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I have turned in the first batch of function parameter definitions to
Aptana, tonight. One step closer toward having a PHP plugin for
Aptana!!

A couple of sites that document “browser usage” statistics:

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=6

Wondering if you have any sites that you prefer to use for these
statistics?

This type of data can easily be skewed based on the “types” of
visitors for included sites. I don’t typically have this level of
logging turned on for my sites. However when the question gets asked
or I am interested, I tend to trust a “snapshot” of logging a
particular site to better understand the browsers that visit a site.

A friend of mine pointed me to iUI, a javascript and css set that
makes apps similar to iPhone apps. You can read more about it at Joe
Hewitt’s blog:
http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/introducing_iui.php

And you can try it out at:
http://www.joehewitt.com/iui/

I found the following videos of and powerpoint from Douglas
Crockford’s presentations from The Ajax Experience 2007 in San
Francisco. You can check out the details at:

http://ajaxian.com/archives/douglas-crockford-video-advanced-javascript

If you are wondering where to find the sample AIR applications found
in the lower right corner of Aptana (with the Air Plugin installed),
below is what appears to be the original author (Kevin Hoyt, and his
blog entry releasing them to the public). These are basically some
35 discrete examples that demonstrate one particular functionality of
Adobe AIR runtime, using HTML/Javascript code.

Here is the blog entry where Kevin Hoyt discusses and provides the
download:
http://blog.kevinhoyt.org/2007/06/27/35-air-examples-for-javascript-developers/

Quick link for downloading:
http://blog.kevinhoyt.org/wp-content/air-js-examples-v1.zip

There are also some more detailed Air Sample Apps available at Adobe
Labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/samples/

I was trying to setup my reader with this WordPress site, and
searched the internet to find out how. I found this very informative
page by WordPress that explains it in great detail.

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds

Did you ever wish you could view all the Javscript code for a
particular page? How about when troubleshooting some stylesheet
related layout issue, wouldn’t it be nice to have an easy way to get
all the CSS stylesheets combined?

Well, Ron Beckman thought so…. He created JSView, a plugin to
Firefox that does both of these things and much more. You can
download it at:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2076

I turn on the option to have it displayed it’s icon in the status
bar. You can do that too, using these quick steps after loading the
plugin into Firefox. Just go to the Tools menu and select “JSView
Options”, and on the first tab, just unselect the “disable statusbar
icon” choice, and click OK. Once that is complete you will have an
icon/menu similar to this in the statusbar of Firefox.

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Awesome specialty tool, but when you need it…. it really saves you
time!

Aptana is a web development IDE based on Eclipse (or available as an
Eclipse Plugin). It provides excellent code-assist in both HTML,
Javascript, and CSS. The code highlighting and outliner provides a
quick and easy way of quickly seeing what is going on in the code.
Errors and warnings are also very beneficial and popup after you have
made the mistake (in the classic eclipse way with the red circle with
x near the line numbers).

With a plugin for Adobe AIR development, this is ideal development
environment for developing your AIR applications. They also provide
a “samples” pane in the lower right (by default) that provides quick
examples of functionality in the various Javascript frameworks, and
Adobe Air. Snippets and Scripts will also add you time (once you
realize everything that is there). I am still trying to make better
use of these areas, but they are beneficial for those “common” tasks.

Download it out at: http://www.aptana.com

They are working on a PHP development plugin… Looking forward to
that as well.

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Recently I discovered a tip while watching a Photoshop Killer Tips
video podcast (http://www.photoshopkillertips.com/), that I
wanted to share with everyone.

If you are using a shape selection tool (oval/box/etc) and begin to
draw the shape…. if you press and hold the spacebar you can move
the shape you have drawn. And then if you let up on the spacebar and
continue to drag your mouse it will enlarge/shrink the shape as
necessary.

This little tip has saved me more than a few minutes recently so I
thought I would pass it along. I wasn’t aware you could move the
shape once I began to draw it…. so I would spend time re-drawing
the shape until I got it just right. After watching Matt move a
shape and continue to grow the shape after moving it… I did a
little digging in the online help and was able to determine how it
was done.

Well, after posting about one of the many great things I learned at
The Ajax Experience (in San Francisco), I decided I needed to spend a
few minutes to attempt at a summary of the event.

I attended with a colleague, and we both felt that the show was very
well done and extremely insightful, beneficial for both of us. The
keynotes were well done and informative, and provided by: Edwin Aoki
of AOL, Brendan Eich of Mozilla, Chris Wilson of Microsoft, Kevin
Lynch of Adobe. AOL also provided a cocktail reception on Wednesday
evening including drinks and a fajita bar.

This show is a great show for the developer attempting to get more
into the Ajax movement as well as the seasoned developer wishing to
stay up with current trends, or seeking more details. We were able to
attend an overview of the frameworks or specialized sessions for each
framework (including Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Dojo, jMaki, jQuery,
Ext, qooxdoo, etc). These sessions allowed us to understand better
their focus as well as what they did well. It provided concrete
examples in the slides/demos of how this library works and how
typical code might look.

There were excellent sessions by Douglas Crockford on JSON, Ajax
Security, and Javascript in general. And an overview of Microsoft
Silverlight, Adobe AIR, sIFR technologies, allowed us to learn more
about how to use these offerings.

Finally, the sessions on the user experience and ways to improve it
were very helpful when you consider the size of many Ajax
applications today. User experience is having a much bigger impact on
which products make it and it was great to see topics like
“Anti-Patterns”, or “Ruining the User Experience” to help bring a
focus to this area.

One additional area of focus was performance and tools to help with
that including the recently released Yslow (a plug-in for Firebug)
developed at Yahoo! (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/). Another
benefit of shows like this, is to see what tools others are using to
develop/debug/tune these Ajax applications. Some of these gems were
found in the JSView plug-in for Firefox, JSLint for keeping your
javascript clean, Selenium, Aptana (awesome web development IDE based
on Eclipse!).