February 2005
Wednesday 23 February 2005
- Making web applications more user-friendly - Such an interesting article from Adaptive Path's Jesse Garrett today entitled "Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications" highlighting the recent trends in web apps to make them more user-friendly. This provides a good summary of the technical achievements that power the latest breed of Google apps (ie. Gmail, Google Suggest, Google Maps) without the in-depth codeline play-by-play. Brendan pointed me at Dojo, too, which is a browser toolkit that aims to provide a uniform interface to the capabilities that browsers from Firefox to Opera to IE provide. One thing's for sure: the demonstration Google Maps provides rocks, but it's still just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done when common JavaScript techniques are coupled with the DOM and client-server RPC.... (18:07)
Tuesday 15 February 2005
- Bonsai linkification - If you've been looking closely enough you'll have noticed that the commit message linkification on Tinderbox and Bonsai has gotten smarter. Now if a group of numbers is preceded by "attachment ", the link will be auto-transformed into a link to a Bugzilla attachment. Example... (11:32)
Sunday 13 February 2005
- Modifying Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR; Call for Suggestions - Slowly but surely I've been weaving my way through the Tinderbox, Bonsai, and LXR code and straightening out any parts that seem crooked. I've fixed some regressions around the layout of usernames on Tinderbox pages which was giving bad links to their commit info, properly URL-escaped committer names (so we can see what people with '+' in their usernames have changed), and, with the proper encouragement, implemented the equivalent of an "I'm feeling lucky" search for file find in LXR. (If you have an LXR keyword set up for file searching append '&lucky=1'. Hi Ben!) I can't leave out Bonsai, though, due to the amount of time I've spent getting a new installation enabled for l10n work. Packaging was never done for this tool, which means that if the person standing up a new instance isn't familiar with it, this can be pretty challenging. But the challenge is good because it points out one area in particular that the tool needs work. I'm putting a lot of thought into how tools like these are used on the Mozilla project and how they could be made better. What works and what doesn't, strengthening them while at the same time making them more flexible. They are essential for our work and could prove just as invaluable to those projects which aren't using them already.... (16:34)