Software As She’s Developed

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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Man, JSON has come out of nowhere! I first came across it amid the Javascript hype in early '05, now it's everywhere. Not only in your Ajax apps, but in the On-Demand Javascript APIs of the world. Sharing an ethic of simplicity with Rails, it's not surprising these technologies have come closely together, with JSON support [...]

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