nonsmokingarea.com

the recommendable All about Linux-blog features a detailed walk through of many features introduced with the new version 7.0 of texteditor Vim (Vi-improved). highlights include spellchecking, ‘omni’-code completion for many predefined languages, tabbed user-interface and undo-branches. the latter is a life-saving time-machine: typing ‘:earlier 5m‘ rewinds the editor-buffer to its state 5 minutes ago - even if the file has been saved meanwhile. similarily, ‘:later 20s‘ fastforwards 20 seconds. Vim is available for unix, Windows and Mac OS-X.

I just discovered O’Reilly Code Search (Beta), a search engine indexing all the sample code of more than 700 books published by O’Reilly (that’s about 2.6mio lines-of-code :)). snippets are annoted and linked with similar code from other books - a great resource for those owning an O’Reilly-collection worth several metres of shelfspace.

I just tried out an in-world text-to-speech (tts) synthesizer built by Christian Westbrook from the Electric Sheep Company. the prototype (which can be publicly tried out at Christian’s house) basically translates every message on public chat (=channel #0) into synthesized speech. the resultig audio-sample is streamed to the parcel almost in real-time and can be received by all avatars in presence. the current prototype seems to have problems with simultaneous speeches by several avatars, leading to cut-up samples. due to SecondLife’s audio-architecture, Christian’s script probably won’t work on-the-go, but only connected to particular land (afaik internet audio-streaming is only supported on parcels). still, integrate a decent cross-language translator and - voila - get a cool audio-Babelfish…amazing!

John Resig has released jQuery 1.0, a light-weight (about 10kbyte), cross-browser javascript-library including all the usual AJAX-functionality, basic gfx and advanced event-handling. however, jQuery really is focused on DOM-traversing and -modification, allowing easy manipulation of stylesheets as well as selection & manipulation of DOM-nodes (supporting CSS and basic XPath as selector-languages). iterator-methods (think ‘foreach’) for processing batches of DOM-nodes are available too. developers looking for a javascript-library strong on data-manipulation, should give jQuery a try - especially since it’s fairly well documented.

Swift is a Windows-browser based on the WebKit rendering-engine used in Apple’s Safari. the idea is basically to give Windows-based web-developers a comfortable way to write cross-platform-compatible HTML, CSS & JavaScript. however, the current alpha-release of Swift isn’t mature enough to replace native testing on Safari: form-elements aren’t supported completely, pages render slightly different than on Safari, and the app seems to have a tendency to crash on complex documents. Windows-developers should keep an eye on Swift’s evolvement, a stable release could ease their lives consideably.

Sang Shin, technology architect & evangelist at Sun Microsystems, is going to offer a free 10 week online-course on mastering AJAX, starting august 4th. the course is spread over 11 classes, containing about 40 hours of learning-material (PDF-slides, flash-demos & -screencasts). the extensive schedule covers AJAX-basics, the Dojo-Toolkit, Java-related topics (DWR, JSF-integration, jMaki) and the Google Web Toolkit. looking at the excellent material from a previous online-course Sang has done on J2EE-programming, this is highly recommended for any AJAX-beginner or -intermediate!

XHTMLized is a service claiming to convert your design-comp (think photoshop) to XHTML/CSS in max. 5 days - for an astounding average rate of 150 US$. potential customers can request a particular quote by uploading the compostion. XHTMLized promises valid, accessible and search-engine-friendly code. they even promise a money-back-guarantee in case you’re not satisifed with the results. this is in fact a very inclining offer.

XHTMLized is a collective of 12 developers currently looking for reinforcement (probably a good idea, since TechCrunch reported on about them today).

Google announces another interesting web-service aimed at developers of web-applications. Google Accounts is an authentication proxy enabling everybody to build local- and web-applications on top of Google’s user-management. in other words: visitors of your site could use their Google-(GMail-, GCalendar-, G…)-account-credentials to identify themselves on your website. since the interface’ specification looks pretty simple, I guess Google Accounts could become a common tool for user-authentication on the web - but only in addition to conventional user-registration, since nobody would like to alienate users not holding a Google-account. moreover, this service surely fuels Google-critics’ fires, as it’s remarkably similar to Microsoft’s infamous Passort…

as reported on Ajaxian, Webkit - the browser-engine powering Safari, Mail and other OS X applications - has finally received an integrated JavaScript-debugger called Drosera. since Safari’s implementation of JavaScript is differing from Firefox and others in some spots, this will ease life of many developers greatly.

If you’re a Mac user and haven’t been intrigued by Firefox or more lately by Flock, I also recommend checking out the Safari Enhancer for a better user-experience with Apples own browser.

I have never personally known a professional web-designer using microsoft frontpage, and I guess most of us were happy when Microsoft discontinued the product. however, developers may now testdrive frontpage’s successor, the Expression Web Designer (what kind of genius comes up with such a name?) in a free trial. Rachel Andrew gives a short review at thinkvitamin.com, and she is quite happy with the product:

Expression is certainly no FrontPage with a new skin, this product feels up to date and relevant to how professional designers and developers are working currently. Probably my main issue with the software is the strangely disconcerting feeling that I am developing a website in Microsoft Word.