Sep 13, 2006 News Wire

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  • A superset of the famously tiny moo.fx library for JavaScript-powered effects, mootools adds features found in more complete libraries like Script.aculo.us. Mootools is still impressively small, and tends to give more low-level control to the developer.
  • Because the site for the new Mootools library is not yet complete, demos of the libraries capabilities are still scarce. This demo shows off how the library handles drag-and-drop with greater control (and a couple more pitfalls) than its competitors.
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  • For design firm Varien, distilling the checkout process down to a single page with carefully crafted JavaScript and AJAX features to assist the customer in filling it in resulted in a 50% increase in the conversion rate of an ecommerce site.
  • Microsoft will have a fully-supported 1.0 release of its Atlas library around year’s end. It will be split into three products: the Microsoft AJAX Library (the non-ASP.NET client side stuff), the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions, and the ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit.
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  • As soon as you get beyond very simple scripts, JavaScript’s scoping rules, and in particular the meaning of the keyword ‘this’ in various situations, can become quite baffling. This article lifts the veil nicely.
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  • This slipped by while I was on holiday, but it was important enough for me to post belatedly. Microsoft’s public Internet Explorer bug tracking system seems to be off to a shaky start.
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  • In this essay, Chris Heilmann discourages the use of CSS for adding interactive user interface features (often based on the :hover pseudoclass).
  • Use a bit of JavaScript trickery to detect your users’ font size changes and respond to them by adjusting your site layout.
  • Downloadable QuickTime videos of the presentations given at Mashup Camp this past July are now available. Beware, the files are pretty large. Streaming Flash versions are expected soon.
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  • Adobe has acquired InterAKT, which has been developing powerful extensions for Dreamweaver since the days of UltraDev, as well as the slick Eclipse-based JavaScript editor, JSEclipse, which is expected to re-launch on Adobe Labs soon.
  • From the FlashForward conference currently on in Austin, Adobe has provided a sneak peek at integration between Photoshop and Flash 9. Specifically, you’ll be able to import PSD files into Flash with a great deal of control.
  • Style Master developer John Allsopp discusses his experience with depression, getting turned down for income protection insurance as a result, and how depression may be an imminent epidemic in the IT industry.
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  • SQLyog, a slick Windows GUI application for managing MySQL databases, has been released for free under the Open Source GPL license. A commercial Enterprise edition is also available with a few extra features.
  • Crazy Egg is a service that lets you monitor the trends of mouse click positions and hyperlink clickthroughs across your sites. I’ve seen stuff like this before, but the heat map view is pretty darned cool.
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  • If you’re on Windows, chances are you’ll need to get familiar with IIS 7.0 in Windows Vista before too long. Listing many major changes (including the virtual hosts on the desktop version, and lots of ASP.NET integration), this summary is worth a look.
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  • ASP.NET is often criticized for generating bad markup. The CSS Control Adapters for ASP.NET 2.0 are designed to produce clean HTML ready for pure CSS styling, and add a new “ASP.NET CSS Friendly Web Site” option to Visual Studio.
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Kevin YankKevin Yank
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Kevin Yank is an accomplished web developer, speaker, trainer and author of Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL and Co-Author of Simply JavaScript and Everything You Know About CSS is Wrong! Kevin loves to share his wealth of knowledge and it didn't stop at books, he's also the course instructor to 3 online courses in web development. Currently Kevin is the Director of Front End Engineering at Culture Amp.

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