scripty2: for a more delicious web. Scripty appears to be a new version of Scriptaculous that incorporates support for more advanced CSS features and HTML 5. Now in beta, which is available for download. Has good documentation and a few interesting demos.

Atlas - 280 North. The Capuccino project seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. In addition to the amazing presentation app the project published earlier in the year, they have now demoed an equally amazing tool for actually building Capuccino interfaces and wiring up their functionality. From what the demo video shows, Atlas is going to be Interface Builder on steroids! Maybe Apple will even learn a thing or two about the direction they should be going with their developer tools for Cocoa apps. For now, you can sign up to be emailed with progress info about Atlas, which is still in testing.

ccgus's jstalk at GitHub

Here's the latest offshoot of the jsCocoa universe: JSTalk is a scripting language that can be used to easily interact with Cocoa apps. It's what Applescript would be if rewritten today using Cocoa and JavaScript. The download comes with a slew of example scripts and a script editor application.

JSCocoa — A bridge from JavascriptCore to Cocoa

On the heels of learning about Cappuccino, here's a project that lets developers access Cocoa from within JavaScript! Natch, it's open source, with documentation on on a google code site.

FancyBox - fancy image zooming tool

I keep running across cool and useful JavaScripts that emulate Apple's zoom boxes, which it uses for adding detail about products or showing larger versions of thumbnails. This is a new one to me. It doesn't have the nice rounded corners of Apple's but does have some features my other fave lacks.

Speaking of which, the script I've been using lately is FancyZoom... the variant that works with Prototype and jQuery and doesn't pull images in using Ajax. The original version of FancyZoom is also cool, more like Fancy Box.

SproutCore is Apple's Flash, Silverlight-killer - Mac software - Macworld UK Sproutcore is a new Ajax/JavaScript framework being developed as an outgrowth of Apple's new MobileMe product. It's also part of the ongoing rapid development of the iPhone development platform and the WebKit browser engine that forms the basis for Safari. To call it a "Flash killer" is perhaps a bit overstating the case, but judging from the demos on the Sproutcore website, it appears to be on its way to being a robust rival to more mature frameworks such as Ext.js. I've installed Sproutcore and look forward to playing around with it soon.

Apple Developer Connection - iPhone for Web Developers - Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone I now see how Apple plans to make its standard for web "widgets" the de facto industry standard: Through the iPhone! Since widgets are now the only way third-party developers can get applications onto users' iPhones, and since Apple's released Safari for Windows, anyone can develop widgets, Apple-style, and they have an incentive to do so. Certainly, I'll be adding this onto my to-do list, and this document is an excellent starting point for learning how to do so.

Effect.Transfer I really like this effect! It reminds me of ones I'd seen on the terrific TiddlyWiki app as well as the Ajax-y BloxPress blog system for WordPress. It may come as no surprise, in fact, that the effect was developed by the author of BloxPress... as well as numerous other cool web goodies. This effect is intended to augment the collection that comes with Script.aculo.us, and the author provides several useful demos on this page.

Table Sorting with Prototype * Dexagogo This looks like a cool add-on to Prototype.js that enables column-sorting in tabular presentations. There are a slew of great demos for the various techniques you can use. A further add-on to Tablekit gets you column-reordering, but what I really want next is row-reordering. Probably out there already and I haven't seen it yet...

riiv.net» Blog Archive » MindFrame - Demystifying Rich Internet Application I've admired Spry since it first began evolving a year ago, and if you want to deliver data to users through a small XML data file, it's one of the best ways to do it. Now MindFrame is designed to bring those benefits to the growing Prototype.js universe. It also relies on a new open source library called ZParse, which apparently lets you define your own JavaScript parsing language. How cool is that?

Loupe.js This is the greatest little demonstration of the Canvas tag I've seen yet. Really amazing... it degrades for all the suckers who are still using IE, but works fine in the modern browsers that support Canvas: Firefox, Opera, and Safari. With Loupe, you can let users call up a little magnifying glass to take a closer look at a small image on your site. Is this cool, or what? The demos are amazing!

gWidgets I do hope this developer continues with these... the four he's released so far all look quite useful and cover a pretty good range of the absolutely necessary list: Tabs, Expandable text, Tool tips, and Popup windows. All done so they can be mixed and matched together in different ways... a lot of good demos here, too.

script.aculo.us Slider Demos and Example Code Damn! I wish these demos had been available when I was building parts of Mars a year ago. But I could find nothing but the demos on the Script.aculo.us wiki site, which didn't cover things like: Scrollwheel activation, use as a scrollbar... the two things I most needed. Oh well... at least they're here now if I need them again!

ModalBox — An easy way to create popups and wizards Here's a very cool javascript library based on Prototype/Scriptaculous: ModalBox is kind of a Lightbox for longer user messages, like "wizards", and could be used for surveys, for example. I love the statement that "it's inspired by Mac OS X modal dialogs"... of course! Nearly all the whiz-bang Ajax visual candy that's come out in the last 2 years is derived from the Mac OS X interface. Definitely want to try this one out some time!

lightWindow Demo I think my title on this puppy says it all. If not, check out the LightWindow demos! As some readers have noticed, I had earlier hacked Lightbox to enable running videos, but this does so much more. And it's more than a hack as well! Thanks, Kevin!

Ajaxian » Performance test results show strong WebKit outcome Ajaxian posted a nice report on a distributed study of the relative browser performance on Dojo's charting system yesterday, and immediately the naysayers started naysaying. "Safari is a piece of crap. WebKit is so buggy..." and the like. I suppose if WebKit keeps coming up at the top of the heap on these kinds of tests, eventually Safari/WebKit will earn more respect, but probably not until a lot of the bozos who are so critical actually buy themselves a Mac. By the way, the test is strictly speaking a measure of relative performance at rendering SVG code, not overall browser speed or javascript parsing. (Although WebKit excels at those, too.)

Handling Keyboard Shortcuts in JavaScript This looks like it might be just the ticket I'm seeking to help smooth out a wrinkle on Mars. Seems many Mac users are accustomed to reading web pages by hitting the spacebar to move to the next page. This handy shortcut scrolls the page exactly one page length based on the browser window's current size. Only problem is, on Mars the persistent header screws up the calculation of the browser window size, apparently. I've been wanting to intercept that shortcut and make sure it works properly on Mars, and maybe this library will help make short work of that!

EJSChart :: 100% Pure JavaScript Charting Solution Well, I guess this is the day for cool new graphics libraries for Web 2.0 applications! Unfortunately, EJS Charts isn't free or open source, but it does work great in Safari and WebKit, as well as any other modern browser that supports the Canvas tag. At least, I believe it's using Canvas... the library also works in IE 6, which doesn't support Canvas, so it must use some other mechanism for IE. The chart data can reside in XML format, and the library enables dynamic resizing, zooming, and data selection (among other niceties). The only problem I had with the demo on the site's home page is that I had to reload the page in both Safari and WebKit before the chart rendered correctly. EJS Charts is free for personal use, and is so early in its life that documentation and examples are mostly missing for now. But this looks very promising indeed for any application that needs to display charted data on the web!

Prototype Graphic Framework This is very cool... it's too bad the library doesn't fully support canvas, but I gather that'll bring up the rear. For now, it works great in an SVG-enabled browser (as well as whatever it is that Microsoft uses for IE). For Mac users, this means you can't use Safari until Apple updates it in Leopard. For now, if you want to use Safari, you need to install and run the WebKit nightly build. Note: This is the same developer who gaves us the marvelous windowing library for Prototype, which I've used extensively here on Mars.

Zimbra on your Desktop Zimbra is doing this to support use of its Collaboration Server, which I think finally became compatible with Safari. (I need to doublecheck that.) Instead of using your browser, though, with Zimbra Desktop, you'd run Zimbra as a separate app, utilizing this new runtime layer. I'm not sure what I think of this new proliferation of such apps... following on Mozilla, Adobe, Microsoft, and so on, what's to be gained if users have to run multiple such runtimes to get their apps going? Isn't this taking us backwards instead of forwards? Just not sure...

Control.Modal : Unobtrusive CSS Modal Windows and Lightboxes for Prototype These are worth taking a closer look at... I do have solutions in place for such things, but I also would like my code to be more in the "nonobtrusive" mold. These are built for the Prototype Javascript library.

Devthought - Guillermo Rauch’s Blog » CSS+Javascript power. Fancy menu This has been a bumper-crop kinda week for new JavaScript code and ideas. Here's another really kewl implementation of the old "moving highlighter" idea, using mootools. The author does a great job documenting the work, too.

Ajaxian » Cross Browser Keyboard Handler I may be in serious need of starting to capture keystrokes and mouse clicks/scrolls on this site soon... here's one possibility.

Parallax Background with Javascript and CSS Now this is a kewl implementation of Javascript! Talk about thinking outside the box... this is a totally new concept I've never seen before. Of course, it's also a great way to make visitors dizzy, but hey... some people like that, right? I mean, how about web pages as roller coasters or tilt-a-whirls?

OpenLaszlo | the premier open-source platform for rich internet applications OpenLaszlo started out declaring that their framework could be used for both dhtml and Flash, but they started with Flash, and that's what got stuck in developer's brains. They had demoed some dhtml/ajax versions last year, but now they've offically released version 4.0, with full support for Javascript/CSS/HTML/Ajax applications (earlier known as DHTML). The demos on the site have to be seen to be believed! For each demo, there's a Flash and DHTML version, and I think most people will have trouble telling one from the other. I've got to take another serious look at this framework soon!

Dean Edwards: Yet Another JavaScript Library Without Documentation Dean Edwards is one of the, well, Deans, of the Javascript guru world. Obviously a brilliant programmer, he's released what he himself calls "yet another JavaScript library" for reasons that aren't perfectly clear. My impression is that it's Edwards conception of a perfect standards-compliant library, but without documentation and with so many other fine libraries floating around now, I wonder why he didn't devote his talents to one of the existing projects... ? Oh well, hopefully one of them will pick up some of Edwards' ideas, as they have in the past.

DED|Chain JavaScript Library Dustin Diaz has released version 0.1 of a new javascript library, somewhat awkwardly named DED|Chain. He says it's built on the Yahoo! UI Javascript library, but combines some features from jQuery. It also leverages Jack Slocum's awesome CSS query functions. There's only one small demo at the moment, but I'm sure more will emerge with time.

Tobie Langel - A Fistful of $$ As readers of Mars have no doubt noticed, I use an autoscroll function to make navigating to different sections of my somewhat lengthy articles easier and more, well, interesting. Programmer Tobie Langel has published a prototype implementation of auto-scrolling that he feels is superior to the one I'm using, which uses the Script.aculo.us "Effect.ScrollTo" function. Hey, I'm always interesting in learning something new and better... And was a little distressed at how the readers of the post on Ajaxian pounced on Langel, acting as if existing tools had this function all wrapped up, and he was an idiot and troublemaker for suggesting an alternative. Very un-Mars-like, guys. I noticed in a subsequent Ajaxian post that the Prototype guys feel they've cleaned up Prototype's $$ function's speed problems in the latest beta, so maybe it's time to take a closer look at solutions like Langel's. His page of autoscroll demos is here.

Ajaxian » Ext Being developed by this brilliant programmer Jack Slocum, who's starting from using the Yahoo Ajax toolkit, Ext is apparently a framework that will support more than just YUI. In fact, Slocum has already incorporated into Ext (which is still in alpha development) support for both jQuery and Prototype/Script.acul.ous. Amazing! The widgets on display at the Ext docs site are incredibly sweet... I've downloaded the latest alpha build myself and hope to play with it shortly. So far every widget I've tried has worked great in WebKit.

Web Kit DOM: Main Page This site is much deeper than it appears at first... in fact, the home page gives you no indication there's anything much at all. But start clicking the tabs: Namespaces, Classes, and Files, and you'll find yourself wandering through a Doxygen-created maze of documentation that tells you everything you ever wanted to know about how to make WebKit tick. Oddly, I haven't seen an announcement about this on the WebKit blog... of course, this is only version 0.1, so maybe they don't consider it "ready for prime time." But honestly, developers will froth at the mouth to get at info like this.

ColumNav Documentation Wow! This is damn cool! Another reason to take a second look at the YUI toolkit, I'd say. Great demos here, too, including source code. The widget builds a tree-like navigation widget that looks just like column view in the Mac OS X Finder.

YUI Version 2.2.0 Released: Browser History Manager, DataTable, and Button Components, New Versioning, and More » Yahoo! User Interface Blog This is great news... Yahoo has included a component to manage the browser's history that's supposed to work in all "A-grade" browsers, which of course includes Safari/WebKit. The new release also has a new data management tool and more besides.

SEEdit XHTML Editor Covers CSS and Javascript Functions As Well As Website Management

Originally downloaded 4/9/06. Having grown disillusioned with Dreamweaver over the last few years, I haven’t used it in a long while. But I’m also not pleased with using BBEdit “Bare Bones,” either. This looks like a nice upgrade from BBEdit’s built-in HTML/CSS tools and may be just what I’m looking for. It also has link-checking and Javascript coding tools that BBEdit doesn’t have, but it works as a BBEdit plug-in or on its own. At only $30, it’s way more affordable than Dreamweaver and may be a real bargain.

Update 10/14/06. SEEdit is now updated to version 5.0 and redubbed “SEEdit Maxi”.

Update 2/20/07. In a pique of naming confusion, the latest SEEdit Maxi is now referred to SEEdit Maxi 2007 and has no numerical version number. In testing the latest version tonight, I’ve finally concluded that SEEdit Maxi’s not the one for me. Even though the newest release is a dramatic improvement in user interface, as well as adding several very useful new features, over the version released just last October, it still has enough annoying traits and missing parts to keep me away.

Annoying trait #1 is its tendency towards window proliferation. SEEdit Maxi, like BBEdit before it, seems to think that the more windows you can open for the user, the better. I disagree. In my mind, the best Mac OS X applications are marvels of ingenuity that tuck discrete features in drawers or sliding compartments, or various other nooks and crannies that a modern Mac app is capable of. Part of the reason SEEdit doesn’t take advantage of these is that it’s a Carbon application, using the Mac’s older application framework rather than the new one Steve Jobs brought over from NeXT, called Cocoa. Since SEEdit doesn’t have a Windows counterpart, I can’t imagine why the developers aren’t rewriting this app in Cocoa…

Annoying trait #2 is that SEEdit doesn’t have a visual table editor. That’s one of the main things I really need to do visually, and I can’t in SEEdit.

Bottom line is that SEEdit is a great value if you’re not bothered by some of the things that bother me. At only $29, it does a huge amount… right up there with Dreamweaver, without the WYSIWYG editing capability. For a few other notes on SEEdit, see my short list of pros and cons below.

Pros	Cons
Latest version is much improved (2007). Live preview works well, but doesn’t automatically refresh when you make a change. The CSS editor looks very good. Excellent site management tools. Provides a useful example site to help orient beginners. Can do color syntax highlighting for PHP documents. Has support for Javascript coding.	A lot of windows open up on launch, which can be confusing if there’s no “main” window that also appears. SEEdit is a Carbon app, so things like being able to customize the toolbar are missing. Doesn’t use tabs, so all documents get stored in separate windows. This can lead to window chaos pretty quickly. Has no visual table editor. Doesn’t support live preview for PHP files.

If you’d like to see some screenshots of SEEdit, the developer provides a slew of them here.

One final note: SEEdit is still available in a freeware version, which is quite similar to the shareware one but lacks a variety of features that are explained on the downloads page. SEEdit “mini” is only available for private or educational use.

Version as tested: 2007 r4.

OAT Framework OAT (OpenLink AJAX Toolkit) is a new open source reference Ajax library that's resulting from the combined efforts of members of the OpenAjax Alliance. I haven't tried it yet, but the site is chock-full of demo widgets that have gotten rave reviews on Ajaxian.com today. The source is downloadable at sourceforge, and I'm printing out the Alliance's white paper now... Very cool news indeed!

Fork JavaScript Judging by the reaction to Fork at Ajaxian, where I saw the note about Fork, the programmer world either isn't interested or isn't impressed. No one bothered to leave a comment, but the story had a 2-star rating (very low) when I visited just now. Has the web developer world reached the point where new libraries are merely dissed on launch? Yes, we have too many already... but hey, maybe the guy's got a good idea or two. In any case, I'll be adding Fork to my list to test and update my Cross-Browser scorecard soon. A lot of updates are already in the queue, so why not one more Fork-ful?

Prototype Javascript Library: Easing the development of dynamic web applications Ah, now this is more like it! No more having to scrounge around the web for documentation, examples, and tutorials on Prototype.js, the Ajax-wise JavaScript library that's taken the web developer world by storm over the last year and a half. Now, thanks to a lot of dedicated developers working on the project, the library finally has its own website that's more than just a billboard page. Besides being able to download the library, the new site provides a blog, a section on tips and tutorials, and a full set of API documentation! Can't wait to step inside and look around.

Big WebOS roundup - 10 online operating systems This post lists 10 web-based operating systems with a screenshot and brief paragraph or two about each. It's useful to have this snapshot of the state of Web OS's at the end of 2006, as I suspect it'll look quite different a couple of years from now (as always), and looking back should be instructive.

Creammonkey: Free Input Manager for Safari runs Javascript extensions

Originally downloaded 2/20/06. Many Safari users have gazed with envy at the plethora of add-ons for Firefox, though in the final analysis there are only 3 or 4 that I really wish would come to Safari. One was Greasemonkey… and now we have Creammonkey, which will try to fill those shoes… Worth a try!

Update 10/29/06. Well, eight months after launch, there are still only a tiny handful of scripts that work with Creammonkey. I’m going to watch it awhile longer, but if the usefulness quotient doesn’t go up soon, I’ll pack Creammonkey in. Now that SafariScript is available—with a lot more scripts behind it—Creammonkey may not make it anyway. The fatal flaw seems to be its lack of compatibility with the hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts that already exist. That’s probably not the developer’s fault, but it may doom the effort in the end.

p:OK, even though Creammonkey still isn’t anywhere near as useful for Safari as Greasemonkey is for Firefox, I’ve found at least two scripts that make me want to keep it around. The first one I stumbled on quite by accident… it’s a cool little script called Greased Lightbox, which adds the popular “lightbox” effect to any image you link to from the page. The site designer doesn’t need to do anything but add links to an image… which is quite typical on sites that show thumbnails with links to larger versions. The script’s page has some sample images you can test it with, and also suggests that Google’s image search is a good place to use it. Personally, I’ve been surprised to find how often Greased Lightning is invoked as I browse the web these days… The first time I saw it, I honestly thought it was another lightbox javascript that was being served from the site owner’s HTML page. Greased Lightning alone is worth installing Creammonkey for.

Yesterday, I went searching for more Greasemonkey scripts that are compatible with Creammonkey. Unfortunately, I didn’t find many. The large repository at userscripts.org turns up only a handful, and if you follow some of those links, you might find a few more. For example, this programmer’s site has a number of Greasemonkey scripts, and he believes some of them may work with Creammonkey. I installed a couple of them but didn’t have any success. (I didn’t have time to be exhaustive…)

Nevertheless, I did turn up one other very cool script that works great in Creammonkey: RSS Panel X. RSS Panel X reads the HTML page’s RSS meta tags and then parses and displays the linked feeds in a tiny floating, collapsible window that appears in surprising, bright pastel colors. The script also reads a selection of microformats you may have embedded on your page and adds them to the RSS feed info. I haven’t been able to get this script to work in “automatic” mode in the manner of Greased Lightning, so I added a bookmarklet to my Safari bookmark panel.

Creammonkey is free, has been improved to the point that it no longer degrades Safari’s performance, and now has at least two really useful scripts that lets it show what it can do. Here’s hoping more will be coming along as time goes on.

Version as tested: 0.8.

Firebug Lite This looks like it might be worth trying out... it's a javascript file you can add to pages you're debugging that will cause javascript messages to be written to a Firebug-like panel at the bottom of the browser window. You can toggle the panel with F12 or Ctrl-Shift L.

Quartz Composer Programming Guide: Webpages and Widgets This is pretty cool... I don't think many Mac users know that you can run most Quartz compositions in your browser nowadays, if you're using a late-model version of Safari or WebKit on Mac OS X 10.4.7 or later. Now Apple is trying to educate us on how we can make those compositions interactive using JavaScript. This document explains how to embed a composition in HTML and how to manipulate it using JavaScript.