It took me a few weeks to find this project, but I knew it was out there: a component that provides common task-bar/tray notifications (ala Toast in OSx). The Mac version is called Growl. The Windows version is caled Snarl.

Labels: growl, notification, snarl, toast

The Internet Renaissance is back! Google Gears, Dojo, HTML5 spec draft, AJAX, Firefox 3, Air/Flex, Silverlight, that-ugly-flash-thing and lots more! I think my head is going to explode.

Labels: dojo, firefox, flex, gears, HTML, html5, javascript, silverlight

I had the chance to attend a great talk about website performance tuning: absorbing lots of great ideas and things I hadn't heard before. The book "High Performance Web Sites" (O'Reilly) was written by the presenter a few months ago and covers all the same material. Nevertheless, I'll be buying a copy as soon as I get my manager's ear for a few minutes. To sum it up:

Load javascript in parallel instead of allowing the browser to block while loading scripts one at a time, and do the same for CSS and images as much as possible, while taking into account things like inline script tags, etc.

To analyze page loading, use a packet sniffer like IBM's Page Detailer.

For easy to understand checklists of things to try, use YSlow, a Firebug Add-on for Firefox.

Lastly, to easily see and understand the effect of load order and method, use Cuzillion as a test-bed.

So, my manager gives me a document and says "put this on our website". Wonderful. Not only did they not use the template that I'd given them, but they also tried to convert it to HTML on their own, but had saved the document with all kinds of trash in it. To make things worse, it also contained badly encoded character data...and had half mac and half windows line endings. A horrible recipie for a lot of trouble. I wish they'd used Smultron or another great HTML editor for mac.

Smultron is pretty nice, but Coco/Taco goes even farther in being pretty and very extensible with HTML preview, etc.

And then, if you don't want to deal with HTML code at all, and are looking for a nice simple-as-possible WYSIWYG editor, look no further than Kompozer.

Labels: editor, HTML, Kompozer, mac, OS X, Smultron Coco, Taco, text