As you may have noticed, Ive been writing alot about Javascript recently. Mostly, because I’ve been reading alot about javascript recently. I’m working on a project that involves my first real brushes with AJAX, besides the word itself being thrown around all willy nilly. Everything is being built from scratch with ASP.Net 1.1, no anthem.net, no atlas. Just Michael Schwarz’s Ajax.Net Pro.

The whole thing really is pretty sharp. I’m not going to give a tutorial of how to work it, though I cannot recommend the documentation on michael schwarz’s page…pick up pragmatic ajax.

This commentary is more about designing ajax applications than how to build them. More than anything, the whole “stay within the page” model, and using div overlays as dialog boxes in a “modal window” fashion.

Overall, I dont like it.
I like inline editing, and so far in this app, we havent had any of it. TONS of places it could be used, but the application IA didnt call for it. Everything was placed in div-overlay dialog boxes. And since the content varies, the we need more and more methods to create a custom dialog box for each modal window.

Generally speaking, if there is any kind of delay on the callback, the dialog box gets munged. If you click on the trigger to launch it more than once, the effects could be disasterous on the page. Too much mouse input is required. Its an abuse of an application window model in a web-based application, and it just doesnt work for me.

I’m looking forward greatly for the sunset meeting on this project. It was the first AJAX project design for the IA, and the first AJAX app for me and the other developer. LOTS of learning for all of us…what works, what doesnt, and what do do for the future. Our next app is going to be incredible, so long as our sunset meeting is productive.

Some good reads:

AJAX wireframing (PDF Warning)

Matthew Miller’s Blog about ‘Too Much Ajax’

As was pointed out to me today, the comment form on the previous theme was broken in firefox…and since I’m a bit on the busy side to be digging through someone ELSE’s ajax calls, I’ve decided to temporarily revert to the stripes theme.

If you’ve tried to comment recently, please accept my apologies.

Maybe I’ll just upgrade to the new wordpress and see what happens.

Ok, so it wasnt intentional, but at least I felt like i was getting a new toy on WWDC day 1. Do I want a Quad Xeon 64 bit mac pro? Not really. But i want a developer copy of Leopard SO bad. Time machine, now that’s the shit.

I now have 2x 512mb OEM apple memory chips for any new intel-driven mac(mini, imac, macbook, macbook pro) for sale.

I recently pseudo-raved about the javascript capabilities of Aptana. I quickly turned and realized…while the concept is awesome, the execution only goes halfway…mostly thanks to the crap-tastic performance of a java-based IDE.

Well, this morning, i discovered one more reason why I’ll quietly wish that I could do all of my development, not just the stuff i do at home on the side, on my mac. I was catching up on Thomas Furch’s blog, and noticed that he made a post about a bundle for textmate that gave it support for prototype AND scriptaculous. It even does inline wiki searches, so you can pull up docs on the functions you want to use from script.aculo.us, using Ctrl+Shift+H. hot.

I’ve already admitted, at least twice, that one of the primary reasons for switching to mac was textmate for web development. Obvoiusly, I’m a happy camper all the way around with my mac experience but its things like this that make me breathe a sigh of relief. Why arent PC application developers doing anything to make my life easier? Why do I spend all day fighting with Visual Studio 2003? Why do I wait for acrobat to crash my browser? Because I’m used to it. Maybe my mac experience isn’t that great, it’s just better than my crappy pc interactions.

I’m gonna shut myself off before i turn into another mac fanboy. But definately check out the budle, and textmate if you somehow havent yet. Features abound in the screenshot below!

Im admittedly almost a week behind in watching diggnation, however, last week Alex mentioned his love for a “magic bullet” that a viewer sent him.

I just wanted to state publicly, that I totally understand.

First off, for clarification, the “magic bullet” in question is NOT the one that can be found in sex shops all over America. At least, mine isn’t. And since Alex talked about making margaritas in his, I’ll assume the same for him. The magic bullet i’m talking about is a wonderful blending system found on late night TV infomercials. It’s because of this product and my inability to resist impulse buys that my girlfriend has banned me from watching infomercials any more. Nearly a year ago, i was watching late night/early morning TV, saw the infomercial for this product, and couldnt resist the BUY ONE GET ONE FREE deal they had. So for nearly $100, i ordered not one, but TWO of these systems. They were delivered to my work, where I proceeded to take one home and use it about a dozen times before it found a comfortable spot in my cabinets. The other one was left at my old place of employment with a friend/co-worker, and it’s whereabouts are still unknown to me.

So, Alex, let me know if you come up with anything inventive to make in your bullet. So far my favorites are omelettes. Mixed drinks don’t work as well as advertised, unless you get the ice/liquid ratio JUST right. And, in reality, I think thats the big reason I bought the whole shebang in the first place.

Nate Kohari wrote a great bit about the things that management often forgets to do/not do when handling their software development team.

All I’ll say is it’s a worthwhile read whether you are a geek or a manager.

I’ll also echo his disclaimer that this isnt aimed towards my current employer, or towards a single person or manager. Just something I found that I was sympathetic towards, thats all.

since youtube’s blown up, and a handful of other similar sites have followed in its footsteps, I’ve noticed a trend in embedded movie files on a large number of websites moving away from wmv and mov embeds, and instead using the flash .flv embeds, like youtube provides.

advantages?

• no special codecs needed. just flash, which is easier to handle, and more compatable than wmv and quicktime. No flipformac plugin is needed on macs. quicktime doesnt crash the browser.
• easier video loading: i find myself waiting for wmv preload all the time. “buffering: xx%” seems to constantly crop up, often for no obvious reason, and when you’d expect the number to get closer to 100% it goes back down. i dont know of anything more annoying. With flash preloading, a simple status bar shows the progress of the preload in relation to the playback cursor. simple. beautiful. perfect

disadvantages

• saving files to your local machine. sure, there are firefox workarounds for this, but thats a bit of a pain in the neck. and then you need an FLV player/transcoder. all around, annoying. I guess, depending on who you are, this could be viewed as an advantage (mpaa, etc).

\

• it is flash. I think some players (like myspace) require newer versions of flash than are supported on some non-windows platform (like flash9 beta supposedly crashes macs, so i have been hesitant to upgrade).

So I maintain that my personal preference is flash based video playback. I’m lucky enough to get to play with some of that technology for a project at work in upcoming months, and will be reporting back my learnings as they come.