Thomas Fuchs
Hi, I'm Thomas Fuchs. I'm the author of Zepto.js, of script.aculo.us, and I'm a Ruby on Rails core alumnus. With Amy Hoy I'm building cheerful software, like Noko Time Tracking and Every Time Zone and write books like Retinafy.me.
   Want me to speak at your conference? Contact me!

Create your own effects tutorial

April 18th, 2006

Vitamin Advisor You might have noticed the Vitamin Advisor badge on the sidebar, and wondered what this is, so here it goes:

Vitamin is a resource for web designers, developers and entrepreneurs. You should find tons of interesting reads for all aspect of doing web apps from technical to business stuff from some of the best minds out there.

My first feature is on creating your own visual effects with script.aculo.us—so, if you’re interested in breaking out of the norm, and doing your own, just read on!

If you want, you can also listen to the interview a gave a while ago, for some insights on script.aculo.us.

Also, there’s a great review of fluxiom to be found on Vitamin, done by an independent reviewer. We got a 4 out of 5 rating, and that’s while we’re in private beta, not too bad! 🙂

Slides from my Rails Ajax presentation at Canada on Rails

April 15th, 2006

Here are the slides from my presentation on April 14th in Vancouver at Canada on Rails.

JavaScript as seen by the browser slide

The presentation primarily is about all the new RJS goodness that’s now part of Rails (as of version 1.1).

Download the PDF (~8.5MB)

Eh? Off to Canada on Rails

April 7th, 2006

Canada on RailsTomorrow morning I’m flying to Vancouver, where the Canada on Rails conference will take place on April 13 and 14.

I’ll give a keynote presentation on Advanced Rails AJAX techniques, showing off the new .rjs templates and also giving some insights into fluxiom and how all the magic works.

Also, I’m hoping to catch the April 15 Avalanche vs. Canucks NHL game. 🙂

Update: Arrived in one piece. 🙂

script.aculo.us V1.6.1

April 6th, 2006

So, a new release with the exciting addition of sortable trees, kudos to Sammi Williams for implementing these. See the functional test for sortable trees for hands-on experience.

Also, the included Prototype V1.5.0_rc0 has seen fixes and optimizations, so be sure to don’t miss out on this release.

Thanks to the all the bug hunters and contributors! 🙂

Get it here.

Interview in Treehouse Magazine

April 5th, 2006

The April 2006 issue of Treehouse magazine has an interview with me on wollzelle, script.aculo.us and fluxiom.

Read more over at the fluxiom blog.

Ooops: Web 2.0 error messages

March 31st, 2006

I’ve started a little page on Web 1.X and Web 2.0 error messages.

You can help! If you have a nice error message just send it to me (the error messages page has details).

It’s meant to be sort of a counterpart to the Web 2.0 Logo collection.

Oops!

Cool text fields? Safari soon gets them

March 31st, 2006


Safari will get support for super-very-rich-stylable textfields in an upcoming release. It even includes support for advanced CSS niceties as:


border-image: url('frame.gif') 17%;
border-width: 20px;
border-radius: 5px;

or


border: 0px;
background-color: lightgreen;
border-radius: 20px;
text-shadow: 3px 3px grey;

Firefox 2 will be in for a tough ride (at least on the Mac platform).

Oh, and can we have Safari for Windows, please?

script.aculo.us 1.6 out now!

March 28th, 2006

On the heels of the Ruby on Rails 1.1 release, script.aculo.us 1.6 final is now available.

See the previous article on what’s new.

Remember, you can try out most stuff by using the functional test suite!

As always, thanks to all the contributors for making script.aculo.us ever more stable!

In-page windows

March 27th, 2006

Tired of those popups and ugly JavaScript dialog boxes? Sébastien Gruhier has a solution for you, based on the Prototype JavaScript Framework and support for script.aculo.us effects goodness:

Prototype JavaScript Windows

You can open pure in-page windows, or load in a an entirely different URL, via the included support for IFRAMEs.

Sébastien doesn’t stop there, but also put up a cool debugging extension, which you can put to use when developing JavaScript stuff.

Of course everything is skinnable with CSS. So, hop over to the site and enjoy the demos, and see the blog entry to leave comments.

P.S. All that is served with a MIT license—free to use for any purpose. Rock on, Sébastien 🙂

script.aculo.us 1.6 is coming

March 27th, 2006

script.aculo.us is nearing its 1.6 release.

Hundreds of thousands of downloads, packaged with Ruby on Rails and other frameworks, and as standalone package, and 10,000+ del.icio.us links speak for themselves—great to see that kind of usage and support!

script.aculo.us 1.6 marks the switch over to Prototype 1.5 (1.4 will no longer be supported), which has really great new features and has undergone some refactoring to take advantage of the Prototype 1.5 niceties.

Other new stuff includes window-scrolling while dragging, performance optimizations and various bug fixes.

To see some cool combinations of the new Prototype features with the latest script.aculo.us 1.6 beta, see example 1 and example 2 (from the functional test suite).

I’m welcoming test reports, so if you have an app using script.aculo.us, get the newest files from SVN
and try if everything works smoothly.

The final version of script.aculo.us 1.6 will be released with Ruby on Rails 1.1 final, which shouldn’t be too far ahead. 🙂

Oh, and don’t forget that you can stay updated on when it’s released by subscribing to the script.aculo.us RSS feed.