Sam’s random musings

InputDraw: Allow Drawing in Forms:

Ever wanted to let your users draw in a form field?

InputDraw lets you do just that, saving the results as SVG for you to include in a form field. It’s based on Flash and is easy to use

Pretty cool, look out Lance and Rush, JS is on the hunt….

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language:

fullduplex.org » How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who [...]

Oh man so true so true

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Prototype JavaScript framework: Prototype 1.5.1.1 bug fix release:

Prototype 1.5.1.1 is now available for download. This is a bug fix release that prevents crashes with versions 1.3 and 2.0.x of the Safari browser. We urge everyone using Prototype 1.5.1 to upgrade to this latest release. Previous versions of Prototype could trigger bugs in Safari’s regular expression engine when updating elements with HTML containing script tags or when using JSON functionality with built-in security checks. These regular expression engine bugs affect Safari versions 1.3 through 2.0.4, but not Safari 3 beta or the WebKit nightlies. We’ve managed to code around them to prevent either browser crashing while maintaining the full API, keeping the performance top-notch and assuring backwards-compatibility. Prototype 1.5.1.1

there was a fix for a safari prototype.js issue just released 1.5.1.1 if you want to test it you need to use the current beta of script.aculo.us 1.7.1 b 3

ProtoPacked 2.13: Protoype + Script.aculo.us == 32kb:

John-David Dalton is up to his packing tricks again, and has created ProtoPacked 2.13:

This updated pack includes compressed versions of Prototype: 1.4, 1.5,
1.5.1 and Scriptaculous: 1.7.1_beta2.

There is also a “Protoculous” option as well (Prototype and
Scriptaculous combined)

Smallest files are:
Prototype 1.5.1 @ 15.8kb
Scriptaculous-1.7.1_beta2 @ 17.9kb
Protoculous (1.5.1 + 1.7.1_beta2) @ 32.5kb

Download from here and find protopacked_v2.13.zip.

Get your difficult to read, hard to update protopack here. But man that is smaller…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Smashing Magazine::

30 scripts for galleries, slideshows and lightboxes.

Wow that is a great list, some cool toys in there

(Via Dangerousmeta.)

Tapefailure: Web Analytics on Actions:

Joshua Gross, founder of Tapefailure, let us know about their new launch.

Tapefailure records user actions, which are recorded as tapes, and the users can play back the tapes or view various statistics about them.

You can get access to information such as visual mouse maps, and average tapes.

Tapes are recorded via iframes, and the player itself is built using Prototype.

Got to love site metrics, this is cool because you can see metrics as people work around the site…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Slider.js - Prototype based Carousel:

Bruno Bornsztein has created Slider.js, a carousel widget that flips between content, based on Prototype and Script.aculo.us.

You can see it in action, or download it.

Always keeping track of these things…

(Via Ajaxian Blog.)

Uni-Form:

Uni-Form is an attempt to standardize form markup (xhtml) and css, “modularize” it, so even people with only basic knowledge of these technologies can get nice looking, well structured, highly customizable, semantic, accessible and usable forms.

An interesting approach using javascript to give a very nice indicator of where the current focus is. Gives clean mark up and they do look nice. There are some prototype versions of the jquery parts to handle highliting the elements as they get focus. Seems to have a nice semantic nature. Would be easy to build a version of the formHelper for cakephp to help make use of this down the road.