Hi everyone,  I won’t be posting much over the next few days.  I was burgled yesterday and lost my laptop workstation, development server,  personal archives and cable modem among other things.  I will be offline until after the holiday & my insurance settlement.

I hope to resume regular posting by monday, November 26th.

Dojo Grid has landed in the DojoX trunk for Dojo’s 1.0 release scheduled for the 31st of this month.

I’m eagerly anticipating Dojo 1.0.  It’s been a long time coming, but this is shaping up to be an excellent and capable release.

Read More on the SitePen Release

Hi everyone,

Posts may be light over the next few days as I will be attending HighEdWebDev ’07 in Rochester NY. For those of you attending, I encourage you to check out the workshop & presentation I will be giving.

The Ajax Bestiary: An introduction to the various frameworks with a focus on the strengths, weaknesses & quirks of each. Sunday October 14th 1:30 – 5:00 pm.

Making Sense of Card Sorts: Card sorts are powerful tool for planning and organizing websites. Unfortunately the analysis tools can be hard to find. This talk will show how simple excel spreadsheets and critical thinking can dramatically increase the value of card sorts in your projects. Monday October 15th, 5-5:30 PM

John Resig has posted a very cryptic series of images & animation on his blog hinting at some stunning visualization & animation capabilities coming to jQuery. And as for timeline he simply hints at “Sooner”. No word yet on how it works.

You can find it online here:

http://ejohn.org/blog/sneaky-2/

Via Ajaxian

The Ext team is proud to announce that Ext v2.0 Beta 1 is available
for download. This release of the Ext framework features updated portal
and desktop examples, documentation updates, and bug fixes.

New Sample Application Updates

In our last release, we introduced two new sample applications which
were truly a hit with the development community. The two applications,
Web Desktop and Customizing: Portals were excellent examples of the
capabilities of the new Ext 2.0 framework. For the beta release, we
have dramatically improved the features and functionality of both. The
Web Desktop has been drastically enhanced to include a start menu as
well as functional icons on the desktop. It truly looks like you’re
working within an operating system like Windows.

Available from EXTjs.com

IBM has released a preview of their new Web 2.0 Mashup kit.

IBM Mashup Starter Kit consists of two technologies: IBM Mashup Hub and QEDWiki. IBM Mashup Hub is a mashup server that stores information feeds (such as in RSS, ATOM, or XML formats) in order to enable reuse and collaboration. Mashup Hub can also merge, transform, filter, annotate, or publish information in new formats. From there, the newly-enhanced QEDWiki serves as the user interface and allows non-IT users to “mash” information from any data source in order to create a single view of disparate sets of information in minutes.

From: Alphaworks via CMS Report

A new featurepack for the Gaia Ajax Widgets framework has been released along with new logo. The release is free for all those who had purchased the Q3 release of the software.

• Added up Focus override for most of the Controls
• Several new Widgets; FishEye, DisappearingPanel (useful for having Context Menus), DraggablePanel, TabControl and WizardControl
• InPlaceEdit can now be either a “single line edit box” or “multiple line edit box”
• Three new skins; “light_blue”, “ivory_white” and “mac_light”
• 100% Safari Support! This is a feature we know many of our existing customers have been wanting for a long time…
• And much more…

Gaia is a commercial .net widget framework that retails for 295 € and features complete mono support.

Spry 1.6 has been released with a focus on web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement.

Of Special Note is the Element Selector:

Ah, the sweet Element Selector. Along the lines of jQuery and DOMQuery,
the Element Selector (SpryDOMUtils.js) is a utility used for grabbing
multiple parts of the page using CSS Selectors and applying functions
to them. Our speed is on par with other tools and we have robust and
accurate CSS3 support. Read about it here and check it out here.

There are also several new widgets:

• Password Validation
• Confirm Password
• HTML Panel

Minimized forms of all files are available

http://blogs.adobe.com/spryteam/2007/10/spry_16_and_the_dreamweaver_up.html

The first Alpha of EXT 2.0 has landed  Some of the new features are:

• Scrolling Tabs
• Highly configurable single-level column grouping capabilities as well as summary rollups at the group level.
• Anchor layout in forms to ensure a consistent size and position for form fields regardless of browser size.
• Treeviews that support additional columns for each leaf node.

Along with launch of 2.0 alpha, there’s a revised API documentation system with a streamlined ability for bookmarking & new samples.

Find More information here:
http://extjs.com/blog/2007/09/28/ext-20-alpha-release/

Vancouver, BC – October 1, 2007 – Ajax experts, Nitobi Inc., releases Complete UI 2007 Q3 today with support for Adobe Dreamweaver, and with improvements to its flagship component, Nitobi Grid. Complete UI includes nine Ajax-powered components that significantly improve user experiences for any web application. With today"s release, even beginner web designers can implement dynamic, Ajax-powered design elements in their web applications, such as embedding a spreadsheet or calendar.

Nitobi components have been popular with Ajax developers since Nitobi Grid and ComboBox first launched in 2005. Today"s release introduces Complete UI to a much wider web development and design audience because the components now support Dreamweaver, the industry-leading web design and development tool.

"Supporting Dreamweaver Extensions means more developers can use Nitobi components in their applications. Until now, most of our customers have been hardcore Ajax developers. Now, users can simply drag and drop our components into their applications using Dreamweaver," said Andre Charland, Nitobi co-founder.

"Web designers and developers rely heavily on Dreamweaver to create interactive, compelling web applications that provide a richer experience for their customers," said Mark Hilton, vice president of Adobes Creative Pro Business Unit. "Adobe is committed to supporting the adoption of AJAX and Nitobis Complete UI suite makes it simple for designers, with various levels a coding background, to work with Dreamweaver and AJAX to build advanced user interface elements into a web page."

"Nitobi"s Complete UI is a powerful set of components that will give Dreamweaver users the ability to present data in an engaging format in a fraction of the time," states Michael Lekse, Vice President of Sales and Services at WebAssist. "Dreamweaver professionals looking to enhance their user interface functionality should turn to Nitobi with confidence."

The easy drag and drop feature for Dreamweaver reflects Nitobi"s philosophy of fast, easy web application development–a key selling point of Complete UI. Complete UI components are designed to be easy to implement and to help create web applications with intuitive and graceful user interfaces. The Complete UI suite includes:

• Grid — A cross-browser spreadsheet with Excel "copy/paste", LiveScrolling, and more.
• ComboBox — A drop-down menu with autocomplete functionality, similar to Google Suggest.
• Calendar — A high-performance calendar picker that can be used with Nitobi Grid or in standalone web applications.
• Callout — A rich, skinnable tool-tip that prompts users with real-time feedback and helpful instructions as they navigate through an application.
• Fisheye — A tool bar menu featuring fisheye magnification, similar to Apple OS X tool bar.
• Spotlight — A tool for creating stylish guided tours of websites and applications.
• Tabstrip — Folder tabs for navigating to different sections of a web application via Ajax or iFrame requests.
• Tree — A hierarchical data view, similar to the folder view in Windows Explorer.
• Ajax Toolkit — A library of fully-documented tools used in Nitobi components that can be re-used in your own applications, or to build your own components.

In addition to Dreamweaver support, Complete UI includes enhancements to Nitobi Grid, including expanding spreadsheet-style rows and even better performance.

The Complete UI suite is platform-agnostic and works with a variety of development frameworks, including Java, PHP, ASP.Net, Classic ASP and Coldfusion. Pricing for Complete UI starts at US $429. For more information on Complete UI, visit www.nitobi.com. Download a 30-day free trial at www.nitobi.com/download/.

About Nitobi Inc.

Nitobi Inc. (www.nitobi.com) has been creating web-based software components and enterprise solutions for customers around the globe since 1997. Nitobi"s customers include Bank of America, Time Warner, KBR and NASA. Nitobi is an active member of the OpenAJAX Alliance and has recently authored a book on Ajax entitled, Enterprise Ajax published by Prentice Hall PTR.