Software As She’s Developed

Moz has begun Add-On Collections (via Ajaxian): Today, we’re excited to introduce a new feature to our website that will expose the niche add-ons that can be hard to find, and gives users a more active role in helping outstanding add-ons bubble to the top. One thing we’ve learned as add-ons have grown in popularity over [...]

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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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A Net Applications study (via ReadWriteWeb) says IE’s market share has dropped to 67%: This is an interesting trend. The actual quantity of market share will vary with methodology, but a 7% drop in a year is something to take note of. Moreover, as Readwrite points out, there are two things that will probably make the [...]

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Chrome now has Greasemonkey support. The Chromium patch came from Aaron Boodman, who is at once a Google employee and the brains behind the original Firefox Greasemonkey extension. It makes me wonder if this is the plan for Chrome add-ons. Forget about anything like Firefox’s add-on mechanism and just rely on Greasemonkey. With the right APIs, [...]

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Firefox 3.0 ticker tape parade Today is Firefox 3.0 landing day. Maybe tomorrow as the servers have been down for many hours now. Funny how Twitter is up, but Mozilla is down…it feels like today is the Juneth of 18. Anyway, this is great news as you could wile away a few lazy hours tweeting and [...]

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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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Just mailed Joe Hewitt a couple of suggestions for the bug. Hi Joe, A couple of firebug suggestions. (1) Search On the Ajaxian interview, you mentioned people have trouble locating and knowing about the existence of Search. (Me too.) Redesigning the layout will help, but I’d also suggest retaining the standard alt/control-F shortcut somehow, as I’m sure a lot [...]

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Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category – http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2. Thanks [...]

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I recently explained how I created my first Greasemonkey script as an experiment, then converted it to a standalone Firefox plugin/extension/add-on using an automated tool. Official homepage here. The experiment continues, as I subsequently submitted it to Mozilla, and it’s now been approved as an official plugin. I’ve been curious about the process people go through [...]

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My previous post outlined Domain Teleporter, a first attempt at a GM script. Continuing the experimentation (as I have a comlpetely different real example in mind), I wanted to see how easy it was to create a self-contained FF extension from the GM script … I figure there’s a significant population who have FF and [...]

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