Signed up for the announcement list yet?

Everything is on track for a mid March Alpha release…

If you’re unaware, prototype.js is the javascript library that ships with Ruby on Rails. It provides a lot of convenience features for the DHTML / front-end developer.

I’ve been using this resource for my prototype.js doc needs to date.

Found out today that there’s now an official prototype.js doc reference. Hell yeah.

Update

Forgot to mention this dope set of enhancements to prototype as well. Adds a ton of cool stuff like the ability to trigger event handlers programmatically.

No software talk today, just pictures for you to enjoy.

Found a few nice sets of photos over at the SF Metroblog. I’ve got this one at a high res as my background pic.

Graffiti goes digital. Enjoy.

Updated

Looks like the original got taken off GooTube…Here’s one that works for now.

I’ve been having major problems with my MacBook Pro battery lately.

I haven’t been able to run the laptop on battery power reliably for the past month or so. The charge will get down to around 50% then the entire computer just shuts off.

Today was the breaking point, as I unplugged the laptop from power and it just shut off not five minutes after.

After a quick call to Apple support it turns out they’re going to send me a new battery, free of charge.

You’ve got to love support like that. Thanks Apple.

Update

Got the battery, and it works like a champ. Who knows what caused the other one to flake out like that…

Check out this very well designed app for creating online portfolios.

Carbonmade oozes personality and friendliness. Something nice to see in the world of the web where everyone takes themselves way too seriously.

It looks to be the way to go for setting up an online portfolio for artists that don’t want to mess around with HTML.

Besides the nice design, most of the portfolios contain fresh work as well. Take a spin through it if you have some time.

Continuing the love for subModal today, I released version 1.4.

Took the time to fix a nasty IE/centering bug that was effecting 1.3. Whoops…Thanks go out to bhaidar on the subModal google group for spotting and reporting the problem.

Spotted in the wild…

A friend of mine directed me towards MyHeritage.com yesterday. You know the site where you can upload your face and see what celebrities you look like? It’s all over MySpace… Pretty funny stuff.

Anyhow, I was interested to see that it looks like they’re using the subModal in their code. Always nice to see things you’ve written being used.

I get a lot of questions regarding the use of a callback function with my subModal code. The following is an except from a response I posted over at the subModal google group.

1. Define the function that’ll be called on the opening page.
2. Pass the function you’d like to call into ‘showPopWin’.
3. Assign any return value on the modal page itself, if necessary
4. Call the hidePopWin function passing true

It might be easier to grok in code, so as an example…

On the subModal opening page

// returnVal can get passed in from the modal page itself...
//....see below for info
function returnRefresh(returnVal) {
  window.document.reload();
}

// Open the modal, passing in the refresh function 
// as a reference NOT a string.
showPopWin('mymodal.html', 500, 500, returnRefresh);

From inside the subModal window

// If you plan to pass a return value assign it
var returnVal = "something";

// When you're ready to close the pop window 
// call this...Passing true makes sure the return 
// function gets called.
window.top.hidePopWin(true); 

Feeling nostalgic for old-school Flying Toasters today I went looking for screen savers for OS X and found a faithful re-creation of the original.

Takes me back to the After Dark days when I had my old Mac LCII and IIsi.

Too bad the originals haven’t been open-sourced by Berkeley yet.

For something with a new-school twist I also found this pack of x11 savers that have been ported to OS X.

My favorite out of the bunch so far is the barcode module which generates random words and displays the corresponding barcode for each.

Took a few minutes out of the day today to tweak the design of this blog.

Theming Typo was quick and painless…Now at least the UI fits in with our home page a little better…