Software As She’s Developed

Scott Isaacs on a new Start.com feature (quoted on Ajaxian): DHTML-based Gadgets: Start.com consumes DHTML-based components called Gadgets. These Gadgets can be created by any developer, hosted on any site, and consumed into the Start.com experience. The model is completely distributed. You can develop components derived from other components on the web. Remote portlets take […]

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Andrew Sutherland offers a few Ajax Gotchas/Tips. I’ll add some comments. Escape content with encodeURIComponent() which is superior to escape. XMLHttpRequest’s readyState tells you how far the request has progressed. MM: If you’re confused about readyState’s transition from 0 to 4, you have good reason to be. Read the recent posting and comments on David Flanagan’s blog, and […]

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I’ve noticed that I’ve recently habitualised the Yellow Fade Technique, or what the Ajax patterns refer to as One-Second Spotlight. The typical Fade example is a form field. When you change it, the field is suddenly highlighted, then gradually fades back to its original form. This tells the user that “the computer” knows something’s happened, and […]

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Amazon, Yahoo, and Ebay all have E-Commerce APIs, right? The model is “You can create a UI and if it fits a niche better than us, you make money”. It’s one of those odd models where you’re competing and partnering at the same time. Some other examples where this hsa occurred: Phone companies forced by government […]

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First, a quick update on yesterday’s book anouncement: Thanks for your interest. Yes, it will be published as a physical book. In the O’Reilly animal format. And no, I don’t know which animal. Periodic Refresh is a pattern where the page runs a loop to continuously grab fresh data from the server (Ajaxify Time Demo). As that […]

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I’m pleased to announce the in-progress patterns at ajaxpatterns.org will be completed and published as an O’Reilly book: “Ajax Design Patterns”. The accompanying podcast explains the details, here’s a summary: I’ll be completing full-text descriptions for all the listed patterns, give or take some restructuring. ajaxpatterns.org will remain online, with full content - before, during and […]

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I mentioned Protopage yesterday. It’s look-and-feel has so much more appeal than the standard Ajaxian portals (Google Homepage, Backbase, Start, etc.). Considering the others are more powerful functionally - given that you can do stuff like grab RSS feeds and search history - I wondered why I like Protopage so much more. There’s a […]

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Tweaking a Greasemonkey script is easy. It’s just a single file, so you download the file locally, edit it, and install it the same way you’d install any other script. I did this because I needed a quick fix for the super-helpful XMLHttpRequest Debugging script. Sometimes the console has a little trouble with positioning - using […]

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I know. “The Ajax Desktop” sounds like I’m taking things just a bit too far. But I wanted to point out that people are experimenting with things you’d associate more with the web. To wit: Protopage:I was triggered to write this after discovering an awesome new Ajaxian app: Protopage (via FloatingSun). It’s essentially a start page, […]

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The other day, I noted the Ajax Patterns widgets have been broken down into content, form, and page architecture. The patterns for those are now complete. Give me yellow! Yellow is the colour for full-text descriptions, and the bottom of the page is starting to look a nice shade of yellow. There are full summaries for […]

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