After an entertaining introduction Roberto Bicchierai gives us a pretty comprehensive review of available JavaScript grid components. He divides the list of JavaScript grid editor into: data-driven, light editing implementations emphasizing “editing agility”, and JavaScript Excel spreadsheet clones.
Geoffrey Grosenbach walks us through a 25 minute upgrade of a his news screenshot site, formerly a Rails 2 app, to Rails 3, in a PeepCode screencast. Here come the Rails 3 upgrades!
One of the easiest places on the net to find icons has got to be iconfinder.net. The slick interface allows you to browse, search or quickly look through a huge selection of high-quality icons by tag, as well as filter by icons that are free for commercial use or personal use only. Icon sets are clearly labeled with whatever flavor of Creative Commons license applies.
Veera Sundar has a nice list of five ways that you can use firebug to edit HTML and CSS. It is amazing how easy firebug makes it to visually modify a page layout…
If you’d like to go deeper, Digital Media Minute as a popular tutorial on debugging Javascript with Firebug.
Groovy is a dynamic programming language for the JVM that combines Java’s enterprise capabilities with productivity features like closures, builders, dynamic typing and meta-programming. It can either be interpreted or compiled and you can add new methods to classes dynamically at run time, with greater flexibility than standard Java offers. There seems to be an increasing interest in Groovy so I looked around for some quality Groovy tutorials, and here are a few that make the grade. You might want to bookmark this article, as I will actively maintain this list of tutorials, as I do with Digital Media Minute’s well-received ruby on rails tutorial listings.
There is hope for mankind. Our imagination will save us. Or something.
What do you do if your wife cries uncontrollably at the end of every single movie you watch? Clearly you buy the domain cryingwife.com and post videos of her weepy film reviews. As a bonus there is her hysterical railing against the injustice of it all, such as at the end of 2012 (not referring to the waste of money). Subtitled for your convenience. Hilarious, somebody hire these two for something.
Have you dreaded synchronization when you have concurrent Java applications and multiple threads simultaneously running and need to ensure that these multiple threads have access to the data they share? Immutable data structures can minimize the need to synchronize.
Here’s a post from Jim McClure on reducing and localizing the necessity for synchronization by creating and using immutable data structures.
MS Office as a video game?
UI truism “Don’t make me think!” is too simplistic?
Game designer Danc over at lostgarden.com has a thoughtful post about how game design will improve application design. Oh yeah, Ribbon Hero is the name of the aforementioned video game, available as a download from Microsoft, that will transform using Office into a game. ZDNet called it “brilliant”.
Matt Cutts has a nice ‘notes to myself’ post on installing Android development environment on Ubuntu 9.04.
Steven Frank leads us on a speculative-but-insightful journey on the future of computing as illuminated by (you guessed it) iPad. Frank sees a “New World” in front of us, which began in 2007 with the introduction of iPhone or possibly a few years earlier with the arrival of Web 2.0 applications. The gist of his argument is that computer usage (broadly speaking) will be less of a tinkerers’ paradise where computer users needed some under-the-hood knowledge to keep versatile all-purpose machines running. We’ll have less freedom in how we can customize our machines, but hey will be much easier for most people to use, as well as less prone to breaking down. Specifically, in tech terms:
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
1. has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
2. completely hides the filesystem from the user
3. favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
4. favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
5. lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
Even Frank, as an ‘Old-Worlder’, admits that he’s not entirely comfortable with the idea. But that may not be the point. The unwashed masses have got computers they can use easily now, they are happy as hell and will be catered-to commercially. As much as anything, this might dictate the direction we’re going. What do you think: are the days of hacking drawing to a close?
