Developing with Mono and MonoDevelop on OS X

Thursday, June 26th, 2008

Having just downloaded and installed MonoDevelop for OS X I can say that the process of getting up and running is an absolute breeze - only involving the normal mac 'download, unpack and drop into Applications' routine. MonoDevelop (and indeed Mono itself) allows you to build several types of application - ...

Dojo Toolkit Book Reviews - ‘Dojo: The Definitive Guide’, ‘Mastering Dojo’ and ‘Dojo: Using The Dojo Javascript Library To Build Ajax Applications’

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

Having been working extensively with the Dojo Toolkit, and found their documentation to be extremely useful - but not exhaustive. I was happy therefore to be able to get hold of the following of pre-release books about the toolkit: Dojo: The Definitive Guide Mastering Dojo Dojo: Using the Dojo JavaScript Library to Build ...

Reacting To Events with the Dojo Dijit Editor

Monday, June 16th, 2008

I was writing a custom set of validation routines for a form, and using Dojo's Dijit.Editor component - and having some trouble attaching my "invalid" class and a tooltip to a 'required' editor. There were several parts to the problem: Iframe Transparency in IE Targeting the containing div node, the editor's iframe tag, ...

Transparent IFrames in Internet Explorer using Javascript

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

In order to have an IFrame with a transparent background in Internet Explorer, you need to add an "allowtransparency" attribute, like so: <iframe src="iframe_source.html" id="iframe_id" allowtransparency="true" /> However, if you want to set the transparency with Javascript via the DOM, you must camelCase the property: document.getElementById('iframe_id').allowTransparency = true; Note - you must also make ...

Firefox 3 RC1 Extensions

Thursday, May 29th, 2008

Now that Firefox 3 Release Candidate 1 is out, I've decided to give it a proper trial. I had tried running Firefox 2 and 3 in parallel on my macbook, but found that 3 would always try and become the default browser, which annoyed me enough to get rid of it. ...

The Best Freeware Icon Editor

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

IcoFX is the best freeware icon editor for Windows. Aside from some really crap, not-worth-mentioning, alternatives like GoldIcon, this is really it when you want a freeware icon editor that you can, apparently, use commercially. Bonus: IcoFX is also available in an alternative zero-install portable app format.

I Took The 2007 A List Apart Survey

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007



Implementing the Zend Framework for complex projects and pages

Thursday, April 19th, 2007

Pádraic Brady has posted a synopsis of a discussion about the Zend Framework. The approach taken is excellent with real-world usage of the Zend code. I have long been a fan of the concept behind the Zend Framework - which fits with my understanding of 'small pieces loosely joined' - ...

Shortest way to create an XHR in Javascript

Wednesday, April 18th, 2007

Nicolas Faugout has a very neat, and tiny, method for creating an XHR object in different browsers: if (!XMLHttpRequest) { window.XMLHttpRequest = function() { return new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP'); } } // .... var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); Via Ajaxian

And end to Safari InputManager Plugins in Leopard. Thank god for Firefox.

Friday, April 13th, 2007

Hicksdesign reports that OS X Leopard will disable InputManagers, the technology behind plugins like Saft. Must admit I'm even less tempted away from my beloved Firefox now.