Archive for November 6th, 2006

Animation.js, keep it short, keep it simple!

Programmers love inheritance, they name their children like inherited classes, they implement interfaces and do other nasty things involving parent relations :P Not all of them: Bernie Sumption hates inheritance.
I was putting together my new home page the other day, and decided that the chicken could use some lipstick in the form of one of those new-fangled animated accordion widgets. I checked several different libraries and found them all to be lacking. In particular, they don’t seem to realise that inheritance is evil, and must be destroyed. By providing base classes for an effect and requiring users to subclass it to make new effects, they create a proliferation of classes and make it too hard to create new effects that the library designer hasn’t thought of (scriptaculous gets round this by thinking of every effect you might want, which is why it is so large).
Being a developer that loves a good challenge he simply made his own animation library: Animation.js. The code you get is very minimalistic and … beautiful. Programmers love not having to write too much, they hate verbosity, so keep the code they have to write short and they’ll love you :D
 
ex2 = new Animator({
     duration: 1200,
     interval: 400,
     onComplete: function() {$('ex2Target').innerHTML += "Bing! ";}
 })
 ex2.addSubject(updateButton);
 function updateButton(value) {
     $('ex2Target').innerHTML += " Badda ";
 }
 
ex13 = Animator.apply($('ex13Button'), "background-color: #3F9"); // ta da!
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A big bang in the Meebo universe

Meebo made a huge splash when it came onto the scene. It was an example of a real world app inside the browser, in this case chat. From that we started to see chat everywhere :) It also had the side benefit to proof that people would trust their passwords into a meta service like this, but that is another issue. Meebo just had a large update that they call release XX: one giant leap. With the pop-out feature you can see that it is hard to tell the difference between meebo and a native app. Here is meebo and Adium side by side: Meebo Update What’s New
  1. New visual design – Sandy and I were Photoshop newbies when we first designed meebo and we’ve been itching for an updated look. We’re thrilled to show off David’s latest work!
  2. Pop outs – click on that little icon in your IM window to “pop” the window out of the main meebo browser (don’t forget to disable any pop-up blockers you have for meebo.com).
  3. Drag and drop buddy list management – Harry A. wrote, “I’d like a way to easily consolidate and manage groups.” Mike C., Frank R., and Rafael F. agree. The ability to move buddies between groups has been our most popular feature request for a while. Enjoy!
  4. Skinning – we understand a few of you might be attached to the meebo’s first look and feel. If you are feeling nostalgic, we’ve introduced the ability to switch back to the old skin – just go to the preference area and select the ‘Classic’ skin. Keep an eye out for more skins in the future.
More good stuff…
  • Individual sign on and off – now you can manage your screen names one-by-one. Just click on the drop-down menu in the left-hand console area.
  • Localization – In addition to Bangla, Creole, Esperanto, Iloko, Jawa, Latin, Malagasy, Marathi, Mongolian, Nias, Swiss German, Thai, Uzbek support – we’ve also translated other parts of the UI such as buttons, menus, and links. The language updates dynamically based upon your location and preference too. Thai looks really good on the new front page!
  • Updated Chat Logs – Chatlogs just got a facelift. Power-users (like Sandy and Andreas) will appreciate the new design and speedier loading times.
  • AIM Profiles – This has been one of the top three requests for many weeks. AIM users, check out the ‘Set Profiles’ in the console area. Mark recently got engaged, guess what he announced in his profile this week! Congrats!
  • Optimization – We’re always trying to make meebo better and faster. Those of you with very large buddylists, like user rnbmelody, will appreciate the new performance enhancements.
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Jerome’s Keywords

After thinking and rethinking it so many times I finally decided to add an internal tagging system to the posts: Jerome’s Keywords. Got to figure out some things but it looks nice :D
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