scripty2

The alpha of scripty2 is out, please head to http://scripty2.com to see the demos and grab a copy.

Also comes with on and offline documentation (probably the most requested feature!), courtesy of http://pdoc.org.

This first release focuses almost exclusively on the complete rewrite of the effects engine, which is now much more flexible and allows for some pretty nifty tricks (but see the demos!).

Note it depends on Prototype 1.6.1_rc3 (a development copy and a minified version are included with the scripty2 download).

Also note that the API is not final yet, and it is not 100% compatible with the old effects API, major changes include:

• Namespacing: now effects are called in this format: new s2.fx.Morph (...)
• Reusable effects: need to call .play() on the effects instance, can .cancel() and .finish()
• Default duration is now 0.2 secs
• Transitions are much more versatile
  

If you use effects in the preferred $('element_id').morph() format, this still works and is encouraged.

A more thorough article and tutorial are forthcoming, will post once it's out.

Please discuss this alpha release on the new group: http://groups.google.com/group/scripty2

Lotus Symphony named Best Desktop Application

CRN, a leading industry publication, announced its 2008 Product of the Year awards and named IBM Lotus Symphony its Product of the Year for Desktop Applications.

"The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. "

The editors at the Test Center for CRN evaluated hundreds of products in 2008 in categories that ranged from hardware to operating systems. In selecting each product of the year, the editors considered market impact and end user value. They concluded that 2008 has been a banner year in the technology sector. Lotus Symphony respresents one of these milestones.

Read more

Lotus Symphony Business Partners Page Announcement

No symphony is complete without a robust set of players and to that end the Symphony team is pleased to introduce a new section to our orchestra - the Business Partners Page. Discover who is leading the group and what music they are playing with Lotus Symphony.

View Business Partners

http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home

The iPhone & Rails love at first sight

ObjectiveResource is a framework for the iPhone that makes interacting with Ruby on Rails applications dead simple.

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails' ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails' standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

http://www.iphoneonrails.com

Jetpack

Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play.

In short, Jetpack is an API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using the web technologies you already know.

As with all Labs experiments, Jetpack is an open source project and everyone is welcome to participate in its design, development and testing.

Web-based

• HTML, Javascript, and CSS will be the only tools required
• Have the full power of the open Web: AJAX & multimedia capabilities including canvas, audio and video
• Streamed & accessible via a URL, just like the rest of the Web
• Debugged in the browser without restarting using common Web development tools like Firebug

Secure

• Provides access to only the privileges needed, with security issues always be presented in social-terms, and not technical-terms
• Short and easy to review code ensures that potential security issues are shallow, and review times short

Robust

• Versioned APIs so that you won't have to update & revalidate your code for every new version of Firefox
• Lightweight but full featured, enabling simple and complex applications that add to the Web experience, just like Firefox add-ons do today

Extensible

• Archiecture will allow for the easy inclusion of reviewed & versioned third-party toolkits (e.g. jQuery, Dojo, etc.) and API libraries (e.g. Twitter, Delicious, Google Maps, etc.)

https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/

JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit

The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web.

Features

• Multiple Data Representations
  Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, and more...
• Major Browsers Support
  IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+
• Open Source
  Licensed under the BSD License
• Library Agnostic
  You may use the JIT with your favorite DOM manipulation framework
• Extensible
  All visualization classes are mutable, so you can easily add/override any method you want.
• Composable
  Visualizations can be combined in order to create new visualization methods.

http://thejit.org

rubyrep

Development of an open-source solution for asynchronous, master-master replication of relational databases that is

• ridiculously easy to use
• database independent¹

¹ Currently supports PostgreSQL and MySQL.

• Can scan two databases for differences
• Can sync two databases
• Can continuously replicate between between two databases

For the full feature list please click here.

http://www.rubyrep.org/

Page Speed

Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.

Page Speed performs several tests on a site's web server configuration and front-end code. These tests are based on a set of best practices known to enhance web page performance. Webmasters who run Page Speed on their pages get a set of scores for each page, as well as helpful suggestions on how to improve its performance.

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

Exporting HTTP tracing data from Firebug

• NetExport - (requires Firebug 1.4a26 and higher) an extension that allows exporting HTTP tracing data from Firebug. This extension appends a new Export button into Firebug's Net panel toolbar (see the screenshot bellow).
• HTTP Archive Viewer - online tool that allows previewing of existing logs. The viewer uses the same visual style for visualizing HTTP tracing data as the Net panel. Note that it's possible to compare tracing info generated by multiple pages (which is also something what is planned for Firebug 1.5)
• HTTP Archive Format - description of the format for exported data (doc updated according to feedback we've got).

NetExport

HTTP Archive Viewer

http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/firebug/exporting-http-tracing-data-from-firebug/