With last week’s release of Sidewiki, there have been a quite a few discussions around whether it is a good or bad thing for blogs and sites in general. Whether it is the right way to go about implementing a global commenting system, etc, etc.
Whether it is or isn’t doesn’t really worry too much – my thoughts are around what can be done with the API.
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posted on the September 28th, 2009 No Comments »
OK. My head is about to explode – which isn’t that uncommon when you are as distractable as I am. The reason for my head about to explode this time is that I have now discovered a fourth web technologies based (html, css, javascript) framework for developing iPhone (and Android usually) applications. To be frank, I am struggling for time to do a “deep-dive” into each of these frameworks so would appreciate hearing some opinions about what to use.
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posted on the September 10th, 2009 29 Comments »
If you are anything like me you have been tempted by iPhone development on a number of occasions, but you don’t currently have the time or tools available to get started. Well now there is a great toolset available for web developers who would prefer to spend their time with web technologies like Google AppEngine and jQuery rather than the likes of Objective-C.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and place for native iPhone and Android development but in terms I strongly believe that jQTouch will enable a large majority of applications to be built using web tools, and provide that iPhone look and feel.
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posted on the September 1st, 2009 2 Comments »
I’m currently on a quest for a desktop environment that is lean enough to run on my MSI Wind netbook, but scales up nicely to a multi-monitor desktop environment. Now I’ve sucessfully installed Ubuntu on the netbook but haven’t really taken the next step on getting it running the various programming environments I’m used to working with. Currently I’m stuck in a world of a heavyweight IDE (eclipse) that really doesn’t scale well to the small screen of the netbook.
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posted on the July 8th, 2009 1 Comment »
A visit to Ajaxian revealed that two interesting javascript libraries have hit various stages of pre-production release statuses:
scripty2 alpha
Scripty2 is the next incarnation of the ever popular script.aculo.us javascript library. Some pretty nifty demos show off the capabilities of the library, so one to watch.
YUI 3.0.0 Beta 1
jQuery will probably remain my favourite javascript library, YUI is definitely worthy of anyone’s attention.
So, get out there download some new kit and get mashing.
posted on the June 26th, 2009 No Comments »
Google’s App Engine has some scheduled maintenance pretty soon (June 10th (Wednesday) at 4 PM Pacific Time). During this time, both datastore writes and the memcache will be disabled. Now, I have no problem with this – all systems need to have maintenance completed on them, and in general some of this maintenance will involve service disruption.
What I do have a problem with is the suggested way of dealing with the outage. In the scheduled maintenance announcement instructions are given on how a CapabilityDisabledError exception can be intercepted and gracefully dealt with (example code from the announcement below):
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posted on the June 10th, 2009 1 Comment »
I’m a big fan of DabbleDb. It’s a slick product and simple enough that anyone should be able to dive in there and start building an online database. For those of you who are interested DabbleDb supports both free and paid plans for their service, with the only conditions on a free plan is that the data is made publicly available on a Creative Commons licence.
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posted on the May 28th, 2009 No Comments »
Tonight I have had a win. It’s a small win, but a win nonetheless. I have uploaded a small application which is making use of my new GAE tools library. The purpose behind this library is to make application development in the google appengine even more enjoyable. At this stage a python version of the library has been released, and I don’t currently have plans to build a java equivalent as I’m finding quite a pleasant language to develop in (not a language I have coded much in before).
The GAE tools library started it’s life with me calling it “Twawler” or basically a twitter search wrapper, but it grew to include other functions inside the library the meant it deserved a more generic name. The high level functions are are described below:
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posted on the May 20th, 2009 No Comments »
Really struggling at the moment to make a choice between whether to go with Java or Python in the GAE. Either seem like a pretty solid choice from the reading I’ve done, and I’m comfortable with but not deeply skilled in either language. My great fear is (being distractable and all) is that I will start to implement a project in one, and then realise I really should have been working with the other.
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posted on the May 3rd, 2009 No Comments »
Guillermo Rauch of devthought has very recently released a new version of his excellent textboxlist control, and this time he has built a version for jQuery in addition to mootools. This is definitely worth a look.
If you are looking to build an application that uses tagging, then this control will make your application feel very slick indeed. So without further delay, head over to his project and demo pages. I encountered a few issues with IE7 (which I’m sure will be resolved very soon) but it worked fantastically in Firefox.
posted on the April 23rd, 2009 No Comments »
