Oskar Krawczyk – blog.olicio.us

The day has come, after years of watching it, Battlestar Galactica series ended. It was an awesome show, I can say it was the top 1 on my list and probably for many others– hell, I know a guy who started pirating shows just because BSG was aired only in the States he (and me, apparently) didn’t knew BSG was aired in European TV.

So Say We All ;-)

The time to get a new iteration of MooTools couldn’t get here any sooner… No one knows exactly what will the new version bring and no dates are released to the public. One thing we do know is that the selector engine (the very base of every framework) will get updated.

Meantime, in the Selector Engine War, a new player called Sly got promoted to a Colonel rank. Sly is a child of Harald Kirschner (of FancyUpload fame).

The speed result tests are pretty impressive– it’s at least 4x faster than MooTools’ currently embedded selector engine and twice as fast as the base selector engine for the 1.3 release.

And as much as I’d like to see this being included inside MooTools 1.3, the chances for it, are pretty slim. But fear not! If somebody out there, would like to use Sly as the default selector engine in MooTools, here’s how:

Window.implement({
	$$: function(el){		
		return Sly.search(el);
	}
});

Include this snipplet before your code/class/whatever.

This article is outdated. Please visit http://www.jqueryvsmootools.com/ for a great write-up by Aaron Newton.

There is no simple answer to this, or a comprehensive answer that could be contained within the 140 characters that Twitter blesses us with… Well actually I used to reply If you need to ask than your better off with jQuery – but that didn’t worked out.

Both of these wonderful frameworks are significantly different in the approach of how things are being done. Resig’s jQuery by design was directed for people who want to achieve a certain effect with the most minimum code possible. I also have to mention that since jQuery is a widely recognizable project it has a huge community of users behind it, hence an impressive number of available plugins.

Similarly, MooTools can do pretty much the same thing if you really need to, and on top of that it can do a lot more – where it this case Mr. Modularity, Extensibility, Prototypeability (if there’s such a word) are entering the stage. I strongly suggest Aaron Newton’s MooTools Talk from the Ajax Experience (2008), who elaborates on this topic quite significantly.

My framework of choice was MooTools (in the days when it was still called Moo.fx), I have used it in most of the recent projects I’ve been working on and never looked back. It gives me everything I need, beginning with simple element.fade('out') to handling all of the libraries and Engine files I write.

Almost forgot, speed-wise… I could say that MooTools is faster (which it is) but in reality speed differences between these two frameworks are so insignificant that you shouldn’t really be considering them as a point-of-decision. Besides, everything is slow as s*it in IE.

Update

There’s also the second most repeted question How to make MooTools and jQuery work on one page, there’s a simple answer to that– use the noConflict option:

jQuery.noConflict();
 
// Use jQuery via jQuery(...)
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
  jQuery("div").hide();
});

More on the subject: Using jQuery with other libraries

I’ll try to skip the UI stuff as it needs to be re-designed from scratch in my opinion.

• Smart code indention - when pasting the code should auto adjust its indention depth.
• Smart quote – select a string, hit single-quote or double-quote and presto, the string gets automatically quoted. This is super handy while working with JavaScript.
• Color picker – while working with CSS files what I need is a dynamic color picker, you select a hex or an rgb value, hit Cmd+Shift+C and the picker appears with the passed color value pre-selected.
• That’s actually definable inside the theme file. More accurate syntax highlighting – especially JavaScript syntax. Methods should have different color than variables.
• Find in project – a simple global search (and replace), please?
• Shortcuts – more of them. Where’s the project filter shortcut.
• Bracket highlighter – just like Code Coda and TextMate do it.
• Subversion integration – at least show which files are to be committed.
• Fixed Command+W – should close the active tab no the project window as it currently does.

Make it happen good people of Macrabbit!

Didn’t you ever wish there was a simple way to display your recent Twitter status inside the Last.fm’s sidebar – I, sure did? Well, with LastTweet.com you can do just that, in no–time (three steps to be exact).

What it does in generating a nice BBCode you can just paste straight into your sidebar.

As for now it only supports Last.fm, but perhaps in the future we’ll allow other websites to use the widget.

What I did is a simplistic MooTools-based window session manager implementation.

The pretty cool thing about the library is the fact that the values of the session can be stored as simple strings of as objects, which makes it really easy for us to manage.

Storing a simple session

// init MooWindowSession
var Session = new MooWindowSession();
 
// store a string
Session.set("first", "first value");
 
// returns: "first value"
Session.get()

Storing multiple session values

// init MooWindowSession
var Session = new MooWindowSession();
 
// store an object
Session.set({
  first: "first value",
  second: "second value"
});
 
// returns: {first: "first value", second: "second value"}
Session.get()
 
// returns: "first value"
Session.get().first

Clearing the session

// init MooWindowSession
var Session = new MooWindowSession();
 
// store an object
Session.set({
  first: "first value",
  second: "second value"
});
 
// clear the session
Session.remove()
 
// returns: null
Session.get()

• Example
• Get MooWindowSession (1.1Kb) – (latest from SVN)
• Documentation
• Requires mootools-1.2.0-core.js or newer