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Does the modern browser landscape look excellent to you?

If you were able to say: “Fuck IE6″ (at least being able to say: “it will work, but will be old school.” Do you think we live in a world now where the browsers have “enough” features? That is to say - the javascript engines are fast enough to simulate features of other […]

Fast RFC 3339 date processing in javascript

At Motionbox, we use a RFC 3339 time format in some data we return. Javascript doesn't natively handle this format with Date.parse. The only other blog post I've seen on the subject is this:

http://dansnetwork.com/2008/11/01/javascript-iso8601rfc3339-date-parser/
However, since that's a regular expression that's parsing on the string, it can sometimes be slower (but not toooo bad... [...]

Mamoo released as open source

I just put the Motionbox Advanced Model Observer Observer (Mamoo) up on Github. It's a light-weight (13k), but fairly powerful framework for javascript built on top of Prototype and the Motionbox EventHandler.
It's fairly well documented and has a full suite of specs written in ScrewUnit.
Mamoo let's you stop thinking about the "glue code" you need [...]

Pownce is shutting down

http://www.sixapart.com/pownce/pro.html
People are saying this was a twitter rival. I think their product
could have been great with a slight twist on marketing - making it for
"small group file and links sharing" rather than micro-blogging...
they already had the features - but didn't push it in that direction.

Motionbox EventHandler Focus and Blur Bubbling Update

The Motionbox EventHandler ( http://github.com/tobowers/motionbox-eventhandler/tree/master ) now supports focus and blur bubbling. Based on this technique. Internet Explorer is supported too (behind the scenes it uses focusin and focusout, but you don't need to know that).
PLAIN TEXT
HTML:

<form id="formy" action="#">
  <input id="inputy1" name="inputy1" class="input_field" />
  <input id="inputy2" name="inputy2" class="input_field" />
</form>

PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:

// This now [...]

Letting users know about OpenID

Yahoo recently did some research on OpenID. The results were pretty poor, but I'm not surprised.
I think the big problem with OpenID right now is that we're all thinking about it like geeks. The main benefit to the user is that he/she doesn't have to sign up for yet another account - or give [...]

Additions to the Motionbox Eventhandler

I've been working on some additions to the Motionbox EventHandler. It hasn't moved to master yet, but you can check out the defer_functions branch.
The two major additions are:

The ability to subscribe to Objects (rather than just css rules)
The ability to defer firing of functions (using a setTimeout)

PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:

var someObj = {
  foo:  'bar'
};
MBX.EventHandler.subscribe(someObj, "customFunc", [...]

Screw-Unit javascript mocking

I'll try to blog more about screw-unit javascript testing (since it's awesome!). However, I just wanted to alert everybody about my fork at github, which will let you mock out various things in your tests.
Let me know what you think.
PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:

//
// DOM mocking
//
TH.insertDomMock('some_mock'); // which will insert the file dom_mocks/some_mock.html into a div
//
//
// Object [...]

Browser Wars

http://theclevermonkey.blogspot.com/2008/07/browser-wars-ii-end-of-ajax-is-here.html
As Waldek Mastykarz said in his blog Innovation Matters, "What concerns me is the fact, that it will be supported in IE8 only." You got it; Microsoft has drawn first blood in what will be the next browser war. As Microsoft introduces new features the Firefox team [...]
I think we're all a little more mature [...]

SproutCore models

http://github.com/sproutit/sproutcore/wikis/sproutcore-s-modern-model-layer
http://github.com/sproutit/sproutcore/wikis/sproutcore-s-modern-model-layer-part-2
http://github.com/sproutit/sproutcore/wikis/sproutcore-s-modern-model-layer-part-3
Those links (if you haven't checked 'em out) provide some nice insight into how the SproutCore team is thinking about javascript models. It's an interesting pattern of separation.
Basically:
In a model you use MyModel.get('blah') and MyModel.set('blah') and then (it uses ruby helpers) in a view you do something like this:
PLAIN TEXT
RUBY:

<%= progress_view :progress_bar_id,
      [...]