MooToolified – episode 1

  • 19 December

There are some very cool MooTools-based websites out there (and by saying out I mean in) which clearly need mentioning – which is the purpose of the MooToolified series.

Alexbuga.com

Alex Buga is the Creative Director down at MB Dragan – one of the most impressive southeastern Europe Interactive Agencies.

Visit Alexbuga.com

MacHeist.com

No introduction needed.

Visit MacHeist.com

zootool.com

I actually had a brief chat with Bastian Allgeier and as it turns out he’s the one-man-army behind the project – that is really impressive considering the amount of detailed work that was put in this website!

Visit ZooTool.com

TitaniumApp, but no GoldenApp

  • 16 December

After much disappointment with Adobe AIR and the whole dark age that it covered us with, there seemed to be a sparkle of light somewhere far in the horizon – Titaniumapp, his name was.

As noted, trying to create something nice with Adobe AIR ended up in being a total fiasco.

Fortunately there is a new player, his name is Titanium.

I have given it a go, hoping I can move my project to the new, more open platform. Installed the SDK, did some digging just to find out that Titatnium is not as open as the authors make us believe it is.

It’s using Prototype as the fundamental JS framework which unfortunately leaves us with the option of using highly namespaced JavaScript frameworks (YUI or jQuery) as the ones of choice.

This is pretty bad news.

It’s pretty much leaving developers who like to have everything under control (the Frameworks Holly War, don’t want to get into that today), with our pants down.

On the bright side, I like their logo.

Not quite enough AIR to breath with

  • 15 December

Adobe is really trying to bake something new and fresh like AIR, unfortunately it's doing it using outdated half-products, which can constitute in some really disappointing results.

A few months ago I have given some time into developing a project I came up with – which would be quite useful for many AIR developers – unfortunately while Adobe AIR was still a pretty fresh release I ran into many technical obstacles making it pretty impossible to finalize the output.

Now, a few months later, I’ve given it another go just to find that, even though AIR is now in half-way to reach a completely new iteration level, the obstacles are still there, plus a couple of new ones.

I’m a front-end developer so, quite obviously, what I want to use in AIR is the AJAX-HTML option… Adobe had indeed made some good decisions here, ending up with WebKit as the rendering engine – which makes us front-end developers super-happy. Yet, what doesn’t make us that happy is the fact that Adobe decided to trim-down the available features that WebKit provides us with. That leaves us really little to work with, ergo creating beautiful UI using ie. CSS 3 + the -webkit specific properties.

This brings me to the disappointing results point I’ve mentioned at the very beginning. All of the trimming-down, disabling features seem to be caused by Adobe deciding to use some of their obscure and somehow outdated technologies to deal with the completely new ones – which clearly don’t go together.

Come on Adobe, no opacity support? Really? Please.

In other news: I’m really hooked on Iron & Wine lately.

NoteBoard! Adium Message Style

  • 27 November

NoteBoard! is a beautiful modern Message Style for Adium. It's the first Message Style that fully represents what WebKit is capable of, ie. CSS Transforms, dynamically generated shadows, radius borders, multiple backgrounds, etc.

Download or install NoteBoard!

INFO: If you’re not able to install the Style from Adiumxtras.com, it’s probably because it was updated and lays in the moderation queue. Meantime you can always grab the most up-to-date version from my dropbox Public folder.

When installing the Style you’ll have the option of choosing from twelve different transitions (variants) and picking the one that you fancy the most. Note that transitions apply only to the follow-up message.

WTFramework bookmarklet

  • 8 November

Ever wondered which JavaScript framework was used on a specific website but was too lazy to check the source code for the answer? Fear no more WTFramework is here.

WTFramework has been updated to 2.0 and is available to download from a new location!

Here we have the work of my life – where by saying life I mean 20 minutes of it. This is a pretty simple and straight–forward bookmarklet.

Say you come across a website, see a few pretty cool effects (right click to ensure it’s not Flash driven) and you’d like to know which of the some three fabulous JavaScript frameworks (MooTools, Yahoo User Interface, jQuery, the infamous Scriptaculous, Dojo Toolkit, Mochikit, etc.) are being used to rise the magic.

Typically, you’d have to look for the script tag in the source. Well forget about it, now you have WTFramework – one click and a info pops–up informing which framework are we dealing with.

Just drag and drop the link onto your Bookmark Bar: WTFramework v1.3

I’ll add more frameworks in the future releases. Have fun.

Update (9 Nov 2008) – version 1.1

  • Script.aculo.us and Prototype are now separated
  • The bookmarklet will tell you which version of the framework is in use
  • Added Dojo Toolkit and MochiKit to the recognizable frameworks list

Update (10 Nov 2008) – version 1.2

  • Redesigned
  • The info-box has the highest possible z-index

Update (11 Nov 2008) – version 1.3

  • Press bookmarklet to toggle show/hide
  • Added Base2 recognition

Is Espresso in reality TextMate 2?

  • 28 September

Not a long time ago MacRabbit has released info on a new project of theirs, called Espresso, which is a code editor. The project seems to be a hell load of an amazing one – as amazing as TextMate was years ago. So the obvious question is, whether Macromates and MacRabbit are now one.

This post is outdated. My opinion might have changed since the time this post was published.

Not that I’m a huge conspiracy theory fan, but it would make sense. Macromates always seemed to me to be more of a one person indie development project – Allan Odgaard. And like most indie developers, there’s a time when they’re being hired/acquired/eaten by bigger companies – which MacRabbit seems to be.

Besides, it would seem it’s about time for Allan to release his new offspring – it’s been almost three years since the last update for Pete’s sake!

Are you with me? Is Espresso, TextMate 2? I’d love if that was the case.

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