Mike Smullin
Personal Blog
CSSVista
22111 days
by
in Development
CSSVista is a free Windows application for web developers which lets you edit your CSS code live in both Internet Explorer and Firefox simultaneously. If you like this, you may be interested in their browser compatibility service, SiteVista. Yes, that’s why this software is free!
I have personally fallen in love with this application. I can’t imagine how I ever wrote CSS without it. Dreamweaver is no match, and neither is the Firefox inline CSS editor that comes with the Web Developer plugin. This has saved me literally hours of work and I highly recommend it if you are a cool web developer like me.
You can download it here.
Also for those who don’t know…
Spiffy Corners
12128 days
by
in Development
Over 2000 people dugg Spiffy Corners.
What is it? A pure-CSS alternative to Nifty Corners by Greg Johnson.
I found it on WaSP, as Ian Lloyd was lamenting its redundancy and non-standards markup.
What’s wrong with what we have? Nothing. Except like Greg, when I found Nifty Corners, I too was dismayed at yet another js include for something as trivial as rounded corner effects.
Spiffy Corners is a step closer toward optimizing the process, but…
Whats with Web 2.0?
02145 days
by
in Learning
In case you haven’t heard, “Web 2.0″ is a concept primarily advocated by O’Reilly Media during their periodic Web 2.0 Conference in downtown San Francisco.
Tim O’Reilly officially defines it as, “design patterns and business models for the next generation of software.”
To illustrate, Markus Angermeier was kind enough to design a visual mindmap summing up the memes of Web 2.0. There are even some example sites and services listed. Check it out!
Real-world examples? Don’t tell me you haven’t seen:
- clouding/tagging (folksonomy; like Flickr, TagCloud, Technorati, Eurekster),
- RSS/Atom/OPML (syndication; like Bloglines, FeedBurner)
- XML/XHTML/CSS (web standards; like CSS Zen Garden)
- commenting/trackback/voting (participation; like Digg, Newsvine, Yahoo! My Web)
And that is just the beginning! Most likely you have seen and love all these sites but had no idea how it related to Web 2.0.
It is up to us as web developers to break out of our functional fixedness and find practical ways to apply these concepts in our own projects, possibly even in ways that haven’t been thought of before. People just can’t get enough!
Backbase AJAX Library
162147 days
by
in Development
Introducing Backbase, a 3-year-old company that develops and sells great AJAX applications. Like 37Signals, they too have released a Community Edition of their framework. Beyond great asynchronous capability, they’ve got some pretty sweet objects demonstrated by their drag-and-drop shop, directory explorer, RSS reader, office locator, and more.
For those of you who have seen the script.aculo.us drag-and-drop shopping cart example, this one is much more complete.
UPDATE: This is not an open-source solution as indicated by digg.com. Sucks for them!
Amazing JavaScript Libraries
22151 days
by
in Learning
It has been a year since Jesse James Garret first coined the term AJAX and based on his observations of Google‘s Gmail, Maps, Suggest, etc. and it’s now officially annoying to use web apps that haven’t replaced clunky html functionality with peppy AJAX goodness.
If you aren’t using it, maybe it would help to know that there are now open-source JavaScript libraries available for download. Prototype seems to be the most popular but there’s also Dojo, Advanced AJAX, and SAJAX.
Assuming you’ve already seen some great AJAX in action, check out this excellent introduction to the prototype.js library and a round-up of 30 AJAX tutorials.
On top of all that, since 37Signals released Basecamp, along with an open-source version of their visual effects javascript libraries (now script.aculo.us) which made Ruby popular (now Ruby w/ Rails), a few more combinations have appeared: moo.fx, Rico, ThinkCap JX, and Backbase which are all pretty cool and mostly depend on the latest version of Prototype.
Some people think the combination of AJAX and JavaScript effects are so cool they will replace the need for Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash but I disagree. You have to know how to use AJAX appropriately.
Want more? Check out this comprehensive JavaScript Library Roundup.