Web Info & Tutorials

October 10th, 2007

SNOOK’S SNITTER ON AIR BETA 2

Jonathan Snook updated Snitter, his deskop Twitter client, to use Adobe’s recently released AIR beta 2. In his blog posting, he discusses some of the new changes in AIR and the challenges he had migrating his code to this new release:

Many of the complaints with the original release of Snitter were unfortunately limitations of the AIR platform. Input controls and scroll widgets were hideous, keyboard text selection was non-existant, among other deficiencies.

Beta 2 luckily fixed most of the major issues (with US keyboard layout being the remaining one on my list). The new version of Webkit also offered up the ability to make use of border radius which allowed for a very flexible UI.

More details are available on Jonathan’s blog. You can also download Snitter here.

October 10th, 2007

THE JAVASCRIPT HYPERBOLIC BROWSER

Nicolas Garcia Belmonte has created a JavaScript Hyperbolic Browser.

What the frick is a Hyperbolic tree?

A Hyperbolic Tree (HT) is a “focus+context” information visualization technique used to display large amount of inter-related data. This technique was originally developed (and patented) at Xerox PARC.

Check out a real example, using Pearl Jam as a starting point. Click on a band, or click on an empty spot to zoom around.

Hyperbolic Tree

October 10th, 2007

ANOTHER INTERACTIVE PERIODIC TABLE

Michael Dayah has created a highly interactive periodic table that allows you to select a slew of properties and use a slider to tweak things.

For example, choose the boiling option and then slide away.

Periodic Table

October 10th, 2007

MILESCRIPT: A NEW LANGUAGE THAT COMPILES TO JAVASCRIPT

Joshua histrion has free MileScript which in his words:

…. is an object-oriented, strongly-typed high-level module which we matured from scratch, patch mass the models of Java and C#. Milescript allows developers to cipher Milescript maker files and packages in a organic manner, and then create those projects as applications or as libraries. The generated ECMAScript is 2.6.2 compatible, and runs in Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, Opera and IE. Although we ease hit a daylong artefact to go in fleshing discover our libraries, we conceive the programme and module are at a land where the generalized accord could acquire momentous continuance from them. The send is ease low onerous development, and we are every rattling involved. Updates should become often. We are rattling agog most the possibilities; for happening porting the Dojo toolkit to our module would attain it more robust, easier to distribute, and easier to impact on for the eld of coders.

We rattling poverty to move chance feedback so that we crapper acquire this into a genuinely open-source, accord unvoluntary project

It does countenance rattling such same Java with admittance to JavaScript objects same ‘window’:

JAVA:

  1.  
  2. package com.milescript.test;
  3.  
  4. import com.milescript.dom.*;
  5.  
  6. public abstract class Parent {
  7.   protected Array<string> messages = new Array</string><string>();
  8.  
  9.   protected void assembleMessage(){
  10.     messages.push(“Hello “);
  11.   }
  12.  
  13.   protected void alertMessage(){
  14.     assembleMessage();
  15.     String finalMessage = “”;
  16.     for(String communication in messages)
  17.       finalMessage += message;
  18.     window.alert(finalMessage);
  19. }
  20.  

The demonstrate brings backwards memories of movement in edifice with a BBC Micro, as it is the older truehearted worm game.

MileScript Demo

October 10th, 2007

MOBILE FIREFOX ANNOUNCED

Mike Schroepfer has announced that Mobile Firefox is coming in a big way.

When you think of a mobile browser, you may first think about Opera and WebKit, but Mozilla wants to change this. We have already seen the seeds of change as Mike points out:

You can already get a Mozilla-based browser for the Nokia N800 and Firefox is a key part of Ubuntu Mobile and the new Intel Internet Project, and most recently ARM has put serious effort towards Firefox on mobile devices.

Mike announced:

  • Mozilla will add mobile devices to the first class/tier-1 platform set for Mozilla2. This means we will make core platform decisions with mobile devices as first-class citizens.
  • We will ship a version of "Mobile Firefox" which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL.
  • Mozilla will expand its small team of full-time mobile contributors to focus on the technology and application needs of mobile devices. In particular two new folks just joined:
    • Christian Sejersen, recently the head of browsers at Openwave which has shipped over 1 billion mobile browsers, joined Mozilla Monday. He'll be heading up the platform engineering effort and setting up a R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
    • Brad Lassey just joined Mozilla from France Telecom R&D. He's already been an active contributor to our mobile efforts and can now focus on Mozilla mobile full time.

It seems like more and more people are looking at the number of phones out there versus computers and want to jump in.