There is a new “Facebook” application that utilizes CNETs great API system. This app that was developed is called “My Tech”.
Apart from the great technology use, it is a fun way to show off your latest tech gear to your friends. The best part is you can show your disdain for certain tech products if you absolutely hate it… Good times

“Tag line from app profile”
This application allows you to let everyone know about the latest tech gadgets available using MyTech powered by the CNET API. Facebook users can find it at: http://mytech.cnet.com

CNET Report on CNET MYtech

Hell must have frozen over or something. I don’t know if this just fixes certain kinds of leaks or all of them; explicit circular references in your code should still be avoided. Xopus, via Snook:

At Xopus we develop a pretty big (~50k lines) JavaScript application to edit XML documents through a WYSIWYG interface. With such a large application there’s a large risk of memory leaks. Indeed, this is what we’ve been experiencing in Internet Explorer 6. We’ve also seen a decrease in performance as memory usage increased. These leaks, however, do not occur in Internet Explorer 7. And, as of just 10 days ago, they no longer occur in IE6 on Windows XP.

On June 12th, Microsoft released security update MS07-033. Included in this update is the following:

General distribution release (GDR) fixes
A memory leak occurs in Internet Explorer 6 when you view a Web page that uses JScript scripting on a Windows XP-based computer (KB929874)

And indeed, IE 6 on Windows XP no longer leaks memory, nor performance. This is great news for all JavaScript hackers, there’s no need to worry about memory leaks anymore!

The one cave-at is that this fix is only available for Windows XP. For Xopus this means we’ll still have to fix the leaks, since some of our clients are still running Windows 2000. Users who haven’t installed the latest security updates will also experience memory leaks in IE 6. In the end though, Microsoft fixed the memory leak issues in Internet Explorer, and I’m thankful for that.

Slimbox is awesome and we wanted to use it, but there were a few things I wanted to change about it:

• It should be a class
• You should be able to interact with the options without editing the script itself
• I wanted to have the css assets added to the page automatically

So I made these changes and checked it in. Read the rest of this entry »

Over on the Mootools forum digitarald (a contributor to Mootools) has posted date.js, a date parsing script that converts just about any date a user could imagine entering into a field into an actual date. I’m probably going to add this to our /mootools.extensions/Native folder and integrate it in with our own date.picker.js.

var date1 = date2 = new Date() = "Fri Jun 08 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200"
date1.increment('day', 2) = " Sun Jun 10 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
date2.decrement('hour', 12) = " Fri Jun 08 2007 02:42:57 GMT+0200 "
date1.diff(date2, 'hour') = " 60 "
date1.getOrdinal() = " st "
date1.getDayOfYear() = " 161 "
date1.lastDayofMonth() = " 30 "
date1.getWeek() = " 24 "
date1.getTimezone() = " GMT "
date1.getGMTOffset() = " +0200 "
date1.format('db') = " 2007-06-10 14:42:57 "
date1.format('iso8601') = " 2007-06-10T14:42:57+0200 "
date1.format('rfc822') = " Sun, 10 Jun 2007 14:42:57 GMT "
date1.format('short') = " 10 Jun 14:42 "
date1.format('long') = " June 10, 2007 14:42 "
date1.format various strftime = " a = Sun ; A = Sunday ; b = Jun ; B = June ; c = Sun Jun 10 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 ; d = 10 ; H = 14 ; I = 02 ; j = 161 ; m = 06 ; M = 42 ; p = PM ; S = 57 ; U = 24 ; w = 0 ; x = 06/10/2007 ; X = 02:42PM ; y = 07 ; Y = 2007 ; T = +0200 ; Z = GMT "
Date.daysInMonth(2, 2006) = " 31 "
Date.isLeapYear(2006) = " false "
Date.parse('10/12/1982') = " Tue Oct 12 1982 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('2007-06-08 16:34:52') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 18:34:52 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('2007-06-08T16:34:52+0200') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 16:34:52 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('today') = " Fri Jun 08 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('tomorrow') = " Sat Jun 09 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('yesterday') = " Thu Jun 07 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('next monday') = " Mon Jun 11 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('1st') = " Fri Jun 01 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('14th October') = " Sun Oct 14 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('24th May, 2007') = " Thu May 24 2007 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "
Date.parse('May 3rd 2006') = " Wed May 03 2006 14:42:57 GMT+0200 "

History Manager

Here’s another digitarald script that I’m eyeing with a bit of interest, a state manager for ajax environments. From his site:

“Ajax History”, “Back-Button”, “Ajax Bookmarks”, call it however you like. This is an unobtrusive MooTools plugin to allow history handling for multiple modules, try it out. It can handle back/forward history actions and bookmarks with the location hash.

Features

• Allow users to bookmark your ajaxified application in the current state
• Forward/Backward history browsing for your Accordion and every other
• Save states of One-Page-Applications over sessions
• Change easily default options and customize the behaviour with Events

New Mootools Blog

The Mootools site now has a nifty blog and it’s got some great stuff on it already. First up is a quick set of reference links to everything you need to learn javascript. Many of these things are stuff I’ve linked to in my side-bar or in various posts, but it’s a nice collection for sure.

SlickSpeed

You might have seen this show up on Ajaxian, but the Mootools gang released Slickspeed, a set of browser tests for dom selector comparisons for various browsers:

IE Debugger: My DebugBar

Here’s a new debugger for IE that looks promising. I haven’t fooled around with it yet but if anyone has or does, post a comment with your thoughts!

Google Gears

If you’ve followed ajaxian in the last two weeks no doubt you’ve seen this already, but Google launched Google Gears a week or two ago. In their words:

Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using the following JavaScript APIs:

• Store and serve application resources locally
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
• Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness

Sounds promising. Here’s a nice little write up from Uriel Katz.

Fx.Morph

Was glancing through the demos at http://demos.mootools.net and stumbled on to Fx.Morph, a short little Fx class that transitions an element’s properties from one css class to another. I wrote something like this a few months ago but ultimately decided I didn’t really need it but now I’m giving it a second thought.