodesk Labs' Project Draw editor looks like this: ... and the tool has a nice set [...]

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I was recently invited to make a statement on WebMasterWorld about something in advanced Javascript at the edge of my understanding. I decided to cover fragment identifiers, something I have an odd obsession about: There's a lot of cool stuff going on right now, standards-based graphics and sound foremost in my mind. But I'll focus here [...]

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