I’m prety sure he’s available for weddings funerals and kid’s parties ;0)

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHC_Qyov2Xc]

I know…Another update notice.

This time the Prototye Window library which allows you to create windows and dialogs with ease through JavaScript with some great effects.

Changes in this update include:

* Added: gridX and gridY constructor’s options to snap move and resize
* Added: Effect on modal overlay (fade/appear) only if effects.js in included.
You can change effect options (Windows.overlayShowEffectOptions and Windows.overlayHideEffectOptions).
* Fixed: Multimodal mode.
* Fixed: Works on WebKit.

* Beta: effects on minimize and maximize. You need to include window_effects.js to have them.
Check out samples/constraint.html from the distrib (also on samples page).

This really is a very nice library, built on Prototype of course. If you haven’t seen it before I encourage you to go check it out.

7 good reasons you’ll want to look at this:

* Valid HTML/XHTML generated code
* Resizable windows
* Minimize/Maximize
* Modal dialogs
* Visual effects
* Skinnable
* And more…

Looks like I must have lost a few feeds when I moved over to GreatNews and imported. I’ve a feeling I fell fould of the flat tree structure and thought that it had duplicated some stuff. This means I’m a bit behind on some updates.

The Dojo blog had a recent anouncement of the release of version 0.4.2:

Dojo 0.4.2
We’re happy to announce that Dojo 0.4.2 is available. We recommend that all 0.4.x users upgrade at their earliest convenience.

0.4.2 is a minor patch update to 0.4.1 and includes a tightly selected set of fixes for 0.4.1 issues. As a result, we anticipate that 0.4.2 will be a straightforward upgrade for existing 0.4.x users.

Getting 0.4.2 is simple (just follow the download link at the top of the page), but there some new goodies for advanced toolkit users:

• A new version of the web based build tool has been released for creating custom
  dojo.js

  files. You can replace the

  dojo.js

  from any release with these files to improve the page loading performance of your application

• 0.4.2 has been adopted by AOL for hosting in their CDN, and we’ve updated instructions on how to use it
• Cross-domain package loading is significantly more robust in 0.4.2, style operations are much faster, and common-case event connection speed has been improved on IE. Big-ish apps should benefit from all of these changes.

Every release has it’s heroes, and for 0.4.2 I’d like to extend my personal thanks to James Burke for the amazing work he’s put into ensuring that the build system and cross-domain issues were 100% sorted out so that everything works. It’s a tremendous accomplishment that AOL considers 0.4.2 to be “prime time”, and we couldn’t have done it without James.

I missed the launch date of this one (March 12th), Script.aculo.us 1.7.1 has gone into Beta and is available for download. this version has been updated to work with Prototype 1.5.1 It’s a bit ahead of 1.5.1_RC1 so I’m hoping that it’s OK with the RC2 release. to reduce risk or the bother of trying out various versions, just use the version that comes with Script.aculo.us.

Other changes include:

• Experimental sound support through new sound.js (Sound.play(’blah.mp3))
• Performance improvements to the Effects engine
• Memory leak fixed in morph code for Firefox
• New Failure option to Draggables and onDropped callback
• More customization for in-place editing and nesting single nodes in the DOM builder

The ChangeLog as always has loads more detail

There’s a nice schedule available on the Public Sector Developer Weblog of upcoming Webcasts for April 2007. Top of the list is Creating controls with the ASP.Net AJAX Control Toolkit. This should be an interesting webcast and I’d encourage you to attend if you can. Sign-up details and a schedule can be found on the Public Sector Developer Weblog

The webcast will run from 2pm through to 3:30pm EST so that will be 7pm through to 8:30pm in the UK I think.

if you are running a system that has IE7 on it and you want to check compatibility for applications running under IE6 you’d have a bit of a problem. Microsoft have kindly helped us all out here by providing a VPC image with IE6 on it. The VPC contains a pre-activated Windows XP SP2 install with IE6 and the IE7 readiness kit.

The Image is Timebombed and will expire on 23/7/2007 or 07/23/2007 if you are on the other side of the pond.

The folks over at Aptana have released a set of reference guides for general consumption. The new Documentation site holds the Internal Aptana IDE documentation as well as the HTML, CSS and JavaScript documentation used for content assist.

Consume at your leisure from here.

Moo Tools as we all know, is another of the many JavaScript libraries available to the masses. It’s a lightweight and feature rich library that is free to download and use.

The Menu in question is written by Guillermo Rauch, a 16 year old Web developer living in Argentina. His Blog, devthought, is well worth a read and it’s good to see he’s using the very menu he’s written about in the blog. Proof that this guy is committed to producing quality stuff and not just pointless samples that can’t actually be applied in a real world scenario without a ton of work.

This article describes the building of a pretty nice menu using JavaScript and CSS. The techniques in the JavaScript and CSS are excellent and his writing style means you’ll get yer noggin round them in no time. Taking the sample code you should be able to enhance your knowledge further by working on your own Vertical menu and even add in some dropdowns or fly-out’s.

Even if you aren’t looking to build a menu you will want to read through the article and look at the nice ways Guillermo has gotten round the IE(

After initially turning down an invitation to join the Open Ajax Alliance, Microsoft seem to have had a change of heart and have now joined. Bertrand Le Roy from the Atlas team will be attending the meetings. It will be interesting to see how this changes the momentumn of Ajax development and interoperability going forward.

Microsoft do seem to be having a real change in attitude over the past few years. More open communication with developers, more direct contact with developers and managers through blogs, CTP’s and Beta’s, webcasts… will it ever end?

It’s easy to take the cynical approach when Microsoft do things like this but I want to take a positive vibe from all this and will say that I think it’s great Microsoft are getting involved and are prepared to collaborate and integrate rather than innivate in solitude.

OK I admit I’ve been stupid, I hold my hands up and admit it, I’m a fool.  I bought a game without reading up on it in more detail.

In an attempt to surprise my nephew, whi is into all things Star Wars these days, I bought a copy of Starwars Battlefront and Battlefront II.  Battlefront works just as expected and on my home office rig it looks and sounds great, despite a flakey install process.  Battlefront II however is a whole differen’t story.

The game installed OK off the DVD but as soon as you try and actually play the game, select either training or skirmish or any of the menu options for that matter, the jolly game just freezes up and utilises 100% of the CPU.  I even left it while I had my tea and it was still running the CPU at 100%.  (not recommended unless you are completely confident in your cooling).  I uninstalled, re-installed, patched and swore all to no avail.

Expecting the usual trawl through crap I decided to visit the LucasArts forums and tech support to find a resolution.  What I found was a fine collection of people many of whom have never managed to play the game, many can only play it without sound, and many with Dual CPU/Core rigs have to manually force the game to run on a single CPU.

Like all P.C. Games this isn’t cheap but I feel very cheated, not only because the damn thing doesn’t work but also because on opening the package you can see that there is no manual included in the box, you have to read it off the DVD!  I’m all for saving the planet and cutting down on wasted paper but drop the cost when production costs drop please!

I can run FEAR, Battlefront, Republic Commando, Far Cry, Half Life 2 and a bunch of other high end games all at max settings without an issue but I can’t get Battlefront II to run at all.  I’m astounded that a company like LucasArts can get away with this to be honest.  If there were only one or two people affected I’d say it was bad luck, but this is a whole lot of people all with differen’t system configurations and from different parts of the world.  The company is just turning a blind eye to the whole thing though.  I’ve never known it before.

LucasArts did have a bit of an issue with the latest release of Lego Star Wars II though.  They managed to release a version that would not install on some Windows XP (home and pro) machines.  The users needed a separate patch just to install the game!

Very poor indeed.  I now need to try and find a way to get someone to give me a refund for what is looking like a very expensive coaster indeed.