Arash Yalpani has released Amberjack, a tiny and Open Source/GPLed JavaScript library you can use to create nice looking tours for a web site.
There is a tour wizard to make it simple to create your own tours, and a JSON technique is used to post-fetch skins.
Checkout a sample tour to see it in action.
David Kushner has writen a piece on Blake Ross, and his new product Parakey that is:
a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, he’s building Parakey around a for-profit business model. And he’s leading the charge with a simple battle cry: “One interface, not two!”
We saw many Web OS attempts in the first bubble, but has the landscape changed enough to enable this vision in 2007?
Parakey comes with a new language to build apps upon it:
Ross wants independent developers to create a variety of applications for Parakey. To that end, he and Hewitt have created a programming language for Parakey that they call JUL, a mashed-up acronym that stands for “Just another User interface Language.”
JUL is specially designed for the online world in which Parakey applications will reside. JUL applications are themselves comprised of other applications that come in all shapes and sizes. The interface for Mrs. Anderson’s recipe application, for instance, might include much smaller ones such as a metric-to-English-units converter or photo-goes-here. “You’re not thinking at [the HTML] level anymore,” Ross says. “You’re thinking one level up. That will make it easier to build desktop applications on the Web.” And despite Ross’s connection to Firefox, Parakey will work with any browser.
JUL applications also notice Web events that take place when someone is reading a Parakey page—an update to a sports score, for example, or a new blog entry—and instantly update the page accordingly. Users of these applications don’t have to request these updates, and neither do the JUL developers who wrote them. They simply include “formulas” behind the scenes that reference different information sources. If a source changes, JUL automatically reevaluates the formulas—much as a spreadsheet does.
Hopefully JUL allows us to take our HTML/CSS/JS/Ajax skills and apply them (else it is DOA).
We requirement more moving 3D objects in our applications. Well, of instruction we do not, but this grounds of concept is engrossing to see.
The demonstrate renders capricious triangles using clean JS/DOM/CSS (no ingest of sheet and co. here).
Brendan Eich showed soured whatever rattling pleasant sheet demos at the exhibit terminal week, including DOOM streaming at a beatific instance via Canvas, with promises of field pace improvements to come.
Over at Etre.com they did whatever psychotherapy on the effect of the IE7 promulgation and whether “the scheme was primed for it”.
On weekday 20th Oct - meet digit life after IE7 was free - we kicked soured a brief interior study. We fired up digit machines and compared the homepages of every digit cardinal FTSE 100 companies in both IE6 and IE7. Were these companies primed for IE7? Were their sites unerect seriously discover of shape? Or has this every been a bounteous perturbation over nothing? (Y2K fault anybody?)
Results
Thirteen of the FTSE 100 homepages that we proven were busted in IE7 - though not significantly so. Problems ranged from warped tender layouts (Alliance and Leicester) to diminutive show glitches (Hanson).
It’s worth pointing discover still that the generalized demand of support to scheme standards amongst the FTSE 100 companies haw hit insulated them somewhat from IE7’s different bugs and glitches (IE7 tends to effort most with standards-compliant sites - specially those using hacks and filters to attain decorous show in IE6). Given that most sites aren’t standards-compliant however, we conceive our results are pretty representative.
Generalising our findings to the internet as a full - which is confessedly of questionable message and thence should be condemned with a crop of briny - suggests that there are around 12.7 meg websites in requirement of a lowercase attention as a termination of the launching of IE7.
The scary conception is the name of standards. The terminal abstract we poverty is for grouping to meet absent from standards willing behaviour.
Anecdotally, I hit been entertained with how IE 7 has rendered my past projects. There were a whatever parts of whatever organisation on my terminal send that started to impact dead in IE 7, so no hacks were needed.
Widgets, Gadgets, whatever you call them. They are the rage.
Widgipedia is aiming to be a resource for the widget community allowing you to check out a range of widget galleries, tutorials, code libraries and more.
The site also has its share of rich functionality.
