Well we have been recieving a lot of emails since our last post regarding the UI library. We decided to provide an early access to some of the tests for the library and documentation around it. There is a lot of work still to be done and we hope to steer the project according to the feedback we recieve.

You can check out demos and docs here.

Feel free to post your comments/suggestion here.

Well this isn’t the first library to do this and it won’t be the last. Its not even 100% ready for release but I thought it will be great to get some initial feedback before even releasing any code.

This library (as mentioned in my last post) is heavily motivated and inspired by Flot (a jQuery based plotting library). Its not complete yet and its not that stable yet. So you might see few odd things happening here and there.

You can check out some tests here.

As always, please do give your comments and suggestions but do note that this is just something that I have been working on in my spare time so my replies might be a bit slow and your requested feature might not show up in the code fast enough. But it will be noted and implemented sooner or later.

Apart from the usual clientel work, we are working hard to bring our UI library to a stable release. A lot of work has been done and a lot more needs to be done. So keep checking the blog for latest updates on that.

This past long weekend (for us canadians) I decided to experiment with canvas and javascript. The reasonable thing to do was to build a simple charting script. After few hours of work and inspiration from Flot (jQuery plotting engine) here is the result:

Of course, this is completely based on Prototype and it supports the basic line chart, scatter plot, bar graphs and maybe next weekend I will add pie chart support to it. The code is still a bit messy so I won’t be posting it right now. I will probably wait till I am done with pie chart support before release an alpha and let you folks test it out.

So yeah a lot is going on but that doesn’t mean we don’t have time to chit chat with others. Feel free to throw us an email if you want to discuss about your next project or if you just want to say hello.

John Resig has been working on something special that he will be releasing tonight. I am a big reader of John’s blog, he is one of the best Javascript developers that I have seen. So what could this surprise be?

His clue is:

• Something small and fast.
• Something large and pretty.

So what could it be? We shall know by tonight!

Update:

Well it is amazing what John can do with JS check out his “release” here: http://ejohn.org/blog/processingjs/

Well its about time that we told you guys more about the User Interface Lib that we have been working on. Its far from being production ready but since we aim to launch it as an open source project we thought it might be useful to start getting some input from the community.

You can read initial docs but please note that documentation will be changing without any notice. You can also check out demos here.

Go out and enjoy the weather. It has been exceptionally beautiful here in Ottawa for past couple of days. So take time off your computer and just enjoy mother nature.

So now that I have my iPhone all ready to go and had my moment of joy playing with all the features on this phone, its time to move into development. This device provides a lot of power to the developer but there are still few things that we need to look at before diving head first into development:

1. iPhone supports an amazingly powerful feature set that can make your applications visually attractive and engage your users with great amount of interactivity.
2. Touch screen can bring thousands of creative ideas right to your finger tips (literally)

3. Limitation of no background apps running is sort of a deal breaker but I am hopeful that Apple will change its stance after a while.

Over the next few days I will be posting my experience in developing a simple iPhone application and sharing my thoughts and struggles with you via blog. So what sort of application can we make on iPhone that would be simple yet fun? There are few ideas that I am debating between but feel free to make a suggestion.

Let the fun begin!

Lately I have been working on a User Interface library that runs on top of Prototype and Scriptaculous framework. Please note that this library is in very early stage and I am planning on releasing the source code soon. Still have a lot of issues to fix and address but I wanted to float the idea in public and get wheels rolling.

So what does this UI library have?

This library will have the following components:

• Layout
• Splitter
• Panel
• Button
• Menu
• Tab
• Tree
• and more…

These will be the foundation layer components. With support of Prototype based class inheritance I have also been working on some widgets such as:

• CheckBoxTree
• AjaxTree
• AjaxPanel
• ButtonMenu
• ContextMenu
• Toolbar
• Accordion
• and more…

As mentioned earlier I am still working towards first public preview release but if you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to post them here. I should have a first public preview ready for you soon (can’t promise dates yet)

This library is in no-way meant to compete against ExtJS or Dojo or other such libraries but I believe that with community support we can bring an amazing UI layer to Prototype and Scriptaculous framework.

The main focus is to provide solid foundation layer and believe that our community will build and contribute amazing set of Widgets.

Here are screenshots for Button and Splitter (using Firefox 2.0)

So I have finally decided to jump the ship and move onto iPhone. I have been playing around with the SDK for a while now and the simulator is just amazing and it will be interesting to move onto that platform.

Full browser support: Makes it fun to write interactive web applications that can really push the limits what we can offer to the end user interms of interactivity and amazing experience.  I can’t wait to try the new CSS based animation techniques that they have introduced in Safari and I hope that W3C makes it a standard soon.

Apart from porting web applications to iPhone, I am also looking forward to build native Objective-C based applications.

So those of you who already have an iPhone, want to share your experience so far? And for those who are still waiting to buy one, what are you waiting for?