Did I miss the news somewhere that GoogleMaps got a big UI update?

The largest noticeable difference is that when you “zoom” it’s first just increases the resolution size of the current layer of tiles, and then replaces them with the actual higher-resolution (new) tiles as they come back from the server. The effect is a kind of disjointed ‘popping’. I like the idea that the zooming is better, but I don’t think they should zoom the text - which makes the popping more apparent.

There are other little flavorings are Web2.0-boxing of the ‘Search the map | Find businesses | Get directions’ tabs.

Ahh, I see there was a GoogleMaps Blog post titled, appropriately “Zoooooooom!”.

When developing a website using Ajax, Javascript, and DOM manipulation, debugging is often relegated to just hitting Refresh to see if it worked. Your node doesn’t update, something times out, and you’re not sure what caused it. Putting in alert() everywhere has gotten you tired of hitting enter a hundred times on every page refresh.

Enter some really nice web application development tools. Most of these use Firefox, and modify the user-centric application into a developer’s tool.

The Web Developer Firefox Extension is probably the most well known/common. It adds a toolbar that allows you to quickly and easily inspect a webpage’s layout, disable cookies, view source, modify the css on the fly, or do browser teting. It’s indispensable for developing your own site’s layout as well as understanding how other site layouts are handled.

Firefox comes with the DOM Inspector, which is a separate window you can pull up to select and inspect DOM elements of a page, traverse the tree, and dynamically change node attributes and values. This is nice if you want to check out what the class or ID is of a page element, especially with dynamically added elements (i.e. via Javascript) where they aren’t visible in the page’s source.

For checking CSS errors, Javascript errors, and POST/GET requests returned to your browser, check out Firebug (via Behind the Times). It sits in the bottom menu-bar of Firefox and shows a counter of errors on a per-page basis (rather than the Javascript Debugger which is built into Firefox, which shows all errors received to the entire Firefox application, not just the current page). Firebug is very useful for watching incoming Ajax requests. Just be careful, this can eat up a lot of memory when left active on sites with lots of errors (e.g. GMail, which typically runs up in the thousands of errors very quickly)

Even heavier application development and debugging may lead you to the Venkman Javascript Debugger. It is a full Javascript development and debugging environment where you can pull up all of the javascript files, view variables, set breakpoints, run an interactive console, etc. It’s pretty big and complex, so you probably want to check out tutorials like Learning Venkman.

The last tool is not Firefox specific, but is a special build of Apple’s Safari and KHTML engine which provides a very nice DOM inspector: Safari/Webkit Web Inspector.

Happy debugging!

Here is a tutorial on how to use javascript to change a site’s favicon (via Ajaxian).

The favicon shows up in your bookmarks, in the address bar, and on the tabs of loaded pages in a tabbable-browser. Being able to dynamically switch the favicon on a page promotes the favicon to the ability to be used as a “Status Monitor” of a webpage. For example, I am uploading a bunch of files to a website, the favicon can show an “uploading” icon, and then a green “complete” icon when it’s done. I can then return to the page to carry on whatever I was doing now that the upload is complete.

Or perhaps I have a webpage open to my weblog stats, or server statistics. The color of the icon can be updated to alert me to notifications and messages. A news site could change the icon when there is a new and pertinent story that I may want to read.

Personally, when I think Yahoo! I think “Bubble-Yum Bubble Gum”. It’s good in an AOL kind of way. A useful portal for general populace, but it’s always too icky, overloaded, and feature-poor for my tastes. This is in-spite of the fact that the president and CEO is a fellow Alum.

However, Yahoo! has really suprised me and released some very cool developer resources.

• Design Patterns - numerous UI concepts, descriptions, and implementations for various application tasks
• User Interface Library - collection of JS, DHTML, site elements for websites
• Yahoo! User Interface Blog (rss)
• Browser grading chart for following standards

- via vanderwal.net

Publishing technology books, especially related to any online tools or programming languages is a very fast paced, and dangerous, situation. Books take years to produce, write, publish, and distribute. More than likely, if you started writing a book on the newest technology now, it wouldn’t be out until mid-late 2007. During this time, the tool or language you are writing about will be in a new version, used in new ways, and be sitting next to 5.4 x 10^6 books on the same subject on the bookstore/library shelf.

Magazines deal with this problem by publishing on a month-to-month basis. But an article can still take several months to publish and is limited to several pages, at most, in length. Not enough to cover an entire language/tool.

The answer, currently, is to publish online, early-editions of your books. Push them to excited “beta” (so Web2.0) customers who are willing to pay for up-front copies, and give feedback to the publisher. This is similar to a beta program for the commercial Operating Systems. Developers want information now.

Pragmatic Programmers Beta Books was the first of this genre that I am personally aware of. You can purchase the PDF version of the book now, and get updates for the lifetime of the book. They are currently offering Rails Recipes and Pragmatic Ajax: a Web2.0 primer ($20.00 pdf/$37.45 both)

Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) (did I just hear Beaker?) is offering Ruby for Rails: Ruby techniques for Rails developers ($22.50 pdf/$44.95 both), which looks like quite the tome, at 600 pages. This seems like an extra reason to get a veritably 0g digital copy.

O’Reilly Rough Cuts, is a bandwagon jumper. They already offer all of their books in online format via their ‘Safari’ service, but charge extra now for their version of the beta books. In addition, it appears that when you pay for the beta book, you only get access to it until it is published. You then have to buy the full copy when it is released. They are offering a Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ajax, and Flickr books.

I like the idea of getting access to books now, rather than waiting for eventual, and typically belated, publication. By using a digital, ‘published’ book, I can use a more trusted resource than your various flavors of search engine (and often tainted responses - which tend to propagate bad coding practices). I don’t have to keep an aging, dead-tree copy of a v1.0 (or 2.0) book on my shelf and look at it years later and laugh at how out-of-date that language/tool is now (you go with your BASIC and setting up the TRS-80 books).