Wow – freaking wow! Opera Browser is now Freeware!
In the footsteps of their 24-hour giveaway last month, Opera Software is dropping the banner ads from its Web browser and releasing their software as freeware.
For $29 you can buy premium support that includes:
Have you ever been annoyed that the JS Date object doesn’t include the nice addXXX and subtractXXX methods? The Date Extras Javascript Library
adds these methods and a few more to the JS Date object.
ScreenGrab is a very cool Firefox extension that allows you to take screenshots of web pages. What’s so cool about that? Well it captures the entire page – not just the part viewable in the browser window! It’s even cross platform!
The Cross Platform Portable Firefox is a version of the Firefox web browser that can be installed on a USB thumbdrive and will work on both the Mac and Windows. The great thing with this tool, is that your history, bookmarks, cache and extensions can be shared between your Mac and PC!
TurboGears brings together four major pieces to create an easy to install, easy to use Python-based web framework. The frontend uses MochiKit JavaScript for the browser, HTML templating is covered by Kid, the controllers use CherryPy, and finally the ORM backend uses SQLObject.
The TurboGears project is focused on providing documentation and integration with these tools without losing touch with the communities that already exist around those tools.
Take a look at the 20 Minute Wiki tutorial and screencast to have a good look at what this framework can do!.
Typetester is an web-based application that allows you to compare how different fonts will display on a screen. It’s primary role is to make web designer’s or web developer’s life easier. The author promises that as the new fonts are bundled into various operating systems, the list of the common fonts will be updated.
Microsoft has just released a beta of their new IE Developers Toolbar. The toolbar offers many of the features that can be found in the popular Web Developers Toolbar for Firefox.
Too late Microsoft – as a developer, I’ve already switched to Firefox.
ONLamp.com has a great article that will help you Understand MVC in PHP and will demonstrate how to build an MVC web framework using PHP 5.
Engadget reports that Researchers can transcribe the sound of key clicks into text with 96% accuracy. Amazing project! Just think about the possibilities for hacking!
With Microsoft’s announcements of Gadgets yesterday, it looks like most of the big players have some sort of technology that allows for the creation of small, web connected, content display applets. Here is a round up:
Here is where I think Google is missing the boat. Yahoo, Apple and Microsoft are all using technologies that are well-known and well-used amongst web developers. Writing a Widget or Gadget is quite trivial if you’ve had any experience writing JavaScript or HTML. For proof of this, look at the long list of widgets available for Konfabulator or Dashboard. To write a Deskbar panel, you need to use languages like .NET, Java, Perl or Python and to top it off, the API documention is written using examples in C++ and makes extensive use of COM! Kind of reminds me of writting desktop applications!
Note to Google – keep it simple! Just look again at those lists of widgets and compare that to the list of panels available from Google. Granted panels have only been available for one month now, but you would think that there would be more than 5!
