Dylan Schiemann

We’re starting to offer Dojo 1.0 training courses, with completely revamped course materials, activities, and more. We have upcoming courses planned in San Francisco (December), Phoenix (January), and Sydney, Australia (February) in the next few months. If you have questions or would like to request training in your area of the world, please let us know.

Most of my posts about customer service remark about how poor it is, and how annoyed I get when incompetence wastes my time. So I’m pleased to write a post about the great service I received recently from Photojojo, an online photo site and store.

I was recently looking for the new Eye-fi Card, and all other online retailers were sold out or did not yet have the card in stock. I contacted Photojojo and asked if they had any in stock as I wanted to get the access early to show it off (SitePen worked with Eye-fi on the software for the card, and Eye-fi was out of cards). Photojojo was out of stock, but then wrote back that they had received more cards and would be able to ship one overnight.

Unfortunately, we just missed the cut-off time for overnight shipping, so they did some searching online, figured out where I was located, and said they could meet me in person if I was going to be in the Bay Area. It turns out one of their founders is based in San Francisco and had one Eye-fi Card with him. I accepted their offer, picked up the card, and was able to start showing it off right away.

I can’t imagine many companies going out of their way to accommodate a customer like this. Experiences like this are far too rare.

Now that Dojo 1.0 has shipped, the community is putting a lot of effort into finishing the new web site, updating tutorials, improving documentation, examples, and demos. And fixing bugs of course.

Even with the new launch of the web site next week, we know there’s going to be a lot we can do better, and sometimes this feedback gets lost in the noise. Please let us know how we can do better, what you find to be most lacking or most needing improvement. We’re tired of being told our documentation sucks, so now that we have pretty solid source code documentation, and a pretty comprehensive online book, what else can we add to make your life easier while using Dojo?

Feel free to comment here, send us email, file a ticket in trac, etc. And of course, if there’s a demo, example, tutorial, or documentation that you’ve created that you’d like to contribute, or at least have us link to, please let us know!

I’m happy to announce the launch of Comet Daily, a new site we’ve been working on to better explain Comet.

We have a number of great Comet developers writing original content for the site. Check it out and let us know what you think!

A new article, The Mojo of Dojo, by Matthew Russell (no relation to Alex) is now available, as is the short cut preview of his book, Get Up and Running with Dojo. These are great additions for learning about Dojo 1.0. The release candidate for 1.0 is due any hour now.

On the WebKit blog, Dave Hyatt announced that WebKit now has support for CSS Transforms. This is really interesting because it takes the matrix transformation possibilities from SVG, and moves them into CSS, allowing their application on any HTML element. I’d also bet that given WebKit and Safari 3’s solid SVG support, this was relatively easy to implement, so perhaps we’ll see this in other browsers. Dojo could provide this capability with dojox.gfx in today’s browsers, but perhaps we need to find a way to leverage the CSS syntax, ala Dean Edwards’ IE 7.

It’s cool to see the Mozilla Prism announcement. It’s another entry to the “Desktop Apps with Web Technologies” section of my post on the Proliferation of Web App Platforms. Interesting that it is also announced the day Leopard comes out, with its enhanced Cocoa bindings and Dashcode support. I’m curious to see if and how it will provide support for things like Dojo Offline and Google Gears, and other native storage providers. I’m also curious to see if this lets you sandbox apps with essentially different Firefox instances so that one poorly performing web app won’t crash the others currently in use.

We returned from Italy recently… what an amazingly refreshing experience. Italy is an amazing country with the great combination of art, architecture, scenery, and cuisine. Fully recharged, there are a number of things we’ve been working on that are close to being announced:

• Dojo Toolkit 1.0: After 3 plus years, we’re closing in on a 1.0 launch date of October 31!
• SitePen: We’re working on a few interesting things we’ll be announcing in the next few weeks.
• Something else: We’re about to launch a new site… more details to follow later this week or early next week.

This is a rare non-tech post. Carrie and I have been touring around Italy for our one-year anniversary. When we return, we’ll post a full set on Flickr, but for now, here are a few shots from Milan, Cinque Terre, Siena, San Gimignano, and Florence:

The main cathedral in Milan.

The arcade in Milan.

North end of Monterosso al Mare in the Cinque Terre.

More complete view of Monterosso al Mare.

Looking down at Vernazza, the second town along the trail 2 hike… yes, we did the full-hike in one day.

Corniglia, the third of the five towns.

A nice ocean view from somewhere just before Riomaggiore, looking back towards Monterosso al Mare

Looking down at one of the many vineyards along trail 2.

The main piazza in the Tuscan town of Siena.

Looking down in Tuscany from up top at San Gimignano.

Still looking down in Tuscany from up top at San Gimignano.

While driving back from Siena to Florence, we stopped at Michelangelo’s Piazza and enjoyed a great view of Florence.

I’m giving a talk on the current state of Dojo at the Grails eXchange on October 17 in London. The conference is put on by Skills Matter, a training company that also puts on our Dojo training courses in Europe. They do an excellent job with the training courses, and there are a number of interesting courses planned on Ajax and Comet topics. As an event sponsor, SitePen is pleased to offer a £100 discount to all of our friends and clients. If you are thinking of attending, please contact me for the promotion code and then visit Grails eXchange to register for the conference.