onfocus

A preview of a future release of ColdFusion. Goodbye JRun, some nice shortcuts, some teasers.

"The HTML5 history API is a standardized way to manipulate the browser history via script." The key to fixing our collective Ajax back button woes in modern browsers.

"Error level analysis (ELA) works by intentionally resaving the image at a known error rate, such as 95%, and then computing the difference between the images." Automated Photoshop detection!

Fill your design mockups with adorable kittens. It's like lorem ipsum for images.

"A collection of 100 pixelated camera illustrations for anybody to download and use in whatever way they see fit."

"In case you're as late to the party as me, it turns out that you can get web apps to behave like native apps." Nice run-down of some ways you can make a web app feel like a native app on the iPhone.

"...when you host your nameplate site (and blog) on a domain you control, it doesn't change, you never lose Google juice, and there's never a question about the canonical web page which identifies you." Gina is right!

A nice roundup of criticism of Ajax-spawned 'hashbang' URLs that sites/applications are starting to favor over traditional URLs.

"Find and explore 6124 books quoted on Stack Overflow and Hacker News."

Animated Ajax loading image generator.

A nice jQuery plugin that provides infinite scrolling with minimal setup if you already have paging.

Hey neat! James Taylor has some highly produced guitar lessons he's putting on YouTube. [via scottandrew]

"As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us. But our engineering strength is also our social weakness." uhoh, I'm guilty of this sometimes. [via mathowie]

A nice modal window kit for Prototype.

"Amplify's goal is to simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified API for various data sources." Looks like a write-once way to handle client side storage.

Filed for use: "...ultimate guide to 37 download resources for hundreds of [mobile] emulators and simulators."

Some strategies for dealing with persistant URLs, Ajax state changes, and the back button.

Write an HTML5/JavaScript app and PhoneGap will turn it into a native app for various mobile devices including iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Still in Alpha, but this looks like a great way to speed-up mobile site development. The form elements demo is impressive.

Another JavaScript charting library.

A jQuery port of Prototype's PerodicalUpdater method that includes a polling interval decay if updates aren't happening.

"...if after a few Ajax polls there’s no data, there probably won’t be for a while. Maybe the site is overloaded or the queue is backed up. In those circumstances the continued polling adds additional unwanted strain to the site." Another polling approach: increase the interval every time.

"And the greater risk is not of Flickr’s deletion of customers, but of the market’s deletion of Flickr. Because, after all, Flickr is a business and no business lasts forever. Least of all in the tech world." Valid concerns about Flickr, advertising, and how we fund the Web.

"If I had to give you a single piece of managerial advice, I would say: 'Your job with your nerd is to bring calm to their chaos'." The author of Being Geek on managing software geeks.

Kellogg's: not the best source for parenting advice.

A nice alternative to a standard AJAX poller that takes network latency and server errors into account.

"Dennis Delimarsky compared several weather APIs and decided that Google’s is best, despite having no documentation or support from the company." Looks nice!

A bit outdated, but full of good advice for tuning SQL Server applications.

"Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days. The borrower does not need to own a Kindle -- Kindle books can also be read using our free Kindle reading applications for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices." It's a start!

"...the Pro users of yesteryear’s products, the people with the biggest investment in old technologies, are not the people who should be calling the shots in the design of their successors." Let Beginner's Mind have a shot! [via torrez]

Rev Dan Catt explains why applications that rely on the social graph have scaling problems.