Entries in Apr, 2005
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A Firefox observation
There are (to my knowledge) around 80 people on my undergraduate computer science course. Of those 80, I know of at least fourfive who’s final year project involves writing a Firefox extension of some sort. That’s 1 in 2016.
Why the term Ajax is useful
Software design patterns are useful mainly because they provide a shared vocabulary: rather than discussing the intimate details of a three layered application architecture, we say “MVC”. Rather than describing an object that tracks your progress while looping over a collection, we say “Iterator”.
[... 152 words]Safari 1.3 has a JavaScript Console
My single biggest complaint about Safari in the past has been its terrible support for JavaScript debugging. Safari 1.3 has just been released, and tucked away in the Debug menu is a brand new JavaScript console option. It’s not as good as the Firefox equivalent (it throws up far too many “Undefined value, line: 0” errors for my liking) but it’s a big step in the right direction.
[... 80 words]Greasemonkey FUD
Wow, that didn’t take long. Via the Greasemonkey mailing list, Forrester Research have released a report entitled Greasemonkey Primes Firefox For Embarrassment. I have no intention of paying the $49 asking price for the full 3 page report (!), but here’s the executive summary:
[... 283 words]Greasemonkey etiquette
In Meme tracking with Greasemonkey, Jon Udell introduces a userscript which grabs the number of references from del.icio.us and bloglines and appends that information to the top of every page you visit. To be fair on Jon, the version he has released defaults to only doing this for pages on Infoworld.com but modifying it to run on every web page is trivial.
[... 252 words]Flickr without the Flash
One of my favourite panels at SxSW this year was the Flash vs. HTML Game Show, in which a team of HTML/JavaScript gurus took on a team of Flash gurus showing off pre-prepared solutions to tasks set for the panel. One of the challenges was to come up with enhancements to Flickr using the team’s assigned technology.
[... 353 words]Enter the hedgehog
The Ubuntu community have released Hoary Hedgehog, otherwise known as Ubuntu 5.04. If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet, it’s an excellent Linux distribution based on Debian with a strong focus on desktop usability. Unlike most Linux distros, Ubuntu comes with just one desktop manager (Gnome) and one obvious default application for each of the essentials: Firefox for browsing, OpenOffice for office work, Evolution for mail.
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