A Web Developer’s Responsibility
The vast majority of web developers have never filed a bug report with a browser vendor - or even used a nightly version of a browser - which is a shame. If you think about it there are few who are more qualified to assess what is going wrong in a browser than those who spend every day developing for them.
I’m especially surprised when I see professional developers not filing bugs with browsers, or testing on nightlies. Since one of the primary tasks of most developers is to paper over cross-browser issues it becomes in their best interest to see the number of bugs reduced (and making their job dramatically simpler).
An excellent resource for every web developer who cares about having a healthy web and making his own job a little easier.
Joel Spolsky on Office Space
Building great office space for software developers serves two purposes: increased productivity, and increased recruiting pull. Private offices with doors that close prevent programmers from interruptions allowing them to concentrate on code without being forced to stop and listen to every interesting conversation in the room. And the nice offices wow our job candidates, making it easier for us to attract, hire, and retain the great developers we need to make software profitably. It’s worth it, especially in a world where so many software jobs provide only the most rudimentary and depressing cubicle farms.
Amen.
jQuery 1.3 beta 1
The next minor version of jQuery is ready for testing.
Google Blog Search Loses its Bearings
Scott Rosenberg on the state of Google’s Blog Search:
The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read. So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard. This completely messes up the utility of Google’s search for me — and, from what I see posted by other serious bloggers, many other users.
Yup. That pretty much sums up how I feel about it too.
Objective-J and Leaky Abstractions
Excellent article by Objective-J author Francisco Tolmasky in response to John Resig’s original article on JavaScript language abstractions. Although I’m a huge fan of Resig’s work and generally believe him to be right on with his evaluation of things, I tend to side with Tolmasky on this one.
In case you have been living under a rock and haven’t yet heard of Objective-J or the Cappuccino framework, check out the first real world demo, 280 slides.
Eric Meyer on CSS3
An interview with CSS master Eric Meyer on the upcoming (we hope) CSS3. For those of you who may not be following its progression, you may be interested to know that CSS3 is not one great big spec, as was its predecessor CSS2.
It really means there is no such thing as “CSS3″ the way there was a CSS2. There’s no great big monolithic specification called CSS3. There’s just a bunch of parallel efforts, some of which move more quickly than others.
These parallel efforts have been classified as “modules”, each of which progresses on a separate timeline. What this basically means is that the selectors module may reach official Recommendation status sooner than the multi-column module, for example.
Ultimately, this should make it easier for browser vendors who are anxious to adopt CSS3 but may be intimidated by the enormity of the task by breaking it up into more manageable pieces. However, Meyer believes that it has caused a bit of lag in module development time.
My real point is that because of how things have gone, it’s hard to measure CSS3 adoption against what came before. I do think the split caused an overall slowdown in the development of the specifications. No way to prove that, of course, but that’s the feeling I get.
Eric also discusses the effect that CSS has had on some of the major JavaScript frameworks (in particular jQuery) and how developers like you and I can get help to promote the CSS3 effort. A great read for anyone interested in the future of CSS.
What have you tried?
A thoughtful post by Matt Gemmell that should be required reading for any software programmer.
The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go. This is not problem solving, and software engineering is entirely about problem solving.
Well said Matt.
No Mob Veto
Glad to see groups like this one standing up for religious freedom from persecution and violence.
Shadowbox 2.0 Final Release
I’m pleased to report that it seems the release candidate was a success, so I’m announcing the final release of Shadowbox version 2.0. I’ve put a lot of work into it, and I hope you enjoy it.
Some changes from version 1.0 include (but are not limited to) the following:
- More stable communication between adapters for all frameworks
- Smoother and more consistent animation
- Improved support for Internet Explorer 7
- More modular code design and custom build form
- Improved i18n support
- Much improved skinning API
Really, the list could get quite long here. The truth is that it’s late, I’m tired, and unfortunately, I don’t really keep a nice, neat change log of every change that I make to the code. So I apologize to those of you who find them useful. Perhaps I’ll take that up in the future. In reality, I made hundreds of little tweaks and performance enhancements, so the list would be very long a boring anyways. Just trust me when I say that version 2 is much better than 1 ever was.
Many thanks to Wizzud (in the forums) whose help has been invaluable in squashing numerous bugs and who has generously donated hours of time to help stem the onslaught of support requests.
As always, please post any questions you may have in the forum. Enjoy!
Shadowbox 2.0 RC1
Don’t worry. I’m not dead…yet. It has been a crazy couple of months since I released the first version of Shadowbox. If you’re wondering what I’ve been up to, here’s a short list:
- Graduated college
- Took a week-long vacation to Hawai’i
- Ate way too many Mauna Loa’s
- Moved
- Started a new job
I’m pretty sure that at least 3 of the above qualify as major life-altering events, so please excuse me for not having released a major update to Shadowbox in the past few months. I’m back now.
I’ve also been prowling the web to find out how people are using Shadowbox and where it comes short. The biggest problems that I’ve been hearing (and that I’ve tried to address with this release) are the following:
- Support for i18n
- More consistent animation support across libraries (particularly MooTools)
- Better theme/skin support
- Better documentation
- Support for slideshows (on an automatic timer)
- Standalone version without need for an external JavaScript library
- More modular code (file size)
I’m proud to announce that I believe I’ve solved every one of the above issues with this release, as well as squashed a number of minor bugs.
This is just a release candidate, in case I’ve missed something obvious. Please check it out and let me know what you think.
Copyright © 2007-2008 Michael Jackson