The primary new feature ( from my perspective ) was a brand new UI that made use of AJAX, which I built on top of the Prototype JavaScript library. There was a lot of dynamic element creation based on the data coming back from the AJAX calls, and thus a lot of document.createElement calls, along with the appendChild and insertBefore and the element-property-setting statements. It’s very verbose.
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Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel
– March 31, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -The much-anticipated new version 1.1 of Ruby on Rails hit the streets with fanfare a couple of days ago. And while even I am wary of the hyperbole that sometimes surrounds Ajax and Web 2.0, I’m very pleased to say that Ruby on Rails is the genuine article.
Website: http://web2.wsj2.com/ruby_on_rails_11_web_20_on_rocket_fuel.htm
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Take AJAX to Your Email Inbox: Developing a Web-based POP 3 Client
– March 31, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -In this article, the first of three parts, you will start creating a simple web-based POP 3 client using AJAX, which will use “XMLHttpRequest” objects to retrieve messages from a mail server.
Website: http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/XML/Take-AJAX-to-Your-Email-Inbox-Developing-a-Webbased-POP-3-Client/
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Lightbox JS v2.0
– March 31, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.
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Stylehive&’s Virtual Showroom in Second Life
– March 31, 2006 - No comments - Posted in DesignDemo. -
I recently found an entirely new way to interact with a website. Last week one of our clients at Ideacodes launched a virtual showroom in Second Life. When you visit Stylehive’s virtual showroom you can see objects that users of the Stylehive website have bookmarked at the website. These objects such as furniture have been rendered in a 3-D format which you can interact with in the virtual space. You can even sit on a sofa or chair and then click on it which will launch your browser, and take you to the users bookmark page of that particular object. Very interactive and very fun.
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Get On Track with Ruby on Rails
– March 29, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Ruby? Rails? Ajax? Is this cluster of confusing buzzwords swarming around your head like a mob of angry bees? Then fear not, gentle padawan — Jedi help is at hand! For I, too, was just like you once: confused, jumping at shadows, sinking into the depths of yet another custom Python web framework while softly weeping behind a stack of dog-eared PHP books. But not anymore. Today I build my applications in Ruby on Rails.
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JTF: Javascript Unit Testing Farm
– March 29, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Javascript is present on almost every recent web page. But are you sure your scripts work on every browsers?
Website: http://jtf.ploki.info/
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mp3act - Streaming MP3 Jukebox AJAX Web Application
– March 29, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -The mp3act digital music system is designed to be a central location for your digital music collection and a means to easily organize and listen to your digital media through your stereo, over a local network, or anywhere in the world.
Website: http://mp3act.net/
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Rails RJS Templates
– March 29, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -During my daily reading of the Ruby on Rails mailing list I ran across a post asking about RJS templates. I hadn’t heard of them before and I was intrigued to find out more.
Website: http://www.codyfauser.com/articles/2005/11/20/rails-rjs-templates
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Suckerfish HoverLightbox
– March 29, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -I was truly impressed by the development of the Hoverbox Image Gallery written by Nathan Smith of SonSpring. It was great to come across some optimization of the code by Craig Erskine and I thought it was a really creative way to show a collection of images in a gallery.
Website: http://www.mondaybynoon.com/2006/03/27/suckerfish-hoverlightbox/
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Balloon tooltip
– March 27, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Nice downloadable example of balloon tooltips.
Website: http://www.dhtmlgoodies.com/index.html?whichScript=bubble_tooltip
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Say goodbye to pop-ups with DOMinclude
– March 27, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Pop-Up windows are a pain in the lower back to use. Years of abuse by advertisers, malicious attackers and phishing attempts have conditioned users to close them immediately or turn on their third party pop-up blocking tool or the browser option to do the same.
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Ruby applications that scale
– March 27, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -We’ve got the language, we’ve go the killer Rails framework, but we’re not quite there yet when it comes to performance. And building applications that scale is tricky in any language. So how do we solve is the Ruby way? How do we make it possible without unnecessary complexity?
Website: http://www.squidoo.com/rubyscale/
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lighttpd 1.4.8 and multiple rails-apps
– March 27, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -lighttpd 1.4.8 was just released and next to a pile of bugfixes we added a new option to fastcgi.server to allow a simple setup of multiple rails app in one virtual host.
Website: http://blog.lighttpd.net/articles/2005/11/23/lighttpd-1-4-8-and-multiple-rails-apps
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Newsmap – News Pattern Visualizer
– March 27, 2006 - No comments - Posted in DesignDemo. -
In most cases the news is presented in a rather boring but usable way. Newsmap show us a new way to look at world trends in news reporting through their Google News mashup. As they say on their website, “It’s objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.” One other aspect of Newsmap that was a great user experience was the instant language translation. Newsmap will be one of my daily reads from now on.
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RTOC - Real Time Online Counter using Ajax
– March 26, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -RTOC is an statistics script that uses flatfiles to store data. It includes an onine users counter as well as a unique hits counter that stores unique hits for that day aswell as a total. It uses JavaScript to update itself dynamicly, so that all stats are in real-time!
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AJAX Timeouts with Prototype
– March 26, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -I’ve been implementing some AJAX goodness in Mayday and other FastFrame apps lately. In my reading of the various pitfalls of AJAX one that popped up repeatedly was how to handle gracefully a network outage or the webserver going down. For example, Gmail’s chat handles it nicely. When I turn off my airport connection Gmail chat lets me know that it can’t contact the server and maybe my connection is down. Much better than an endlessly spinning hour glass, or worse, not letting the user know their action was never completed.
Website: http://codejanitor.com/wp/ajax-timeouts-with-prototype/
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The adventures of scaling, Stage 2
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Stage 2 contains MySQL tuning tips, tuning of FastCGI dispatchers, and further system optimization techniques.
Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/20/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-2
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The adventures of scaling, Stage 1
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -While a couple of high-traffic sites are being powered by Rails and while the Rails book has a handful of instructions to scale your application, it was apparent for us that you’re on your on at a certain point. This series of articles is meant to serve more as a case study as opposed to a generic “How To Scale Your Rails Application” piece of writing, which may or may not be possible to write. I’m outlining what we did to improve our applications’ performance, your mileage may obviously vary.
Website: http://poocs.net/articles/2006/03/13/the-adventures-of-scaling-stage-1
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Rails for Designers
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -This is for designers who are going to be working with Rails and is intended to give them a good starting point to jump into work with a Rails developer. This is all introductory material. As such, I cover some basics (MVC, locations of files) and move from there to a code example and more advanced topics (partials, ActionView helpers).
Website: http://glu.ttono.us/articles/2006/03/21/rails-for-designers
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FormSpring
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Online AJAX powered from builder.
Website: http://www.formspring.com/
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Nifty Corners
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -Basically, Nifty Corners are a solution based on CSS and Javascript to get rounded corners without images.
Website: http://pro.html.it/niftycube/
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Feed Rinse – Easy RSS Filtering
– March 24, 2006 - No comments - Posted in DesignDemo. -
In my opinion Feed Rinse is one of the best designed products I’ve seen in a while. Their name matches the function of the application, the branding works well with the core message and the overall user interface is intuitive and stylish. The real gem is the user interaction and experience. The process of importing and rinsing your rss feed is fast and easy to use. The free version is limited to 3 feeds, however, it seems to have full functionality, except for profanity filtering. A very well designed application!
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XMLHttpRequest Usability Guidelines
– March 23, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -XMLHttpRequest is becoming more and more popular, and many people are currently exploring what we could do with it. Unfortunately this also causes people to reinvent old and forgotten usability problems.
Website: http://www.baekdal.com/articles/Usability/XMLHttpRequest-guidelines/
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Visual AJAX
– March 23, 2006 - No comments - Posted in mHub. -The Tersus Visual Programming Platform employs AJAX techniques “under the hood”, simplifying the creation of web applications with a rich, responsive user interfaces. Tersus uses a single, visual language for defining user interface, client side behavior and server side processing, eliminating the need to master multiple technologies and tools.