Steven Shankland, over at CNET, has written an interesting piece about Google’s NaCl (yes, chemistry geeks, that is the formula for table salt). Overall, it’s a fairly balanced review.

On the one side, we get all of the benefits of WebKit, but with the performance of a compiled native application. In theory, that then allows us to write a knock-off of Photoshop and make it cross-platform, with easy electronic distribution.

On the other side, it’s not so cross-platform that it works on mobile devices and it does splinter development efforts. It only works on x86 CPU’s to date and it requires a browser plug-in API, which already dates it, since IE10′s Metro version will be plug-in-free.

Finally, Google and Mozilla both offer competing engines. Google’s Dart is intended to supplant JavaScript while Mozilla’s IonMonkey will further improve compiler performance.

Overall, if you’re willing to venture into relatively uncharted territory, have significant say in your deployment environment, and need as much performance as possible, this is an intriguing initiative. I just wonder how many of us developers fall into that bucket.

We all knew this was coming, but google has thrown themselves into the Flash / HTML5 fray with a fun new beta tool.  Google Swiffy

Basically, it’s a tool that automatically converts SWF to HTML5 by creating an SVG animation.

http://www.google.com/doubleclick/studio/swiffy/

And now for the bad news

It’s free to use, but it’s on a closed source license which makes it a bit  of a problem for a lot of users.

Have a Flash SWF File? convert it to HTML5 with Google Swiffy:

(Via Hacker News)

Earlier this week, I discovered that Safari doesn’t support dates in ISO 8601 UTC combined format:  “2010-06-19T03:11Z”.  This was a problem as my production system was delivering me a json file with dates in this format and my project was simply a new UI for the existing server.  A quick round of googling found DateJS a powerful chainable Date extension that enables both unified parsing and mask based date rendering.  I’d only played with it for a few minutes before I was completely hooked on it.  Just look at what it can do.

   1: // What date is next thursday?

   2: Date.today().next().thursday();

   3:  

   4: // Add 3 days to Today

   5: Date.today().add(3).days();

   6:  

   7: // Is today Friday?

   8: Date.today().is().friday();

   9:  

  10: // Number fun

  11: (3).days().ago();

  12:  

  13: // 6 months from now

  14: var n = 6;

  15: n.months().fromNow();

  16:  

  17: // Set to 8:30 AM on the 15th day of the month

  18: Date.today().set({ day: 15, hour: 8, minute: 30 });

  19:  

  20: // Convert text into Date

  21: Date.parse('today');

  22: Date.parse('t + 5 d'); // today + 5 days

  23: Date.parse('next thursday');

  24: Date.parse('February 20th 1973');

  25: Date.parse('Thu, 1 July 2004 22:30:00');

And Yes It supports ISO 8601 UTC combined format!.

A quick replacement of my existing date toolkit in the project and my bugs were fixed.

D’bug has published a wonderful list of techniques for abbreviating Javascript and improving performance.

You can find the article here:

http://blog.reindel.com/2007/11/01/javascript-shorthand-tips-and-tricks/