AppleScript Shell

[AppleScript Shell](http://hayne.net/MacDev/Ash/) has got to be one of the coolest little ditties I have seen in a while, I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet, a particular person (JS you know who you are) is keeping me too busy to play with new stuff. But it is cool the list of features really is fantastic. Really brings AppleScript to some pretty high levels and makes it seem like a tightly nested feature of the os… in a really geeky way. It’s implemented as a PERL script. You can even use it as a shebang interpreter for shell scripts!

Prototype and Scriptaculous Compressed

Some [pre-compressed](http://www.stevekallestad.com/blog/prototype_and_scriptaculous_compressed.html) versions of Prototype and Scriptaculous JavaScript Libraries, still would want to test before I put into a live site, but it is nice to know the efforts are out there

* Prototype.js 1.50rc1(25K as is, 13K with gzip compression, 64K uncompressed)
* scriptaculous 1.65 (41K as is, 20K with gzip compression, 105K uncompressed)
* combined prototype and scriptaculous (62K as is, 29K with gzip compression, 169K uncompressed)

Optimizing Ajax…

Notes from the Web Builder 2.0 Conference: ”

AJAX Optimization

Scott Dietzen, President & CTO of Zimbra, Inc., talked about the three C’s of AJAX Optimization. They are:

  • Combine – When possible, merge images, css, and Javascript files together. When dealing with AJAX, fewer requests are best. Scott mentioned Two ANT tasks called Jammer and ImageMerge in the Kabuki AJAX framework that help you combine images and CSS. The result is that you get sprite images like this one from the Yahoo! home page that use CSS to display the proper section of the larger image. Yes, the CSS gets generated for you, too.
  • Compress – Use compression to save bandwidth and speed up downloads. Use JSMin or ShrinkSafe along with Apache’s mod_gzip.
  • Cache – Why bother re-requesting static data when the browser can cache? Use FireFox plugins like TamperData to make sure caching is happening like it should.

Good little tips, and things to check

(Via Zend Developer Zone.)