I’ve just released a useful little free application for the Palm Pre called Irish Rain.  It’s a weather application that shows the satellite footage for the last three hours of rainfall over Ireland.  Rather than having to rely on vague and often wrong weather forecasts, you can look at where the rain has been for the last three hours, with the map being animated so you can see the direction it is heading.

Irish Rain also shows the weather forecast for the today and tomorrow, for the main cities of Ireland.

For installation instructions, see http://chofter.com/apps/?n=irishrain

Update: I’ve now also submitted it as a free app to the Palm App Catalog.

I’ve just released the first version of CelText, an application for the Palm Pre smartphone.  CelText enables users in Ireland to send text messages for free, using the free web texts available from their mobile provider, either O2, Meteor or Vodafone.

This version of CelText is completely free, and can be installed using the PreCentrals Homebrew installation process, described here – http://www.precentral.net/how-to-install-homebrew-apps .

You can get CelText from http://www.precentral.net/homebrew-apps/celtext .  I’ve just submitted it, so it may not be available for a day or so after this post (Oct 19th 2009).

If you have any issues with it, there is a discussion forum at http://forums.precentral.net/showthread.php?p=1985016 where you can let me know about any bugs that may be present.

For anyone interested in the technical aspects of how CelText is written, for the most part it uses Palms development tools, but I use the Dojo Ajax Toolkit for a number of tasks, including animations and Ajax calls.

My iPhone 3G died a few weeks ago after rudely jumping out of my pocket and onto some gravel, so I took the opportunity to upgrade to the new Palm Pre smartphone.  My main reasons were mainly that it looks very cool, and writing applications for it is really, really easy if you know HTML and JavaScript.

I’ve now had it one whole day, so here are my initial impressions.

Pros

1. Obvious I know, but the multitasking is fantastic.  I got used to using multiple applications at the same time, that I don’t know how I ever did without it on the iPhone.  For example, playing a radio app and browsing the web. On the iPhone, the music stops.  On the Pre, it doesn’t.
2. Moving from application to application is much faster for me.  This includes loading new applications, and switching to new ones.  One of the reasons for this is the much publicised card metaphor WebOS uses, but just as useful is the task bar at the bottom that can be launched using the gesture area at the bottom.  Some reviewers have claimed that it’s just eye candy, since you can access the same controls by exiting out of an application into the “card view”.  However, using the gesture area, you don’t even have to exit an application to launch another.  It’ s just very quick and simple.
3. Integration with Gmail and Facebook contacts is simple to set up and well implemented.
4. The camera is better than the iPhone, and has a flash.  This doesn’t mean it’s actually any good.  Just better than the iPhone 3G.
5. Bluetooth works better than the iPhone.  My Bluetooth headset, a Sony DR-BT140Q, worked with the iPhone, but couldn’t change the music track that was playing.  With the Pre, all the Bluetooth headseats functions work as they should.
6. The keyboard is better than the iPhone onscreen keyboard.  While the keys are small and fiddly, I’m already typing more quickly that I could on the iPhone after a year of usage.
7. Turning on and off the Wireless and Bluetooth is much easier and quicker in the Pre.
8. The Pre can be used as a simple USB storage device.  The iPhone cannot.
9. The biggest Pro for me by far is that applications are SOOOOOOOO easy to write.  I’ve already written a couple, and will write more.  Unlike with the iPhone, I don’t need to buy a Mac just to write an application for a bloody Phone.  Tying a phone to a single computer type and operating system for development is a sign of real arrogance on the part of Apple.  “They’re going to want to write apps so bad for our phone we can force them to fork out on a new computer“.  Palm don’t suffer from the same hubris, perhaps because they are playing catch up, but I don’t care.  You can write WebOS applications on Windows, Mac and Linux (yes, Linux!), using just HTML, JavaScript and a little CSS.  WebOS rocks. Update: My first application is now available for free, see http://wp.me/p15eg-5i

Cons

1. The build quality of the Pre is not as good as the iPhone. As many reviewers have pointed it, it feels a bit plastic (ok a lot plastic).  The sliding mechanism could be better. It can be a bit awkward to slide open the phone when an application is live on the screen using just one hand, and the mechanism doesn’t give a good tactile feel when it slots into place.
2. The keys are a bit awkward to use.  While I still prefer the keyboard to the iPhone, there is plenty of room for improvement.
3. Getting music onto the phone was a bit of a nightmare.   It doesn’t currently work with iTunes, as I presume Apple have, in their postition of Microsoft V2, have blocked Palm from cheekily pretending to be an iPhone.  The unforgivable part of this is that Palm seem to have given no other option that enables you to put music on your phone! After some Choftering, I found a handly program called DoubleTwist, which can be used to manage the music on the Pre.  However, the simple fact that I need to use this is a massive fail for Palm.  There’s no excuse for them saying “You need another companys software to use our phone, and we’re not giving you even a less functional application to do the same”.
4. The swipe motion to go “back” in an application is awkward with one hand.  You almost have to concentrate on NOT dropping the phone when doing it.  This is definitely a two-handed device.
5. No native Facebook application.  Apparently it’s on the way, but that’s no good to me right now.  Get it sorted Palm! Facebook are a partner of Palm, what’s the hold up?
6. The process for selecting text is very awkward, and I definitely prefer the iPhone’s method of selecting, copying and pasting text.
7. When I got my iPhone, my girlfriends first impression was “Wow, it’s so cool!”.  Her first impression of the Pre, after 10 seconds, was disappointment.  No matter how much I tried to say “Look at the cool operating system, better camera etc”, you don’t get a second first impression.  I can definitely see a number of people not buying it if they simply pick it up in a shop without appreciating what’s inside.  Perhaps it’s the plastic feel, the screen that is slightly smaller than the iPhone (people don’t really care if it’s the same resolution), I don’t know.  But it’s undeniable.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with the Pre.  While the build quality could be much better, it’s all about the operating system for me.  I can’t wait to get more and more applications written for it.

Digg It

Ok, I gave in, I’m on Twitter – http://twitter.com/chofter , user @chofter.  I promised myself I wouldn’t join, because I didn’t see the point.  Hmpfh, well, there that goes.  I’ve now promised myself I’ll only write pertinent updates, not the inane crap people post about what kind of soup they had that morning.

If you’re interested in seeing how long this latest resolution lasts, or if you want to hear whatever craziness I have to impart on the tech world, dojo toolkit, or open source worlds, feel free to follow my posts (I refuse to say tweets. Damn, I just said tweets. Damn, said tweets again. Damn it…. etc)

The Dojo Tree has always been easy to make look just like you want, from changing the icons to changing the labels.

However there was always a limitation in that an entire row could not be styled.  Well, today I put through a fix for that, and you can now specify a CSS class and style for each row using the getRowClass and getRowStyle functions.

You can see a simple test of this at http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dijit/tests/tree/test_Tree_Styling.html , available from Oct 2nd 2009, and it’ll be included in version 1.4, which goes into beta any day now.  It shows how you can easily make the tree appear like an expandable, nestable list widget, with just a tiny bit of CSS.

I also plan on writing up a number of dojo.cookie articles over at dojocampus.org in the coming weeks on all the cool things you can do with the tree.

I recently installed Ubuntu Linux 9.04 on my girlfriends lovely new EEE Netbook (I highly recommend the 1005HA + EEEBuntu), but left the original Windows install intact, because, well, I’ve always had a need to go back to Windows for 30 minutes at some point for some reason or another.

The one problem I foresaw with this Ubuntu install was that if she ever had to use the Huawei Mobile Broadband modem I have, she’d have to boot into Windows.  I’d read a year ago that Ubuntu supported it, but when I tried with Ubuntu 8.10, it failed miserably.

So today I was using her netbook and needed mobile broadband, and was about to boot into Windows, when I thought “what the hell”, and tried it in Ubuntu first, fully anticipating the same failure as before, or at least 10 hoops that had to be jumped through before I could get it working.

But no – I was presented with a list of operators for my country (Ireland), asked if I was bill pay or pre-pay, I clicked once and I was connected!  No install required, unlike with windows, just enter your PIN and away you go.

The main argument against Ubuntu, and Linux in general, is that it doesn’t have enough driver support, making it impossible for non-computer literate people to simply plug in their devices and do what they need to do.  It’s great to see that the community is adding in new drivers at a great rate, and that things like cameras, wireless (which is also vastly improved recently) and now mobile broadband now “just work”, and in this case work much better than Windows.

My girlfriend, who is in no way interested in computers or open source, now complains about having to use Windows in university, because Ubuntu is so much easier and faster to use.  I can imagine the same story is playing out all over the world.  Hopefully at least

A very cool bike rental scheme was launched in Dublin, Ireland this month, called dublinbikes.ie.  The one problem I have with it is that their website makes it very difficult to find a station that has bikes available when using a mobile browser.

So, over a few hours last Wednesday I threw together a website, http://www.dublinbiker.com, which shows all the bike stations and how many bikes are available at each.  If you’re using a phone that has GeoLocation capabilities, it can also tell you what station is closest to you.  Clicking (or tapping) any of the stations will give you directions from wherever you are to that station.

I’ve also put a entry in my applications page at ChofterApps.

Have fun using it!

The dojo.beer() circus is coming to London!  On October 3rd 2009 Sitepen and Uxebu are hosting an all day dojo.beer() event, including talks on all things Dojo from the core committers, a bit of hacking and a lot of beer.  Not neccesarily in that order   See http://dojobeerlondon.eventbrite.com for more details.

I’m hopping over the Irish sea to join in the festivities, hope to you see you there

This post explains how to get up and running with Palm Pre development, including getting the tools, setting up the emulator, as well as getting debugging and the inspector working.

In the last few days I’ve started playing around with the development tools for the extremely cool new phone, the Palm Pre.  The coolest thing, from a developers perspective, is that all application development is done using HTML, JavaScript and CSS.  That means if you can write a website, you can write an application for the Palm Pre (though not necessarily a good one).

However, while Palm does provide a pretty good site, http://developer.palm.com, to help you get started, it’s missing some crucial information, which is scattered all over the web (trying to find out how to do logging is a nightmare).  So, this post will explain some of the steps you need to take to get up and running.  As I prefer to use Palm’s Eclipse based development tools, this post assumes that you are using it also, and not go into the command line stuff.

1. Getting the Tools

Follow Palm’s instructions here – http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1597 , to install their tools.

I strongly encourage you to also get the Eclipse development environment, which while it is a large download, is very useful for packaging and  launching your application with a single click.  Get Eclipse by following the instructions here – http://developer.palm.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1639 .

The Eclipse page also includes the required steps for creating a new WebOS application, adding scenes (a scene can be though of as a single web page, and you application will be made up of one or more of them) etc.

2. Create a New Scene

After following the instructions on the Eclipse page to create a new application, create a new scene clicking “File-New-Mojo Scene”, and give it the name “main”.  You should see a number of files created:

• app/assistants/main-assistant.js – This is the JavaScript code that will be executed when your scene, or page, is rendered
• app/views/main/main-scene.html – This is the HTML that defines the displayed HTML for the scene.
• sources.json has also been modified to add information about your scene.

As we want the “main” scene to be displayed when the application starts, open the /app/assistants/stage-assistant.js file, and in the setup method you see there, add the following line:

this.controller.pushScene(‘main’);

That line loads your “main” scene.

3. Starting the Emulator

Palm provides a very cool phone emulator that runs on VirtualBox, which you installed earlier.  Start it by (in Windows) clicking Start > All Programs > Palm > SDK > Palm Emulator.

One thing I’ve noticed is that if you start Eclipse before starting the emulator, it throws errors and can have problems connection. So, start the emulator before Eclipse.

Sometimes you may also see an error when starting the Emulator stating that the Novacom service must be running.  To make sure it is, click Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administration Tools > Services.  Find the Palm Novacom service in the list, right click and choose start.

4. Launching the Application in Debug Mode

As you’ll pretty much always want to be viewing debug output from your application, start it in debug mode.  To do this:

• Click Run > Debug Configurations
• Right-Click “Mojo Application” and select “New”
• Choose your project in the “Project” drop down box.
• Choose the target to be “Palm Emulator”, or if you’re lucky enough to have a Palm Pre, choose Palm Device
• Make sure to check both the Inspectable and Mojo debugging checkboxes, and click Debug.

Looking at the emulator, your application should appear.

5. Logging

Debugging with WebOS is currently a pretty nasty affair, that requires a lot of command line wizardry, that I think only a tiny percentage of people will even attempt to use (if you’ve figured it out, well done!).

However, logging is relatively simple to set up, and that’s what I use.

As with developing web applications on Firefox, you can use the Firebug function console.log to print out messages, e.g.

console.log(“the value of the input is ” + event.target.value);

So, feel free to intersperse your code with whatever logging you like.

To view the logs, you need to log into the emulator/phone remotely using Putty, a SSH client.  Luckily this is included with the Palm SDK you installed earlier.

• Go to the bin folder in the SDK, probably in c:\program files\Palm\SDK\bin, and open putty.exe
• In Host Name, type localhost
• In Port, type 5522
• Save these settings for reuse later by typing in PalmEmulator into the Saved Settings box and clicking Save.
• Click Open.
• When Putty prompts you for a login name, type root
• When prompted for the password, just hit Enter, as the password is blank.
• Now start the logging application by typing log com.mydomain.myapp. If you’re unsure of what the correct string is, open the appinfo.json file at the root of your project in Eclipse, and the right string is specified as the id in that file.

Now, when you run your application, you’ll see your console.log calls being shown there.  It’s a bit verbose, and prepends a lot before your message, but at least it’s readable.

6. Using the Inspector

Palm includes the a DOM inspector with the SDK. Before running it, and after installing your application on the emulator using Eclipse, open a command window in the SDK’s bin folder, and type

palm-launch -d tcp -i com.mydomain.myapp

once again using the correct string for your application instead of com.mydomain.myapp

Now launch the inspector by clicking Start > Programs > Palm > SDK > Palm Inspector.  The Inspector window should now launch, and display the HTML of your application.

7. Write Something Cool

I’ll leave this as an exercise to you, the good reader.  However, you should now have the ability to log messages and inspect the content of your page, so you’re almost on par with the tools available for web development (a good debugger would be nicer though).

I might write some more posts in the future covering anything cool I found or wrote for the Pre.  I’m starting to use a specialized build of the Dojo Ajax toolkit to fill in some of the blanks that Palm’s Mojo toolkit leaves out, and that’ll probably require another post.

Have fun!

Last week I realised that the process of searching for something on the web annoyed me -  it took too many key presses, too many clicks, and opened too many tabs.  To fix this, I came up with QuickSearch.

See the video below for a demo, or you can go to the QuickSearch Home Page to install it.

How I Search

My usual workflow is that I want to search for something but I don’t want to lose the page I’m currently looking at so I:

• Press Ctrl-T to open a new tab
• Press Tab to move the cursor to Firefox’s search box
• Type in my query
• Hit enter
• Read through results. If I see what I want I open in a new tab in case I want to open another, if not I type in a new search and reload the search results.
• Close the search tab.

So, I’ve opened a tab that I’ll probably only want for ten seconds, I’ve had to wait for my results until I stopped typing and loaded another page, and if I want to change my search query, I have to load the page again. Then close the search tab.

How I Want To Search

The workflow I want is

• Press a key combination to start searching.  No new window or tab should be required.  I shouldn’t have to tab to, or click, any input box.  Since Ctrl-F is used to search within a page, I decided that Ctrl-Alt-F made a sensible key combination to search the whole web.
• Start typing, and results should start appearing.  As I type I can keep an eye on the first one or two results, and if I see something interesting, I stop typing.
• I click the link I want, with the option of opening the link in a new tab without having to right click it and choose that option from a menu.
• When I’m finished using the search results, just press Esc to go back to my original page.

QuickSearch To The Rescue

I’ve implemented my desired workflow in QuickSearch, and it has really sped up my navigation around the web.

For convenience, I also added:

• Search This Site: to search just the site you’re on, press Ctrl-Alt-S
• Search Highlighted: to search for some term on the page, just highlight that word(s) and press Ctrl-Alt-F as normal.
• More Results: If the quick results provided by QuickSearch still aren’t enough, and refining your query doesn’t work, you can click the “More Results” link to get many, many more results from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and more using my search portal Chofter.com.

Cross Browser Goodness

QuickSearch works on

• Firefox, as  a GreaseMonkey script
• Google Chrome, as an extension
• Every other browser as a Bookmarklet.

See the QuickSearch Home Page for installation instructions.  I think you’ll very quickly find it indespensible, especially in Firefox and Chrome where it is completely keyboard operated, no mouse required.

Fully Accessible

Another strong advantage of QuickSearch is that it is fully keyboard accessible.  No mouse is required:

• The search is launched using keys
• All link titles are correctly labelled
• All search results can be navigated using the tab key
• QuickSearch can be dismissed quickly using the Esc key.

I think users with sight impairments will especially like this.

I previously wrote about work I was doing on the Dojo Ajax Toolkit’s TabContainer widget.  This work prevents the tab buttons from wrapping around when they are wider than the available space, and instead allows you to use either a drop down menu to select the tab (like Firefox/IE7), or to use left and right slider buttons to “slide” the buttons.

Well, thanks to some great collaboration with Dijit master Bill and a Dojo contributer called alle, the work has now been committed to the code base.  It should be available to view HERE from Aug 12th 2009 onwards, and will be in v1.4 when it is released.

If you can’t wait for it, you can either download a copy of the nightly code base from http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly after Aug 12th, or checkout the code yourself from Subversion right now.  Note that code in between releases is not guaranteed to be stable, as many features may be in the middle of upgrades.

There are a couple of issues remaining to be worked on, such as improved right-to-left support, but for people who have been clamouring for this to make it into the code base, you can grab this now, and get the upgraded, more stable widget in v1.4

For those who come to this blog for Dojo/Ajax discussions, this is a rant I had to get off my chest, so feel free to skip.

For the past year, I hosted my Dojo powered search engine, Chofter.com, with an Irish host (I’m in Dublin, Ireland) called Register365.ie. They were, and still claim to be, the largest hosting provider in the country, so I thought they were a safe bet.

The hosting solution came with some nice tools, and easily installed applications like WordPress, so I thought I’d made a good choice.

How wrong I was.  Register365.com have to be the least reliable web host I have ever come across.  My website would inexplicably go down multiple times every week!!  Each time I complained ( and I complained often), I was told that routine maintenance was being performed on the server.

How often do these machines have to be restarted?  I know other hosts that only restart a couple of times a year, or even less, and these outages are announced weeks in advance.  With Register365 I never knew when the site would be available and when it wouldn’t.

To top it all off, a few times when my site was down, I went to raise a support ticket and the entire register365.com site was down!  If they can’t even keep their own site up and running,  I doubt they put much effort into the uptime of my little website.

So…. based on the recommendation of a work colleague, I’ve switched over to an English host, Bytemark.co.uk, which actually publish the uptime of their servers – my colleagues site last went down for a scheduled kernel upgrade about 8 months ago for a few minutes.  Register365 refused to offer any guarantee of availability when I questioned them about it on the phone, even though on their main page they have an image declaring they give “maximum uptime”, whatever that means.  They also refused to turn on something as simple and basic as resource compression for JavaScript and CSS files, with no reason given.  Now that I have my own hosted Ubuntu install, I can set it up however I like.

Anyway, I’m hoping the availability for chofter.com will be improved by this move.  The DNS is being transferred at this very moment, and should hopefully be complete very soon.

If there’s something to be learned, it’s that expecting quality of service from an Irish organisation is a very risky step, even from a company as prominent as this one. So often in this country I see “shoddy workmanship”, to borrow a phrase, with no apology or attempt to rectify the matter, and certainly with no one accepting the blame.  The IT sector is unfortunately not immune to this irritating Irish trait.

Stay far away from register365!

I was recently requested by the publishers of the book ‘Learning Dojo‘ by Dojo community regular Peter Svensson.  They very kindly provided a copy of the book, and after reading it, here follows the review that I posted on Amazon.co.uk.

This books should suit those who are either just starting out using Dojo, or those who are thinking of picking it up and want a good overview of what Dojo offers.

It spends quite some time explaining how the Dojo community works, why it is organised like it is etc. Experienced users of Dojo can of course just skip these pages, but it seemed a little unnecessary for people who just want to know how to get something done.

There were a number of English language errors, , which are forgivable, however there are also a number of badly formatted code examples in the earlier chapters which are hard to read.

As the book goes on it gets better, with some very good and comprehensive chapters covering dojo.data, Dijit Form controls and Layout widgets. Theres a decent amount of coverage of the Grid widget, but given than it’s such a massive component, it would have been nice to have much more coverage – still, it would take four or five chapters to cover it completely, so it’s understandable.

It also has a nice description of Dojo’s Django Templating Language (dojox.dtl), which is a brilliant templating language that should get much more attention.

So, while this book wouldn’t suitable for someone looking purely for a reference guide (the official Dojo documentation is good for that, as well as the DojoCampus Explorer, dojocampus.org/explorer), after reading it from front to back you should have a pretty comprehensive overview of what Dojo is about, but if you are already familiar with Dojo it might not be as useful.

Today I checked in some bug fixes and performance enhancements for the dojox.widget.Calendar widget.  If you’re currently using version 1.3 or later, I strongly suggest you grab it, as it addresses an annoying bug with displaying the wrong selected date.

You can either check out the file from source control, or grab it from here – http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dojox/widget/Calendar.js any time from Sunday June 14th.

Just a quick reminder, the dojo.beer() event in Dublin, Ireland is on tomorrow, June 6th.  See my previous post at http://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2009/05/20/dojo-beer-event-in-dublin-june-6th for full details.  Should be fun!

Last week I put the finishing touches my Portlets for the Dojo Ajax Toolkit.  You can see them now on the test page at http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/dojotoolkit/dojox/widget/tests/test_PortletInGridContainer.html (it can take a while to load since it loads a hell of a lot of widgets and the code is not optimized with a build).

To see a description of what they can do, see my original post announcing them at http://shaneosullivan.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/cool-portlets-in-dojo

As a brief description, Portlets are widgets that represent individual applications used in a web portal.  They can be rearranged by dragging and dropping them around the page, and can often be customised with a number of settings.

The Dojo Portlets, in the dojox.widget project, support some useful features like:

• Customisable settings widgets, for setting user defined options.
• Loading Atom and RSS feeds to display as a list

and a good bit more.  See my previous post for a full description, or check out the test page.

Below you can see the Portlets using the blue Soria theme from Dojo.  There will probably be some small changes to the look and feel before v1.4 is released, but nothing major.  Note the different types of Portlets, from the Atom & RSS feed portlets on the left that can show more detail using tooltips or expandable secrions, to portlets containing generic widgets like a slideshow on the right.

Have fun!

I’ve added a code style tool to the Dojo Util project that developers can use to ensure that their code is following the syle guidelines published here -http://www.dojotoolkit.org/developer/StyleGuide .

You can see the current report, as of May 23rd 2009 at http://skynet.ie/~sos/misc/dojoCheckstyle/util/checkstyle/checkstyleReport.html

It can be very difficult to police your own code for tabs and spaces, and developers have much better things to be doing with their time than visually scanning over their code making sure that it is formatted correctly.

This tool identifies style guide violations, and gives developers a HTML file that displays them, and automatically fixes many of the common mistakes for you.  (This works best in Firefox right now, so you that if you have it)

The style checker is primarily aimed at Dojo contributors, but can also be used by normal users of the toolkit.  To override the standard folders that are examined, you can simply set the ‘dir‘ parameter relative to the Dojo base folder, and a checkstyle report will be generated for you custom code.

To see how to use the tool, get the latest vode from svn, the go to util/checkstyle and type

checkstyle.bat help

To run the checkstyle tool on the entire Dojo tree, simply type

checkstyle.bat

then open the checkstyleReport.html file, which you can see below.

If you want to be able to save files from the web interface, you’ll have to renamve the file checkstyle.php.rename.html to checkstyle.php, then click the Save or Save All buttons in the UI.

There is a ticket to track all checkstyle fixes at http://bugs.dojotoolkit.org/ticket/7390 , so can developers please reference this when checking in style fixes?

Announcing the dojo.beer event in Dublin on June 6th, in the Ginger Man on Fenian St.

dojo.beer events have been running all over the world for over a year now, where developers and users of the Dojo Ajax Toolkit meet up, usually with a presentation or two from Dojo committers, and always with lots of beer/wine/whiskey/Coke (for the designated driver) depending on the locale.

We’re very lucky to have Dylan Schiemann,the co-founder of Dojo and CEO of SitePen, presenting on all things Dojo/Ajax/Web2.0.  I’ll also be doing a presentation on some of the cooler things you can do with Dojo, and I might even show you how to do them!

So, if you’re interested in the Dojo toolkit, or Ajax/Web 2.0 technologies in general, come along and knock back some beers with us.  The event details are:

When: 5pm Saturday June 6th

Where: Upstairs (private bar) in the Ginger Man pub on Fenian St. Click here for a map.

What: Two very interesting and informative presentations from Dylan Schiemann (Dojo co-founder) and Shane O’Sullivan (Dojo committer).  And beer.

Duration: between 1 and 2 hours, but we’ll be hanging around for beers long after the official event is finished, so stay as long as you like!

Cost: Free!  As with all things Open Source, the event is free entry, but you can buy me a pint if you like .

Contact: You can just turn up, or add yourself to the event on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=78088992918 . Or email me at shaneosullivan1 at gmail dot com

I’ve written a useful script for Firefox and Greasemonkey called EasyCheckboxes.  It makes it more convenient to work with multiple checkboxes on a page, enabling you to select, deselect or toggle groups of checkboxes. It will also work with all web pages.

See the video below for more info, or you can install it right now by clicking here, or by visiting the script homepage at http://chofter.com/apps/?n=easycheckboxes

Context Aware Selections

One of the most useful features of EasyCheckboxes is that it is context aware.  It figures out what checkboxes are related to the one you chose, and only changes the state of those. This is useful if you have multiple columns of checkboxes, and you only want to check all inputs in one column.

Of course you can also change the values of all checkboxes on the page.

Using Dojo’s query engine, Acme, in Greasemonkey

If you’re not interested in the techie details, you can stop reading now.

Since version 1.3 of the Dojo Ajax Toolkit, it provides a standalone DOM query engine called Acme.  I compressed this down to a single line of code, and inserted it in my GreaseMonkey script.   I previously tried using the Sizzle query engine, but it had too many issues with Greasemonkey, the main being that it sometimes crashed the browser.

Using it is very simple.  Simply call:

acme.query(“.someClass”, unsafeWindow.document);

And it returns an array of the matching nodes.

I posted a couple of weeks ago on how I used the Sizzle CSS selector engine in a Greasemonkey script to skip annoying “Welcome Screens”, see it here, or check out the very handy script here.  However, there were a couple of issues with using Sizzle:

• It had to be inserted in the main page’s JavaScript context, otherwise it would not work.  This is obviously bad as it takes it out of the Greasemonkey sandbox, and potentially could break functionality on the page in question.
• On some pages it crashed the browser.  Not good.

So, I’ve replaced it with the Dojo standalone library, Acme.  Some advantages it has over Sizzle:

• It’s arguably faster
• It doesn’t have to be put outside the Greasemonkey sandbox, so no interfering with the page code.
• It doesn’t crash the browser

You can get the uncompressed version of Acme here – http://archive.dojotoolkit.org/nightly/checkout/dojo/_base/query.js

If you want a compressed version, that works independantly of Dojo, you can compress that file to a single line using the YUI compressor at http://www.refresh-sf.com/yui/