Bill Scoot over at Looks Good Works Well wrote a very interesting article: Nine Tips for Designing Rich Internet Applications. Here’s a synopsis: Make it directly interactive Make it inviting Use lightweight, in-context popups instead of page transitions where possible Use real-estate creatively Cross page boundaries reluctantly Create a light footprint Think of your interactions as storyboards Communicate transitions Think in objects Most of this we’ve heard before, but I like lists 🙂

First off, let me apologize again for the lack of posts, again. Would you believe it? My internet connection was down for an entire week. I almost dug out my eyeballs. And it came up the day before I leave for the second part of my vacation. The good news is that, this leg should only last a couple days. So I should be back up and posting by Tuesday. I get back on Sunday, but I’m going to need a few days to catch up on stuff.

I found this rather interesting: One of the more interesting aspects of Ajax is the ability to track a users interaction within the browser. I wanted to investigate navigation patterns, so I have written an Ajax based link tracker. If you press the “Ctrl??? and “X” keys you will be presented with an overlay which displays links usage by percentage. This functionality was created with JavaScript and a very simple API.

Honestly I don’t see why this hasn’t made more of an impact because this script is awesome. One of the pains that Ajax developers go through is debugging. Now, with the help of Greasemonkey the XMLHttpRequest object can be traced. The Greasemonkey script was written by a guy named Julien from Curiosity is bliss. Trust me, XmlHttpRequestDebugging is one script that is going to save a lot of time with Ajax development.

After reading posts from Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life and Links on the Semantic Web I noticed that some people are having problems when making AJAX calls from one serer to another. I believe is the problem that most would come across: Error: uncaught exception: Permission denied to call method XMLHttpRequest.open in Mozilla Firefox. And here is the fix: Just insert this block of code right before you declare the new XMLHttpRequest object:

For those of you who made it to 2006, welcome. I just thought I should mention that up until mid-January, I’ll officially be on vacation on the beautiful island of Dominica. As result of the excessive partying, beaches, and rivers (yes we really do have 365 rivers here) posts are going to be a bit slow. Just thought I should offer a bit of an explanation to my loyal readers. As soon as I’m back in TX, though, things will again be in full swing.

I just made a comment in a previous post about phpBB vs. SMF where a user mentioned the pains that we all go through when upgrading phpBB. I commneted that I cannot actually compare upgrade procedures between the two packages because from the first install of SMF a new version hasn’t come out. And here comes the irony: SMF 1.1 RC 2 is out today. After scanning through the upgrade procedures, it doesn’t look like anywhere near the horrors of upgrading phpBB.

What Is Ajax? It’s become very popular lately, even though it’s not exactly new. It’s been possible to use the concept behind AJAX since browsers introduced the XMLHttpRequest function in 1999. Enjoy Rob Gonda’s highly popular ColdFusion Developer’s Journal article on AJAX, the hottest software development of 2005, with plenty more heat promised for 2006. I know there are many out there, but this one comes from the guys over at Ajax.

We’ve seen and heard a lot about Ajax in 2005. Here is the Ajax year of 2005 in review: The AJAX Year In Review The term (and world-wide attention) behind AJAX is not even a year old, but you can find a wide range of powerful tools either with newly added support for it or created just to support the AJAX way of life. In addition, many of the constraints and problems with AJAX have been resolved or greatly reduced.

Andrew Sutherland developed a beautiful Ajax Based version of the Periodic Table. You click on an element in the table and a window pops up up with more detailed information about the element. The rest of the page is also greyed out. Check it out. [tags]Ajax, web2.0, Web 2.0[/tags]