ajax

As web applications become increasingly smarter and powerful, we start to spend more time in a browser window than in any other desktop application. MS Office-replacement suites like Google Apps, are first to come to mind, but there are many other cool apps. Web-based collaboration is especially web-centric. Wikis, blogs and community sites are all authored using text-areas in a browser. In most cases a WYSIWYG editor is provided. Geeks like us, however, prefer to mess with raw code (HTML?) directly. Nice and dandy, but then you are stuck with boring black-on-white listing. Or maybe not...

Codepress is an absolutely amazing Javascript library that provides syntax-highlighting for programming code, including the ones written on PHP, Javascript, HTML, CSS, Java, Perl and SQL. It's very solid and performance is great.

I must confess, back in 2003, I did try to create something similar but failed miserably. It was either because I did not have enough time or Javascript was not powerful enough, yet, or I was not that good at it, depending who use ask. Either way, I am double excited now to see that somebody else was able to deliver this very useful and much appreciated tool.

P.S. I am going to look-around if anybody has already integrated it into Drupal and if not - you bet it is going there ;)

I have slowed down on blogging lately. It's not because there is nothing to write about anymore, but because things have been very busy for the past couple of months. One of the projects that has kept us entertained and excited at work went live yesterday.

[ geo.worldbank.org ] is a new, free web product of the World Bank’s that was masterminded by Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski and created by yours truly using Google Maps API. It provides an intuitive, visual view of development information around the world.

You can safely claim that the majority of the Earth's population has heard about the World Bank. Most of them also know that the Bank finances development efforts all around the world. However, that is by far not the only thing the World Bank does. Having been at the center of poverty reduction efforts for decades, the World Bank has accumulated enormous amounts of development data. The World Bank is as much an information bank as it is a financial institution. By creating an easy, visual entry point into its data, the Bank attempts to make the information more accessible to the public and to further its transparency efforts.

Being an entry point, the map is much more light-weight than the underlying data-sets. Different tabs provide snapshot views of country news, World Bank projects, statistical data for countries, and the links to drill-down into more comprehensive portals. Where available, the addresses of the local, brick-and-mortar information centers are given too. Map is equally geared towards general audience and professional researchers.

Adobe (ex-Macromedia) Flash is a core technology of today's Web. Unfortunately, it got a wrong start back in the days. Many designers sold their souls to the unprecedented opportunities offered by graphical web and forgot that Flash is a complement to HTML, not - a replacement. This confussion ended us in the initial flood of all-Flash websites - a complete nightmare, by any reasonable standards.

You might remember that even some big media companies made the mistake. I will spare their good names, considering that they [relatively] quickly corrected the mistake, but to make a point - the confusion did not infect only amateur designers. Unfortunately, the cure was not any less damaging - many websites and designers refused to use Flash, at all. It also helped that right at the time, Ajax emerged, giving buzzers new "hot" thing to buzz about.