from the trenches
Well, I’ve almost finished the first round of tweaking for the application alluded to earlier. It’s my first lifesize encounter with asynchronous Javascript calls to the server (yes, I’ll call it Ajax if you insist) and my impression thus far has been remarkably positive. The Greasemonkey experience taught me lots about DOM manipulation which I’ve put to good use here and astonishingly, the app functions pretty much as I envisioned. And that was actually without sacrifices to the dark altar of browser detection. Ye gods!
Somewhat weirdly though, the otherwise marvellous Opera has some deficiencies with image opacity support - but that’s a minor blip as far as the overall app is concerned. At one point, I feared that Opera would start declining in quality and features compared to other browsers once it became free - but at least as far as the latest snapshot is concerned, this doesn’t appear to be the case. The list of changes include a Firefox/Mozilla style about:config interface, some revamped keyboard shortcuts (I won’t need to redefine them any more, thank heavens) and brilliantly, support for XPath 1.0
Staying with the browser discussion, I’ve also noticed that the Firefox nightly builds have changed the version string from 1.4 to 1.5 in the last couple of days… breaking extension compatibility yet again *sigh*. Well, on the plus side, this indicates that a Firefox 1.5 final release is drawing ever closer. Sadly, there are still several bugs that I can see (the addressbar bug is particularly annoying) - so there could be a release candidate or two after the announced RC1. Some of the more irritating UI bugs don’t even have an assignee yet.
Lots of words have been written about Flock recently - ranging from the gushing “Oh my, this is so cool and the theme is so beautiful” to skepticism about the need for another browser, albeit a specialized Firefox variant. Funnily enough, lots of the truly innovative parts of this new social browser (that term makes the browser sound very outgoing, doesn’t it ? Not like your stay-at-home fuddy duddy Firefox) like, for example, the Shelf is called Places in Mozilla-speak - and the interesting idea of integrating bookmarks with a social bookmarking service was discussed here - both features planned for Firefox 2. Perhaps Flock might never ever be as widely adopted as Firefox is at present - and I’d still think that’s ok. All I really hope that Flock accomplishes is to spur on the mainline Firefox. We don’t have a testbed for experiments with radically different user interfaces and toolsets for browsers - and Flock could provide this - even if they’re discarded or never make it into the mainstream. Remember Firefox was spun off from the main Mozilla and eventually became bigger than its parent ? Who’s to say the same won’t happen with Flock some day ?
Having said that, I do far more things with Firefox than merely bookmark stuff and write blog posts (the length of this post notwithstanding) - so I’m holding onto my bleeding edge Deer Park nightly for the moment.
On 23-Oct-05 at 11:33 pm,
Splee wrote:
Meh, I don’t really rate Flock. It’s *ok* but I don’t use del.icio.us, I use Spurl.net and I have plugins in my WP install that don’t work with the XML-RPC client in Flock (nor any XML-RPC blogging tool for that matter).
As far as the Asynchronous JavaScript goes, I’ve just launched myself into the same stuff for the first time when I’m not just buggering around. It’s actually quite a nifty tool
Oh, and I also don’t like calling it AJAX, mainly because I use JSON instead of XML. Isn’t that AJAJ? Doesn’t work quite as well, eh?
On 24-Oct-05 at 12:51 am,
Sin wrote:
I only get about one of every ten tech-related words you’re using in here (much to my chagrin), and this comment is particularly tangential to your post, but I was wondering if it’d be OK for me to e-mail you about some .htaccess-combined-with-WordPress questions that I have? If so, let me know; I’d really appreciate it.
On 24-Oct-05 at 12:23 pm,
drac wrote:
splee: Yes, I know.. the whole X in the Ajax thing falls apart a bit, doesn’t it ? I don’t know of many people who use Javascript to pass around XML, at any rate.
Sin: By all means.
Unfortunately, though, I’ll be doing an overnighter in London today (hop on the train this evening, frantically prepare Powerpoint slides in the hotel room through the night, deliver a talk tomorrow, hop on the train almost immediately and come back) … but if you don’t mind waiting on a response till Wednesday, I’ll help any way I can.