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Getting things done with Flock and Meebo
During a recent GTD weekly review, I suddenly realized how many distractions had worked their way into my daily office routine: personal email, personal instant messaging, entertainment feeds, Facebook. I suspect such time-wasters pose a bigger danger to web developers than to other professionals, if only because the programs they run in are so central to our work. I run Firefox for web development, Adium for instant messaging, and NetNewsWire for industry news all day out of necessity. If I allow my personal distractions to jump out at me from those programs, my productivity plummets.
This weekend, I worked hard to de-tangle my professional and personal lives. My tools? Flock, the Mozilla-based "social browser," and Meebo, the browser-based IM aggregation service. My goal was to separate all personal bookmarks and RSS feeds from NetNewsWire and Firefox into Flock, then move all my personal IM accounts from Adium to Meebo. The end result was a self-imposed firewall between productive time and fun time. (Thanks to many a Lifehacker article for the basic idea, if not the implementation.)
Topics: Adium, Facebook, Firefox, Flock, getting things done, GTD, Meebo, NetNewsWire, productivity, work life balance
Faster JavaScript for Firefox 3.1 Thru JIT
I was expecting the next major advance in JavaScript for Firefox to come from replacing SpiderMonkey with Tamarin, Adobe's donated VM for ECMAScript 4. In fact, Tamarin can already do some JIT.
Now surprise, surprise -- SpiderMonkey can do JIT as well, as Brendan Eich, Mozilla's CTO describes in his blog. The technique used in both Tamarin and SpiderMonkey is called tracing, where during code execution, each hotspot (code that is executed a whole lot) is traced and compiled, so the next time it is executed, the compiled version is used. The beasty is called TraceMonkey and boasts several orders of magnitude improvements over the old SpiderMonkey.
Since this JIT involved actual compilation, you have to look at which architectures TraceMonkey supports. Again from Brendan's blog:
We have, right now, x86, x86-64, and ARM support in TraceMonkey. This means we are ready for mobile and desktop target platforms out of the box.
Sweet. I guess that means the Intel Macs are supported.
There are still some bugs, of course, but this is great news for sophisticated Ajax apps on Firefox. Will Microsoft respond? Is a JavaScript JIT upgrade in the works for IE? This is an arms race I can get excited about.
Update: John Resig of JQuery has some more details and demos about TraceMonkey.
Topics: Firefox, Javascript, JIT, SpiderMonkey, Tamarin, TraceMonkey
FireFox Release Candidate 1: Enjoy
Colleagues here at PFD demanded I add this blog after sending it out as an e-mail.
I'm the fellow that translates what the developers say into English for the business people. I then translate the spreadsheets into quasi-code on the reverse communication flow. I'm a Business Analyst. I gather requirements for software projects, hold the developers to the requirements, assist (sometimes do) testing, training, pathway mapping and pretty much anything that anyone on the team tells me to do.
With the caveat that I did NOT do a scientific or even methodological test of the new browser, I present my results:
I installed FireFox 3 Release Candidate 1 on my Windows XP SP3 machine and have been running it through a few of its pace and thought you might be interested in my anecdotal testing:
- I usually keep 7-10 tabs open when working, in addition to a
Word/VISIO or Excel Session. I keep Thunderbird (e-mail client) open
and usually stream audio on WinAmp from www.folkalley.com. With two monitors running, I'm usually down to 1100 Mb of free RAM on FireFox 2 (which usually pulls between 65 and 80Mb of system memory with all the stuff our project team pushes to my browserthe BB DevTeam puts on its pages. I'm running a typical workday session now and FireFox 3 is only using 45MB, reason enough for me to use it. - The Bookmark manager is sooooo much easier to use than FireFox 1 or 2.
- <ctrl><+> and <ctrl><-> magnifiesdoes the entire page, not just the text. Trey kewl.
- You don't have to go into about:config to monkey around with your MIME associations- there's a new Applications
icon in Tools that not only allows you to select previously associated applications-file types, but to assign whatever you want to open files. - It IS faster- noticeably so on opening sites. Mozilla's DevTeam also integrated the security inside the browser so there are a few new
twists- for example there's a robot icon to the immediate left of the address field, mouse over and it will tell you if there's any real
identification for the site (the sites have to enbale the ID through Firefox, so it's TBD [to be determined], I guess, but a nice feature). - The release notes show a couple of extremely minor issues- easily handled. And like R2.0, the Add-Ons Manager makes certain your add-ons
will work in the new browser. - Add-Ins- quite a few showed as incompatible with the new version. Colleagues here at PFD World Headquarters reminded me of an add-in called Nightly Tester Tools. I used it back in the FireFox 0.9 days but got so frustrated with it that I abandoned it within minutes. The latest version works like a dream. Install it, on FireFox reboot, override all the incompatible add-ins. Most seem to work. Like any other Add-In issue, you may need to return here and disable them one at a time if you have issues.
These add-ons were incompatible in my version:
- AVG Safe Search
- Bandwidth Meter and Diagnostics
- Dummy Lipsum
- FEBE
- FireBug
- Forecastfix
- Google Browser Synch
- InFormEnter
- LinkedIn Companion
- MIME Edit
- PicLens
- Selenimum IDE
- ThinkVantage Password Manager
FireFox3 will continue hunting for your FF2 addons and letcha know when a compatible version is released.
Topics: Firefox
Developer’s Notebook: Find computed styles in IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari
At my recent Web 2.0 Expo talk, I exhorted developers to get comfortable outside the Firebug/Firefox safety zone. By rotating between Opera, Safari and even IE as our primary development environments, we can really get to know those browsers - and perhaps learn to utilize their non-standard features. Switching things up, however, can inhibit productivity until you learn your way around each browser's tools.
To that end, I offer these step-by-step instructions for finding computed styles in all four A-grade browsers. I chose the display of computed styles as my "debuggers are cool" use case because it's an obscure but useful feature for CSS debugging. Most of the time I can debug styles by looking at my debugger's snapshot of the current cascade for a given element. But sometimes that's not enough. If I've assigned a value of "inherit" to the font-family of an element, then the cascade snapshot won't tell me what font is actually applied to that element. (Not being a designer, I often can't tell the difference between various sans-serif faces, especially at small sizes.) Luckily, computed styles can give me the information I need.
As these examples demonstrate, debugging tools have come a long way in the last couple of years. Let's make the most of them for all of our UI-layer needs.
Internet Explorer 8 and DebugBar
500
IE's JavaScript debugging tools have finally matured, but its CSS ones lag behind. Even IE8, with its built-in debuggers (under Tools > Developer Tools), won't show you computed styles. Luckily, Jean-Fabrice Rabaute has crafted DebugBar, an plugin for Internet Explorer 5+ that adds all sorts of useful tools. Install DebugBar, fire up your version of IE and choose View > Toolbars > DebugBar to make the plugin visible. Then click the "DebugBar" icon in the resulting toolbar to open the DebugBar sidebar. You'll see two tabbed panes, one below the other. Choose the "DOM" tab on top and the "Comp. Style" tab on the bottom. In the upper pane, you should see a target icon with the caption "Drag target on document to find element." Drag the icon anywhere on an open web page and you'll see computed styles for the corresponding element in the bottom pane of the sidebar.
Getting semantic and DRY with microformats and Radiant CMS
I can now cross Microformats off my list of "technologies whose value I recognize even though I've never had the chance to use them in real life." Last week I created three hcards for the new Pathfinder website, one each for our Chicago headquarters, our New York office, and our head of sales. Now, if you've got a browser plug-in that can parse microformats, you can import our contact information directly into Outlook, Apple's Address Book or your PIM of choice.
A little background
Microformats, for those who don't immerse themselves in grassroots front-end technologies, are at the core of what's become known as the "semantic web." The basic idea is that by adopting a set of standardized markup patterns, we can create websites that are more easily parsable by both humans and machines. More from the "About microformats" page:
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).
The most popular and best-known microformat is the hcard, an HTML implementation of the standard vCard format used to store and exchange address and personal information in a wide variety of software applications. If vCards are basically electronic business cards that can be imported to or exported from your contacts manager, then hcards provide the same functionality in the browser.
Topics: .NET, Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Microformats, Radiant CMS, Semantic web
Keeping up with Firefox 3: Six more bookmark-manager gotchas
I found four more bugs and two more feature requests to add to yesterday's massive, minutiae-laden post about the Firefox 3 bookmarks manager:
Feature request: It would be awesome if you could sort your bookmarks by specific criteria, then make that sort order permanent. This would work exactly like the iTunes "Copy to playlist order" command. As in Firefox 2, you can approximate this by sorting your bookmarks alphabetically, moving them to a new folder, and moving them back. Then, even when you revert back to the "unsorted" view, the bookmarks stay in alphabetical order. Of course, this is way less necessary in Firefox 3, which can remember different sort orders for different bookmark folders, thus obviating the need to wrangle some folders into natural sort and others into alphabetical sort by brute force. Still, it's a nice-to-have.
Feature request: The Views menu in the top toolbar should be broken out into separate Show and Sort menus. This is commonly accessed functionality, and it's really annoying to have a two-item menu where each item contains around 10 sub-items which can only be accessed by clicking the menu, moving down, moving right, then moving down again to locate the desired item.
Bug: If you accidentally try to move an item to the same folder it's
already in, it will simply disappear. Thank god for command-Z,
otherwise I would have accidentally deleted a folder with hundreds of
bookmarks.
Keeping up with Firefox 3: Improvements, bugs and missing features in the new bookmark manager
I'm a trigger-happy bookmarker, likely to command-D any page that seems like it could be of use in the future. I've learned to live with my affliction, but the Firefox 2 bookmark manager doesn't exactly make my life easier. The problem? An interface that mimics the look and feel of a filesystem but deviates substantially from users' expectations about how a filesystem operates.
With Firefox 3 now in its third beta release, I recently spent some time determining how its completely overhauled bookmark manager stacks up. The verdict? I see lots of cool new features, but it's not a home run yet. I'm not sure whether the issues I saw were bugs, as-yet-unimplemented features, or poor design choices. Regardless, the Firefox 3 Beta 3 bookmark manager leaves several Firefox 2 annoyances unfixed and creates a couple of its own.
Topics: Firefox
Keeping up with Firefox 3: The agony and the ecstasy of full page-zoom
I've been playing with the page-zoom feature in Firefox 3 Beta 3. Thanks to the hard work of the Mozilla folks, Firefox is now the third major browser (behind Opera and IE7) to support this feature. (Safari, of course, supports page zoom on the iPhone but not yet on the desktop.) I don't know whether to be elated or annoyed.
A little background: For years, browsers have allowed users to scale the font-size of any web page using built-in browser controls. The text would get bigger, but other page elements wouldn't. Increasing your font size wouldn't affect the layout of the page at all. If sites weren't careful about how they built their CSS, absolute positioning and fixed-width elements would conflict with the zoomed-up font sizes. The result wold be pages where the main content was readable, but navigational and chrome elements looked grotesquely distorted or in some cases disappeared into the seams of the CSS (see photo below).
Topics: Accessibility, Firefox, Firefox Extensions, IE7
Ajax, Browsers, Running Out of Time
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. -- Karl Marx
I can remember the day, back in 1994, when I abandoned the Mac for Windows. It was a gloomy, overcast day when I made that bittersweet decision -- I was a Mac and Unix nerd all through college -- but after my twelfth or thirteenth crash of the day, I had had enough. Photoshop, Netscape, Secure Shell and Word were just not meant to run more than one at a time on Mac OS 7. Had I stayed with Apple through that rough patch I'm sure I would have been slimmer, sexier and happier, but NT 3.51 only crashed twice a day, so my hand was forced. I ran out and bought a PC that very day.
Now I fear history may be repeating itself. Yesterday, I had Firefox 2 for linux crash 5 times, and IE7 for XP crash 7 times. The cause? Too many fat Ajax applications. Zimbra, the whole Google bestiary of applications, Yahoo Mail, etc.. These are all long running applications that I keep open for most of the day. Then all of a sudden the Browser is gone and I have to relaunch and login all over again.
I'm not alone in this. Colleagues and friends report similar problems with Safari/Mac, IE7/Vista, Firefox/Mac. I've even checked with a friend that runs the helpdesk for a large firm: reported problems with browsers are up. The only one who seems blissfully unaffected is the lone Opera nerd in my office. He just keeps chugging along with what seem like 200 open tabs.
The cause should be evident to everyone. We've taken what was first called LiveScript -- a crufty embedding just good enough to validate a form or two -- and we've abused it into being the foundation for a whole new kind of application platform. The browsers have just not kept up and the situation will only get worse with the accelerated proliferation of Web 2.0 apps.
Help is on the way, in the form of bytecode interpreters and vm's for Safari and Mozilla, though the future of IE is still cloudy (still, there is a plan to bring Tamarin to IE). But if the new Browser version don't arrive quickly enough, or if they don't fully solve the problem of browsers crashing once an hour, then a mass migration to Opera may be the best we can hope for. At worst, content and application producers will opt for more stable non-Ajax alternatives such as Flash or Silverlight.
Ajax and the browsers it depends on are running out of time. If the notion spreads that it isn't reliable, it will be as dead as the Java Applet, never to be heard from again.
Topics: Ajax Applications, Browsers, Editorial, Firefox, IE, IE6, IE7, Javascript
Unofficial Firefox 3 Beta 1 release for Mac and Linux
Occasionally, in-between the latest iPod rumors and stupid top-10 lists from Cracked, Digg coughs up the good stuff. Case in point: today's post about Firefox 3 Beta 1. So far it's only available for Mac and Linux, and the download directory includes the following "IMPORTANT NOTE":
These files are not release versions, they are just potential release
versions. Use them at your own risk, without any of the warnings that we
will be putting in the release notes.To be honest, if you're here from Digg or something similar, we'd really
rather you waited until 3.0b1 was officially announced, so the servers
don't get overloaded and we don't have a bunch of extra work to do.
Because I'm a bad citizen - and because I didn't see the note till afterward - I downloaded the beta and installed it on my Macbook Pro. All my extensions, of course, got disabled immediately. Still, I'm already impressed with the interface improvements. The Places concept looks promising. The bookmarks manager is VASTLY more useful and intuitive. And the download manager, though a little iffy on usability, has some cool new bells and whistles, especially the ability to interact with your downloaded files from within the manager itself.
Also, strangely, dropdowns and other form elements now have the native Mac OS look-and-feel: rounded corners and all that jazz. Is this is new feature, or just something that was always there but hidden by my extensions?
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More on Safari and the new Gmail upgrade
Over the weekend my Gmail finally got upgraded to the new version. (I know, I know, a week is hardly a long time to wait for a slow-rollout Google feature. But I'm impatient.) I have to say, the history and back-button support is AWESOME. It's funny that Gmail warns you in a huge red banner to disable Firebug. I, of course, kept it enabled and immediately began digging through the DOM of the new UI. As usual, most of the JavaScript is so obfusticated that it's hard to tell what's going on. Still, it's interesting to dig through layers and layers of iframes and nested divs and see how much DOM hackery is involved. Looking behind the scenes at any commercial-grade webapp is like taking a tour of a sausage factory.
Luckily, I have a strong stomach. I'm going to make it a weekend project to really dig in and learn how they're handling their history support. In a previous post, I wondered why the new Gmail is only available for Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7. Given my own experiences with Safari's history object, I shouldn't be surprised. With bookmarkable URLs and history management so central to the new Gmail UI, no wonder Safari has been left in the cold; it's simply too buggy in this regard to receive A-grade support. Safari users have been complaining to Google that it should fix Gmail for Safari even with the old UI. I think those complaints should be lodged at Apple, not Google.
P.S. Sure enough, leave Firebug open in Gmail for any length of time and your Firefox will slow to a crawl. My FF has been crashing a bunch this week, but I'm not sure whether it's Gmail or Firefox's own latest updates. Commenters, am I the only one seeing this?
Topics: Browsers, Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Google, Safari
Songbird 0.3: Why aren’t Ajax folks more geeked about “the Firefox of media players”?
Songbird, the open-source, Mozilla-based media player, received its 0.3 "developer pre-release" on Oct. 30. The UI hasn't changed much since the 0.2.5 "developer preview," but things continue to evolve under the hood. Better yet, the documentation and demos keep getting better. Check out the developer center for information about using XUL to build add-ons or using the JavaScript API to integrate your webapp with Songbird's media player.
If you've yet to experience Songbird, a little background is in order. The project is run by Pioneers of the Inevitable, a Bay Area company founded by veterans of Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Engine. Building on Mozilla's XULRunner platform and the VLC media player, Songbird aims to unite a web browser, a media jukebox and an online media player into a skinnable, extensible, open-source application. At this stage, the app is a long way from challenging the likes of Windows Media Player, let alone iTunes. But as it grows, it promises to cultivate the same kind of fervent user and developer communities as Firefox, Thunderbird and other Mozilla projects.
I first became aware of Songbird via a Boing Boing post. I'm surprised it hasn't generated more noise in the various Ajax feeds and news sources. With all the excitement about specialized browsers and desktop webapps, from Mozilla Prism to Google Gears and Adobe AIR, it seems like Songbird would be earning a lot of buzz. Maybe I'm just not hanging out at the right water coolers.
As an Ajax developer and huge music nerd, I'm looking forward to playing with the JavaScript API. It promises seamless integration between webapps running in the Songbird browser and the media player itself. Imagine iTunes, but instead of a built-in browser that only supports the iTunes store, you've got a Firefox clone that plays well with music vendors, P2P networks, MP3 blogs and any other internet music resource. Visit a music mag, for instance, and see all of its featured downloads automatically show up as a playlist in the media player (as in the Hype Machine example above). Visit an online music store and experience an iTunes-esque purchase experience. Indie-music brands such as eMusic and the aforementioned Hype Machine have already gotten on board. To see Songbird's API in action, compare these sites in Firefox and Songbird.
Songbird's add-on ecosystem is cool, too, especially for long-time Firefox developers. They can adapt existing add-ons with just a few tweaks. (GreaseMonkey, for instance, has already been ported.) But Songbird's API allows for more radical innovation than Firefox's add-ons. Instead of simply adding context menus and pop-up dialogues, you can rewire the entire UI of the media player. One example on the developer site shows how to replace the single play/pause button with individual play, pause and stop buttons. That's a trivial example, but a telling one.
I'm already salivating about the cool stuff I'll be able to do with add-ons:
Tag-parsing madness
Imagine Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes ported to XUL. Like a lot of people, I'm obsessive about my meta tags, and I can't wait to use JavaScript regexes to bend them to my will en masse. I'm also hoping that Songbird will record all of its meta data in the music files themselves instead of socking some of it away in the music library. With iTunes, if you decide to rebuild your library in another player - or even in a different iTunes installation - you lose things like star ratings and play counts. It's a real bummer.
Huge libraries
The flat XML database in iTunes scales horribly. Get above about 100 gigs of music and performance slows to a crawl. This problem has only gotten worse with the bloat of Cover Flow, Quicktime integration and all the other features I don't need. I have 450 gigs, most of it ripped from my huge CD collection, and I've had to separate it into four separate libraries (using Libra) just to get decent performance. That sort of defeats the whole "any song at any time" promise of the MP3 era. Enter SQL Lite, which is how Songbird stores its own media library. I've got high hopes that a relational-database back end coupled with open-source how-to will make Songbird the media player of choice for folks with enormous libraries.
Interface freedom
iTunes and its Smart Playlists are all about endless, automated mixes. But I'm an old-school mix-tape guy. At the end of each year, all of my friends usually get a four-CD retrospective of the year's best tracks as compiled by me. But with iTunes, it's excruciating to build a "source" list of possible tracks for these multi-disc epics, then slot the tracks into individual discs and experiment with sequence. You can only view one playlist at a time, so every time you decide to move a track from one playlist to another, it's a multi-step operation. Imagine an interface where I could see my "source" list and all of my target lists at once, and where drag-and-drop defaulted to a "move" operation rather than a "copy" operation. With XUL and JavaScript, I'll be able to build any specialized interface I want and swap it in for Songbird's default UI.
Sure, most of my needs are pretty specialized, but I hardly think they're unique. And that's the point of an extensible, open-source player. You're free to build the features YOU want to see and share them with others like you. That's a lot more productive than griping over at the iLounge forums about iTunes's shortcomings.
I know Songbird isn't the only open-source, component-based music player out there, but it is the only one that's drawing on the power of the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox has shown how disruptive the Mozilla community can be in the browser market, which, like the music-player market, is dominated by a single product. Songbird may not topple iTunes any sooner than Firefox topples IE, but it should provide a powerful alternative and perhaps put some competitive pressure on the folks in Cupertino. It was extremely shrewd of Pioneers of the Inevitable to hitch their wagon to Mozilla's. I'm definitely going along for the ride.
Songbird links
Songbird posts
- Boing Boing interview with Songbird architect Rob Lord
- Ars Technica
- C|Net
- Internetnews.com
- Alpha's Place
- Blog of the Vicious Beast
- Views of a Discerning Critic
- Current_
- Hardware Beyond the Hype
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Topics: Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Innovation, Javascript, Music, Open Source, Songbird
Coming soon: Really Simple History 0.6 beta
Late tonight over at Google Code, I'll be posting a beta of Really Simple History 0.6 for testing. The goal is to elicit help from RSH users in chasing down any bugs I've failed to catch, then push out a stable release around Halloween.
I've tried to be as ambitious as possible with this release: full support of IE7/Win, Safari/Win, Safari/Mac, Opera/Win, Opera/Mac. I've didn't quite get there, but I got close.
Features in the new version include:
- Full support for IE7/Windows (though my only Windows machines use IE7 Standalone, so I need help testing on "real" IE7 installs).
- Full support for Safari 2/Mac (though I'm still trying to eliminate the "infinite loading" bug before I push out the beta).
- Partial support for Safari 3/Windows (hampered by bugs in the current beta version of the browser).
- Full support for cross-platform Opera 9.22 (though you may need to hard-code an image into your markup).
- A totally revamped test page that allows you to play with the library in your browser of choice and see how it works behind the scenes.
As always, RSH works beautifully in Firefox 2 for Windows and the Mac. I hope to give it a good shakedown on Linux browsers in the next release.
So what is Really Simple History, and why am I updating it?
An Ajax bookmarking and history-management framework originally developed by Brad Neuberg, RSH became my responsibility a little over a month ago. I tinkered with it for a few weeks, then finally camped out with it for most of the past week to get a release out.
This is the first time I've ever contributed in this manner to an open-source project. It's been a lot of fun, but it's also been maddening, as anybody who's ever dug into the bowels of cross-browser history management can tell you. Here's a sampling of what I've learned from RSH:
Safari is crazy
Plenty of people who've worked on Ajax bookmarking projects have commented about this, but it only becomes clear once you've actually seen it in action. Getting this thing to work in Safari 2 for the Mac took a wildly disproportionate amount of time considering its market share. I wouldn't have been able to do it without Bertrand Le Roy over at Microsoft, whose blog entry on the development of the .Net history manager pointed the way for both Safari and Opera.
As Le Roy and others have noted, the Safari 3 Windows beta is so buggy that history management is hopeless. You can enable the back button for Ajax apps, but once you use it, the forward button becomes disabled. I noticed yet another wrinkle in this behavior (skip ahead if you're easily bored):
Navigate to a non-RSH site - Google, for instance. Then travel to an RSH site, create some history entries via RSH, and use your back button. The forward button stops working: a known bug. Now keep hitting back until you get back to Google again. Suddenly, your forward button works again. Hit forward and land back in your RSH app. Magically, the forward button continues to work.
If I hadn't spent so much of the last week lost in Safari-land, this interesting behavior might be worth further investigation. For now, I'm just hoping the Safari 3 team fixes this before the final Windows release.
Don't try to retire document.write just yet
A couple of different RSH users suggested getting rid of Brad's original calls to document.write in favor of standard DOM methods for adding elements to your page. That approach worked for some elements, but not for others.
In IE, RSH writes a hidden iframe into the document and uses the location and history of that iframe to help it track application state. Writing the iframe with document.createElement works just great.
But for all browsers, RSH uses a hidden textarea to store the entire history stack behind the scenes. This powers one of RSH's coolest features: its ability to retain history even if you navigate away to another site and then come back to your RSH application. This works because modern browsers retain form-field values throughout an entire browser session. But they do so only for form fields that exist in the DOM natively - that is, exist in the actual HTML markup or get inserted via document.write get inserted into the DOM before it's finished loading.
If you create a form element after your DOM is already loaded, the browser has no way to persist values in that element after you leave the page. Each time the page loads, even from the cache, you essentially create a virgin new form field. I'm therefore using document.write for the hidden textarea - and for the hidden form field I've added to RSH for Safari support.
UPDATE: As it turns out, it's immaterial whether you use DOM methods or document.write. The important thing is to use either method before onload fires. I ended up using document.write in the 0.6 beta because of SSH concerns and the fact that it's so much more concise. For more on this topic, see this subsequent post.
Because of the way RSH is structured, these elements actually get written to the head rather than the body of your document. Still, it works, and it should only offend the most anal-retentive of standards geeks. After all, if you're hacking the browser 10 different ways from Sunday just to enable Ajax bookmarking, then inserting a bit of non-validating markup via JavaScript is hardly the worst of your sins.
RSH won't be hitching its wagon to [insert name of your favorite framework here]
A few users suggested rewriting RSH in Prototype so it would be more compact. I appreciate the impulse, but I think that defeats one of RSH's chief virtues: the fact that it's written in Plain Old JavaScript and doesn't lock you into any specific Ajax framework. It plays well with any library you want it to: Prototype, jQuery, YUI, whatever. (If it doesn't, please file a bug so I can find out why.)
A little JSON never hurt anyone
The one library that RSH does require is a JSON parser; it ships with the latest open-source version. RSH 0.4 included an earlier version of the parser in the same file as its native code; I've broken it into a separate file under the logic that many users will already be serving a similar library. RSH's methods don't actually call toJSONString or parseJSON directly; instead, I've provided bridges so that you can hack in your own JSON methods without having to modify the guts of RSH itself.
Future roadmap
I've got quite a punch list for the next release:
- Provide minified versions of RSH and JSON for download
- Make use of Crockford's module pattern for better encapsulation
- Add official support for Linux browsers, Safari 3/Mac and Safari 3/Win
That's the future. For now, I have to get 0.6 packaged up and ready for testing. Check Google Code late this evening or first thing tomorrow.
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Topics: Ajax Frameworks, Browsers, Firefox, IE6, IE7, Really Simple History, Safari
Mash Note: Foxmarks bookmark synchronizer
All bookmark sync utilities are not created equal. Plenty of browser add-ons promise to keep your favorites in sync across computers, while Del.icio.us and its ilk host your links up in the cloud. For my money, though, if you're a Firefox user with a serious bookmark habit, nothing beats the free browser extension Foxmarks.
I'm the first to admit that I've got a problem with my bookmarks - all 3,000 of them (and counting). I do tons of research for this site and my other writing gigs. When I come across something useful, I hit Command-D automatically. (I'm just as bad with clippings in my RSS reader.) Every once in a while, I do a clean sweep: reading, filing, purging. But until I've extracted whatever piece of knowledge I need from a particular link, I want access to it from all of my workstations and Internet devices.
That's where Foxmarks comes in. When you set up an account and install this free Firefox extension on multiple computers, it keeps the bookmarks in sync across machines and backs them up to the Foxmarks server. When you bookmark something at home, then want to refer back to it the next day at the office, you're golden. And when you're away from your own workstations - say, in an internet cafe or on a mobile device - you can hit My Foxmarks, the webapp version of the service.
The Foxmarks browser add-on gives you some fairly coarse-grained control over how and when syncing occurs. If you set your preferences to sync manually, or only on shutdown, you may get stuck answering a series of dialogs as the server parses your changes. My recommendation: Enable automatic synchronization in the background. In earlier versions of the service, the sync dialogue would hijack your browser and hog your CPU, especially if you were digging around the browser's "Organize Bookmarks" screen. Such performance problems have now been reduced, if not eliminated.
As for My Foxmarks, it, too, has improved over time. The current interface uses the YUI and Ext libraries for a seamless, desktop-like Ajax experience. The UI offers both a folder-tree view and a paged grid view; you can access individual bookmarks' details from either view. There's even an iframed preview pane that can show you the target of a bookmark without leaving the Foxmarks site. And, of course, there's a scaled-down mobile version. All in all, it's a slick, well-designed experience.
Of course, there's always room for improvement. I find the built-in Firefox bookmark manager cumbersome, buggy and annoying. I'd love to see the Foxmarks team position My Foxmarks as a powerful, intuitive web-based replacement. To get there, they'd probably need to add inline editing, a more customizable interface, and perhaps integrated tagging. A trash bin for deleted bookmarks would also be pretty cool, as would the ability to batch-delete bookmarks without constant confirmation dialogs. Most browsers' internal bookmark managers - and most social bookmarking services - don't offer a very efficient or useful UI. It would be great to see somebody get it right.
I have no idea whether such features are in the cards, but Foxmarks's developers aren't resting on their laurels. Just yesterday, they announced a beta of Foxmarks 2.0, which promises to offer:
- Major changes on the server side, including much more efficient syncing.
- A nice tweak to the syncing process so that it preserves favicons across computers.
Pretty sweet!
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Topics: Firefox, Firefox Extensions, Mash Note
Really Simple History: Onwards and upwards
I'm excited to announce that I've heard the call and volunteered to tackle maintenance and stewardship of Really Simple History, Brad Neuberg's intuitive, lightweight Ajax history library. Brad developed RSH a couple of years ago, drawing inspiration from the Dojo Toolkit folks to deliver a standalone library that provides back-button and bookmarking support for Ajax apps in IE6 and various Gecko-based browsers. Since, then, many additional Ajax frameworks have implemented back-button and bookmark support, some of them drawing on Brad's work.
Meanwhile, Brad's been too busy with other projects to upgrade RSH for a variety of new and existing browsers: IE7, Opera, Safari/Mac and Safari/Windows. I asked Brad to let me take care of his baby for several reasons. For one thing, I've been an enthusiastic user of the library. For another, I've been wanting to get involved on a more formal basis with open-source JavaScript projects. But most of all, I believe RSH remains a great tool for folks who want a solution to the Ajax history issue without the overhead of a larger Ajax framework.
I'm currently working with Brad to migrate RSH to Google Code, get acquainted with the bug base, and start tackling the thorny issues surrounding Ajax history support in the 2007 browser landscape. I look forward to shamelessly pilfering the many fine solutions uncovered by a large community of developers since Brad's initial work. (Brad was kind enough to point me to this blog post from Bertrand Le Roy, which lays out many of the aforementioned fine solutions and thorny issues.)
In the meantime, I'd love to hear from RSH users about their hopes for the future of the framework. Comments, please, or ping me directly at bdillard (at) pathf.com. Thanks!
Topics: Ajax Bookmarking, Ajax Frameworks, Back Button, Browsers, Firefox, Frameworks, IE, IE6, IE7, Javascript Libraries, Opera, Really Simple History, Safari, Webkit
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