links for 2008-06-13
06.13.08 - 12:32am
New Version of the Motionbox EventHandler
05.31.08 - 05:36pm
Take a look at the new and improved Motionbox EventHandler (now on GitHub):
http://github.com/tobowers/motionbox-eventhandler/tree/master
New and improved compatibility (and requirement) for Prototype 1.6
Better extension of custom events and better ie6 and ie7 cleanup to work around a Prototype bug (which looks like it’ll be fixed).
RailsConf: UI in Rails
05.30.08 - 07:57pm
The talk is highly geared to working with designers that already know HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, that’s a limited subset. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of them. I wonder how you convince designers not working in HTML to start picking it up.
One of my favorite points is that developers should be talking to the design side about things like REST and some domain modeling. Currently, we tend to name and model things on the dev side which can make talking about products more difficult.
Part of any complicated process should be explaining the higher-level doctrines of rails as best we can and then getting into the nitty-gritty of the domain we’re targeting. I think sometimes both sides tend to forget about the need to just be able to fluidly discuss the project we’re working on.
I wonder if it’s possible to take the idea of small iteration and apply it to the more walled metaphor of photoshop -> html -> rails -> designer -> photoshop -> rails
RailsConf: 10 Things I hate about web apps
05.30.08 - 03:24pm
I gotta say… I’m a little unimpressed with this talk. He makes some valid points, but rather than working with the technologies available he went out and built his own client side app “Limelight.”
Ok, I’ll avoid the obvious: “You got to have distribution to make this viable.”
I think what he really dislikes about the web is the aesthetics of the actual languages. However, we can be better about providing ourselves nice APIs to work with (browser CSS hacks aside). Javascript, HTML, CSS are not *bad* it’s just really easy to use them poorly.
Rounded corners need not be painful after a nice library is built around them (hint… one of my co-workers might be open sourcing one soon).
Make small manageable components with easy to understand APIs and then use them to build your dreams.