Software As She’s Developed

This article explains iframe-to-iframe communication, when the iframes come from different domains. That you can do this effectively is only now becoming apparent to the community, and is now used in production by Google, Facebook, and others, and has powerful implications for the future of Ajax, mashups, and widgets/gadgets. I’ve been investigating the technique and […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns As foretweeted last week, I created a little Ajax app called BlingText. As you can see, it takes a message and provides some ASCII renderings. In particular, it includes a port of the old UNIX/C Banner utility. If I do more work on it, the main improvements will be: Options. Let the user specify, for […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, OpenSocial, Shindig, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets Background Widgets are small “mini websites”, typically self-contained blocks of content, on a larger web page (with Ajax Design Patterns, I referred to them by the nom du jour Portlets). They are used in a couple of ways: Embedded in a normal web page. For example, my […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Gadgets, Google, Web, Web 2.0, Widgets Background A while back, I walked through a Google Gadget I made called Digg Roundup, which simply shows Digg headlines and can be customised on topic and popularity. In my quest for an uber-simple tutorial, one thing I skipped on was content type, the subject of the present muttering. […]

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Ajax, AjaxPatterns, Favicon, HTML, Javascript, Web, Web 2.0 I updated the favicon library a while ago, for a couple of projects I haven't released for various reasons. Anyway, Phil asked me about it, so I thought it's a good time to package it up and release it properly. And in the process wrote up Taking Browser [...]

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I've just updated my favicon library, which I first wrote about here. I'll explain more about the update in a separate post. For now, I want to talk about browser tabs. Browser tabs were introduced by Opera. Then Firefox adopted them a few years later, as did Safari. Then Microsoft stepped into the '90s with their [...]

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CSS coding style doesn't get a lot of play. Most people are happy to stick with the convention of one property per line, like this: PLAIN TEXTCSS: #score {   background: yellow;   width: 12em;   border: 1px solid orange   padding: 2em;   margin: 3em 0;   display: none; } I, for one, can't stand that style. I'm heavily biased towards information-dense coding [...]

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<gush> Firebug is awesome. Joe Hewitt is a legend. As I've said before, Firebug is among the most usable software tools ever developed. I don't just mean compared to other software development tools. I mean against all user-facing software. It's single-handedly improved my Ajax productivity by at least 100% (that's my estimate when making changes to larger [...]

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So there's this Japanese R&D blog that focuses on covers and spotted an uncanny resemblance. Ajax本が一杯出てきているけど、トウトウこんな本まで登場です。 Ajax Design Patterns http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ajaxdp/index.html Ajax Design Patterns 作者: Michael Mahemoff 出版社/メーカー: Oreilly & Associates Inc 発売日: 2006/07 メディア: ペーパーバック カバー表紙が「バクダッド・カフェ」風味。ちょっと惹かれる。   紀伊国屋、DVD「バクダッド・カフェ 完全版」を4月25日に発売―日本初公開版に、カットシーンを追加した完全版で登場http://www.watch.impress.co.jp/av/docs/20030204/kino.htm 少しは読もうかな？ Bagdad Cafe is an arthouse that was always in the video library but I never watched. The film runs 95 minutes in the [...]

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Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al's Design Patterns and Alexanders' equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as "replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality". First, I want to note that the critique above surely defies belief to anyone who [...]

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