February 27th, 2008
Meet John Resig, Sam Stephenson, Andrew Dupont, Alex Russell and me at the Secrets of JavaScript Libraries panel at south by southwest interactive in Austin, TX on March 11!
This talk will delve into the secret techniques used by JavaScript library authors to create comprehensive libraries that work seamlessly across browser environments. We’ll look at everything from fixes for strange browser quirks, tricks for gaining speed, to tips for writing smooth animations. This panel will be held by experienced JavaScript Library developers who have, cumulatively, many decades of JavaScript development experience under their belts. Everything discussed will be backed up with publicly available, rock-solid, code.
Sounds good? Meet you there! Also, don’t miss Dabble Dabble, Toil and Kick Ass 🙂
January 23rd, 2008
Juriy Zaytsev just released a brand-new Prototype 1.6.0.2 cheat sheet that is a great time-saver for development and also makes a nice wall poster. As a nice bonus, it lists deprecated methods, too—time to get rid of those in your code.
December 22nd, 2007
The Bungee Book on Prototype and script.aculo.us is now shipping, in both PDF and paper versions.
A big thumbs-up for Christophe who painstakingly wrote the book to be the best and most up-to-date reference to both Prototype and script.aculo.us there is. Don’t miss this one!
Read more over at the Bungee Blog.
December 5th, 2007
I’ll do a one-day workshop on Professional JavaScript and Ajax in London on March 26, 2008. If you want the inside scoop in script.aculo.us 2.0 and the latest and greatest on Prototype, and you’re around be sure to attend!
Learn the secrets of giving your sites and web applications the rich interactivity they deserve. This exclusive workshop by Thomas Fuchs will provide real-world examples and practical knowledge to enable you to make the jump to using Ajax and JavaScript.
This workshop uses a pragmatic approach and focuses on how to put Ajax to full use in a variety of different situations. It will give you the necessary skills to make the transition from boring web forms to rich, responsive user interfaces. Thomas will show you what Ajax and JavaScript frameworks can do for you, how to manipulate a page with the Document Object Model, and where and when to utilise visual effects to make all this look good. Additionally, he’ll compare different techniques for data exchange with the backend, and how to choose what’s best in your particular situation.
I’m happy to work again with the great people at Carson Workshops!
Hope to see some of you there! Head over to the workshop website to learn more, and if you like, register!
November 27th, 2007
I just launched my new business as an independent JavaScript and Web User Interface consultant and all-around guru, and here’s the website
Head over to:
http://script.aculo.us/thomas/
to get the scoop.
If you want some serious help in your project and benefit of my knowledge, please don’t hesitate to contact me! Note that I’m pretty busy for this year and the start of next year already—but don’t let that hold of enquries. 😉
A shoutout goes to Amy Hoy for taking the awesome pictures and doing design consultancy for the site!
Btw, the site uses a preview-ish version of the upcoming script.aculo.us 2.0 effects framework, so if you’re curious to see that in action, i’d suggest you take a peek.
November 7th, 2007
As part of today’s triple release celebrations, script.aculo.us 1.8 is now available for your download pleasure!
What’s in for you (compared to script.aculo.us 1.7):
- Prototype 1.6 final
- Complete rewrite of Ajax.InPlaceEditor and Ajax.InPlaceCollectionEditor
- Full CSS inheritance in Effect.Morph
- New core effect: Effect.Tween
- Sound: play mp3 files for sound effects; uses native playback on IE and available plugins whereever possible
- Duration and distance options for Effect.Shake
- Performance improvements
- Tons of bugfixes
To download it, head over to the script.aculo.us site and head for downloads. And all of it is sweetly documented in Christophe’s Book on Prototype and script.aculo.us.
As we head towards script.aculo.us 2.0 (I hope to have a preview release ready soon!), further releases of script.aculo.us 1.x will be bug-fix releases only. If you should stumble upon anything, please follow the directions given on the Prototype contribute page (these instructions are valid for script.aculo.us too).
Last but not least, as always, thanks to the many contributors and the great community!
Have fun!
October 29th, 2007
Coming to Vienna, Austria on November 10 and 11: The EURUKO 07, the 5th European Ruby Conference.
See you there! (It’s cheap, so no excuses accepted if you don’t attend!)
October 26th, 2007
Here are my slides from the talk I just gave at the RailsToItaly 07 conference.
script.aculo.us 2.0 sneak preview (PDF, ~3 MB)
Note that everything in there is subject to change. And change it will. Before you start asking questions, please see the FAQ on the last slide. 🙂
Btw, Pisa is a nice city, except that it’s very rainy, at least right now. Writing this literally in the shadow of the leaning tower.
October 14th, 2007
Dave Troy writes on how his project Twittervision, which is a Rails application powered by Prototype and script.aculo.us, is going to be on exhibit at the New York MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). The exihibition opens on February 24, 2008.
I’m really with Dave on his thoughts on this:
Today, creativity and imagination (what some folks are calling the right brain) are becoming the key drivers of software and design. With imagination, we can see around the corners of today’s most pressing challenges.
Rock on!
October 12th, 2007
What’s in for you (compared to script.aculo.us 1.7):
- Prototype 1.6 (lastest trunk version)
- Complete rewrite of Ajax.InPlaceEditor and Ajax.InPlaceCollectionEditor
- Full CSS inheritance in Effect.Morph
- New core effect: Effect.Tween
- Sound: play mp3 files for sound effects; uses native playback on IE and available plugins whereever possible
- Performance improvements
- Tons of bugfixes
As always, you’ll find more detailed information in the CHANGELOG.
Note that script.aculo.us 1.8 will mark a feature freeze and only bugfixes will be applied to the 1.x branch of script.aculo.us in the future. script.aculo.us 2.0 is basically a complete rewrite to make things more awesometastic, but I’m getting ahead of myself now—expect something in the near future. 🙂
Download it over at the script.aculo.us site, 196k zip file.
