Rich internet application guidelines

Bill Scott lists up nine basic guidelines for designing rich internet applications:

Looks Good Works Well: Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications

Edit-in-Place with Ajax

This is something I've been trying to figure out myself for a project I'm currently working on.

Back on day one we looked at using the Prototype library to take all the hard work out of making a simple Ajax call. While that was fun and all, it didn’t go that far towards implementing something really practical. We dipped our toes in, but haven’t learned to swim yet.

So here is swimming lesson number one. Anyone who’s used Flickr to publish their photos will be familiar with the edit-in-place system used for quickly amending titles and descriptions on photographs. Hovering over an item turns its background yellow to indicate it is editable. A simple click loads the text into an edit box, right there on the page.

24 ways to impress your friends: Edit-in-Place with Ajax

Google Press Center: Zeitgeist

The end of the year is coming near, so for the folks at Google is time to wrap up again: Google Zeitgeist shows what made the Google machines heaten up and what turned you on.

Read more at www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html

7Online.com: Sree's Top Several Reasons to Try Firefox

7Online.com: Sree's Top Several Reasons to Try Firefox:

"You have heard my solution many times before: download the free Google Toolbar at toolbar.google.com and it will automatically kill pop-ups. If you are on a Mac, then you should be using the free Safari browser, which you can get at www.apple.com/safari it eliminates pop-ups, too.

Today, I am recommending a whole alternative to the Internet Explorer (IE) browser. It's called Firefox and is from the Mozilla Foundation, a so-called open-source project that wants to keep the software in production through the technical and financial contributions of people around the world."

Web Browser Standards Support

"This document will summarize the level of support for standard web technologies by popular web browsers. It deals primarily with the Internet Explorer, Firefox/Netscape/Mozilla, and Opera web browsers, with focus on the HTML, CSS and DOM technologies.

Not all of the standards are displayed here. In particular, some technologies that have consistently good or poor support by all major browsers or are seldom used aren't listed. These tables attempt to be as comprehensive as possible."

Web browser standards support

Ten good practices for writing JavaScript in 2005

Bobby van der Sluis:

1. Make sure your JavaScript code is in balance with its environment
2. Create accessible JavaScript
3. Create usable JavaScript
4. Create easy applicable JavaScript
5. Create future-proof JavaScript
6. Know JavaScript's weaknesses, limitations and bugs
7. Often there is more than one good solution
8. Write your own scripts or reuse code from trusted places
9. Optimize your JavaScript code for performance
10. Use tools to optimize your work process

Full read here: Ten good practices for writing JavaScript in 2005

Adobe to acquire Macromedia

Combined Company to Deliver Industry-Defining Technology Platform for Rich, Interactive Content

SAN JOSE, Calif. - April 18, 2005 - Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion.

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Macromedia (Nasdaq: MACR) in an all-stock transaction valued at approximately $3.4 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, which has been approved by both boards of directors, Macromedia stockholders will receive, at a fixed exchange ratio, 0.69 shares of Adobe common stock for every share of Macromedia common stock in a tax-free exchange. Based on Adobe's and Macromedia's closing prices on Friday April 15, 2005, this represents a price of $41.86 per share of Macromedia common stock.

Adobe.com: Adobe and Macromedia
Macromedia.com: Adobe to aquire Macromedia
SitePoint Blogs: Adobe acquires Macromedia

UPDATE:
More links and info about the Adobe Macromedia acquisition can be found here:
eWeek - Adobe to Buy Macromedia for $3.4 Billion
PC World - Adobe Unveils Plan to Buy Macromedia - Combined company's media software may go head-to-head with Microsoft.
Mezzoblue - Macrodobia
webgraphics - Adobe buys Macromedia

April Fools Overview

Traditional media seems to be a little reluctant this year to come up with real fun stuff.  But in the wide world of the Internet, there are really some good jokes.  An overview of what I've found:

• Google Buys Mozilla Foundation on MozillaNews, even with a Google press release and Google Firefox mock-up.  Nice one.
• Cash-out on Digital Web Magazine where the guys announce they sold to Yahoo: Change
• Gmail "Infinity+1": And the counter keeps running.  I'll guess they just stop at 2GB (see below)
• Mozilla April Fool's Day Roundup with a number of jokes appearing across the Web

Other amazing news that were no jokes (although they could have been):

• Gmail doubles storage to 2GB: It is true!, at the time of writing, my storage space has 'grown' from 1232MB to 1272MB already
• Pope is in a coma: he's not, he's already dead (sorry, couldn't stop myself)
  

Gecko 1.8, Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1 Release Plans

Asa Dotzler has posted a newsgroup message about the plans for the 1.8 release. As official Mozilla Application Suite development has ceased, the forthcoming Mozilla 1.8 Beta 2 release will be delivered as a set of alpha builds of Mozilla Firefox 1.1 and Mozilla Thunderbird 1.1. In preparation for the release of the alphas, the trunk will freeze at the midnight between Tuesday 5th April and Wednesday 6th April Pacific Daylight Time. During the freeze, only checkins approved by drivers@mozilla.org will be allowed to land. After the alphas come out, the tree will remain frozen until the Gecko 1.8 branch is created, which is likely to be in couple of months time. Broadly feature-complete betas of Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 will be released from the trunk in mid-May. A localisation freeze will come in to effect at this point, meaning that changes to strings used in the Firefox and Thunderbird user interfaces will not be allowed (this will let translators get an early start on localising the 1.1 versions). The final Firefox 1.1 and Thunderbird 1.1 releases will come from the 1.8 branch.

[Via mozillaZine]

Gervase Markham: Greasemonkey

It's good to see Greasemonkey getting some press. It's a fantastic idea. I demoed something similar, although not as capable, at EuroFoo in August last year. I called it "refacing" - a way of changing the face of particular sites to suite yourself. My simple example was defacing the SCO website so that all the references read "SCOundrels". (Amusingly, the current Word of The Day on the front of www.sco.com is "Longevity". Presumably they are referring to Linux rather than their own business.) But I never had time to take it forward and it languishes still on my laptop. I'm glad someone is making this happen :-)

You don't actually need an extension to do something like Greasemonkey - you could do it all from a bookmarklet with appropriate server-side support. The bookmarklet injects a script which adds a DHTML popup to the page which gives a menu of available scripts. Of course, an extension gives much better UI, and is probably the correct solution for the long term.

However, the key problem with running scripts written by others in your session context for a website is security. There's no real way to control a malicious user script once it's running. Audit is your only line of defence. Be careful out there, kids.

[Via mozillaZine feedHouse]