So over at Ajaxian today they have a post on Dean Edward’s latest update for his excellent packer javascript compression tool:

Dean Edwards has released Packer v3.0, one of the top utilities to squeeze your JavaScript like a lemon.

• respects Microsoft conditional comments
• new option to shrink variable and argument identifiers
• removed the special chars feature
  
  (except the ;;; feature which people seem to like)
• some bug fixes:
  • packer no longer closes spaces between the +/- operators so code like this is safe: c = a++ +b;
  • the throw”error”} bug that affected Safari (this is a Safari bug really but packer gets around it)
  • the __proto__ bug for Mozilla browsers (this only affected the online version of packer)
  • a minor parsing bug affecting the detection of regular expressions
• simplified the user interface

Update:

The problems I outline below are fixed. Thanks Dean!

Unfortunately, I ran one of our libraries through it and found two issues that we’ll need to address before we can use it (luckly, I have a local copy of the previous version of the Packer…):

• ‘http://…’ breaks. Your packer wants this to be double quotes (“http://…”).
• /*comment*//*followed by another comment*/ breaks. This happens in our code because we concatenate several files together and each file starts with comments and ends with comments.

I emailed Dean. Maybe he’ll have a fix. If not, we’ll have to figure something out or use the old one.

Valerio posted over on the Mootools forums today a list of changes in the upcoming 1.1 version of mootools. We’ve been hard at work on a lot of this stuff and I’m excited to see it come out. After this version, we anticipate working less on the core framework and more on plugins and widgets.

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#Additions
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• CUSTOM EVENTS!
• $each also iterates objects
• added Element::getStyles
• added Element::hasChild
• added Array::include
• added Array::merge
• added $merge, to merge objects
• Dom.js uses XPATH in supporting browsers
• the use of +’px’ in setStyle is not required anymore.
• added XHR::cancel

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#Changes
————————————————————————————————————

• Object.extend is now $extend, still compatible
• Object.native is now $native, still compatible
• Element has been splitted in Element.Events, Element.Form, Element.Dimensions

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#Elements Creation
————————————————————————————————————

• elements creation is easier: new Element accepts second param
• elements creation for elements with name/type is easier, just use second argument.
• setProperty for name/type are is supported anymore.

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#Notable Fixes
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• dom logic is highly optimized and its blazing fast
• better sortables, no more flickering, removed Drag dependency
• Fx.Slide now accepts borders and margins. Positioning is now possible.
• Element::toQueryString in ajax now works as intended with all Form elements, including multiple selects.
• Element::setStyle supports float
• Element::setProperty and Element::getProperty now supports “for”

————————————————————————————————————
#Obvious Things
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• code cleanup and optimization
• bugs and incompatbilities fixed
• mootools is faster, FASTER, FAAASTEEERRR

————————————————————————————————————
#TODO
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• some bugs left
• testing
• css3 selectors (?)
• ???

There are several new goodies in the most recent release of the CNET libraries. I’ve got examples and details in the wikitorial, but here’s a quick list:

• JsonP – handles grabbing Json from a foreign domain; works a lot like Ajax
• Element.smoothShow/smoothHide – a height/opacity transition for an element to add it to the page smoothly.
• Element.setPosition – position an element relative to another (the window or another dom element)
• ProductPicker – a generic “picker” to allow users (typically in a CMS) to choose an item from a data source.
• stickyWinHTML – a default html block for in-page popups
• SimpleSlideShow – a very, very simple slideshow for dom elements or images

Have fun.

I ran a pass through our reporting software the other day and here’s the breakdown of browser usage @ CNET. It’s not in a fancy chart because I don’t have time for that kind of thing, but I’m sure you’ll manage:

OS:
92.3 % Windows
6.8% Mac
0.4% Linux

Browser:
Firefox: 23%
MSIE: 71%
Safari: 4%

MSIE:
55.9% ver. 6
43.5% ver.7

Summary:

Firefox has made some strides but continues to be an underdog. Safari is only barely big enough to even worry about supporting it (though of course we do). IE7 has made a lot of headway since it’s launch, but IE6 is still the winner (sigh) with near 40% of the total market. No other browsers cracked the 1% mark.

It’s scary that .6% of our IE users are still using version 5 (dear god why?!?) and .1% of them are using IE 4. These people, presumably, were stranded on an island after their plane crashed. There they found a fall-out shelter with a computer that requires you to click a button every 108 minutes. This button reads “object expected in line 12.”

Mootools 1.0 is out. Fancy new site design and docs.

We’ve already refactored all our code for 1.0, though it is not yet released to the CNET site. We’re entering into QA now…

I’ve also released the second part of my wiki tutorial series, this time giving working examples of all the CNET common code. The CNET Libraries are comprised of common code (widgets, shortcuts, etc.) and implementation code – code that is specific to a given page or application. The implementation code is usually just implementing and executing functions and libraries in the common portion of the library. The wikitorial for the CNET common code focuses on this generic content. Form validation, date pickers, carousels, etc. Dig in! Oh, and if you have a chance, Digg the tutorials, too. You’ll find shortcuts to do that in the right navigation column in the tutorials.