Alan Coleman's

As the spring sun shone through our office window this morning I came across a couple of great things online that made the already great day even better.

The first is an online code editing app from Mozilla Labs called Bespin (Bespin video). Although only in Alpha at the time of going to press its potential is already mind blowing, a fully functioning browser based coding environment that keeps your file in the cloud. Fantastic. There’s more, included is a dashboard style file manager and command line functionality. The whole thing is put together with JavaScript using the HTML 5 Canvas Element and makes for an intuitive work area that I’m sure will at some stage offer some sort of CVS.

The second item from today is the discovery of Personas, which is also from Mozilla Labs. Essentially it’s a plug-in for the Firefox browser that allows users to skin their browser in a variety of different patterns and themes. It’s all in real time so as you navigate down the list the whole browser changes before your very eyes. Okay, it offers no additional functionality, but it does look good, great in fact.

On the same lovely morning someone sent me a link regarding an extension to Microsoft’s Expression web environment that checks your web layout in IE 6,7 and 8. So is this an admission from Microsoft that their browsers are incompatible with each other? Or just an acknowledgement that their browsing capability is a badly organised, over funded river of shit that simply does not work properly.

Redmond, you are a long way behind.

I’ve been working on the same project for several months now so haven’t really had the opportunity to mess around with new web page layout ideas. After looking around at what’s going on in the more visual fields of web design and development I was amazed at how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

All of a sudden, the web is looking great. It’s almost as if the whole thing has had a makeover following the initial hype of Web 2.0. Or maybe this is Web 2.0, it’s just that it took a little longer to happen than we at first thought it would.

One area of development that is particularly interesting at the moment is JavaScript libraries. I’ve made some fairly dramatic structural changes to our site at work using JavaScript working in conjunction with the Document Object Model, but these are scripts that I’ve written myself for a particular purpose and as such are fairly bullet proof. A library takes it a step further by offering the kind of functionality that I’d never have the time to develop.

My initial impressions of the Mootools framework was excitement tinged with the usual IE disappointment, and because of its Object Orientated nature I found debugging to be a much more drawn out process. Although it has to be said, that in itself was a superb lesson in Object Orientation.

Although we’re yet to go live with any of the functionality I’ve been playing with, it is great fun, there are simply hours of pleasure to be had from playing around with the framework and snippets of code. The whole thing reminded me of unwrapping my first metal toolbox as a child (Blue Hamerite finish).

Mootools

This is a great website too http://css-tricks.com/

2008s project at work will be the next step in our re branding exercise, the development of an in house application to manage our content, otherwise known as a CMS. The technology will come courtesy of Microsoft’s .NET framework, that being a logical progression from the classic ASP (Visual Basic) set up used to create the web site and Intranet.

It is an exiting, if terrifying prospect, one that threatens a complete immersion in a whole new area of uncharted technology. However there is hope, already the human logic of those that developed this framework has started to show itself as little different from those from the open source sector. For instance, I felt almost at home with the concept of Microsoft’s Data Tier Components, and begrudgingly acknowledged that someone has probably put a great deal of thought into what I’ve always known as, Layer Separation.

This is only the beginning of a momentous project, but what is clear already is that the .NET Framework is not quite the bloated WYSIWYG editor that people like me used to say it was.

What’s this, Something positive about Microsoft?

Maybe, only time will tell.