Dylan Schiemann

After many months of working out the details, we’ve just announced the Dojo Grid! It took a significant amount of effort to make this happen, but we’ve managed to come together with a bunch of people in the community to bring an excellent grid widget to Dojo in time for the 1.0 release.

SitePen, Mozilla, Nexaweb, Redfin, Snaplogic, and TurboAjax Group (prior to and after their acquisition by ActiveGrid) have come together to make this happen. Thanks to everyone involved for adding something great to the open web!

In “Tales from the Evil Empire”, Betrand Le Roy of Microsoft has a summary of the current state of of browser history management. It’s a reasonably solid summary of browsers today, except that he comes to the following conclusion:

Now, we only have IE, Firefox and Safari Mac. I just hope this is only temporary and that both Apple and Opera repair their browsers soon.

Given that the web development community has been complaining about Microsoft for not fixing the many many flaws of their browser for most of this decade, it seems ironic that he would have the gumption to say this. Furthermore, there are other history managers that manage to work around these issues. I would still bet that Opera and Apple will “fix” these issues before Microsoft will fix the issues with their browser that the world complains about on a daily basis.

There’s an easy to follow Cometd tutorial available that shows how to get up and running with the Jetty version of Cometd. The examples use Dojo version 0.4.3, but the syntax changes necessary to make this work with Dojo 0.9 are straightforward.

Eugene has posted his dojox.gfx slides from SVG Open 2007. It’s great information for anyone wanting to learn about dojox.gfx, or wanting to see a preview of the 3d drawing and 3d charting done this summer by our Google Summer of Code students.

I had an odd realization the other day that the early popular applications on the iPhone such as Facebook and Gas.app are really the network equivalent of old hypercard applications mixed with a Gopher-style interface. Oddly enough, long forgotten user interfaces from 10+ years ago are inspiration for the new rage of mobile apps.

We’re at an interesting crossroads of UI development at this point. Do we basically cede control of the way our applications look and behave to the excellent but limited user interface that Apple provides for many of their applications, or do we try to innovate on the user interface to keep some uniqueness to our user experience?

I’ve read a few early horror stories of international roaming with the iPhone and $3000 phone bills. I would usually just rent a phone while in Europe, but next month I am giving a talk about the iPhone in London, and I’m wondering what people recommend for using the iPhone overseas. Airplane mode turns off both the data and wireless networks. Removing the SIM card prevents phone calls, but might still allow Wi-fi. Is that the best option, or is there a plan AT&T offers for international data roaming? Any suggestions?

Apple’s $100 store credit for existing iPhone owners is a great example of a company doing the right thing by its customers. It should be enough to not discourage early adopters in the future, and yet at the same time doesn’t give people money back so much as giving them more for their purchase. Overall, it’s a very smart gesture.

• NBC stops selling shows on iTunes – does anyone really care… besides Heroes and the Office, NBC doesn’t have anything worth watching.
• Ron Paul in the WSJ – a decent write-up about Ron Paul in the WSJ… one thing the media doesn’t seem to get is that he feels abortion rights is not something that should be decided on the federal level. While he’s opposed to abortion personally, he feels that states should have the power on that type of legislation.
• Install.app for the iPhone – very cool way to make it much easier to install apps on the iPhone. Apple must be getting close to an official app installation mechanism.
• Dojo 0.9 was released – congrats to everyone at Dojo.

The 2008 sxsw panel picker is coming on Monday, August 20. We’ve submitted a few interesting panels. Be sure to go to the panel picker and vote for the ones you want to see, as they use that feedback to keep the quality and relevancy of the programming as relevant as possible.

In the article iphone.facebook.com sets the standard, we’re seeing more inspiration from the Parakey acquisition than just fbjs.