soaked and soaped

RubyGems 1.2.0 was released yesterday and the announcement starts like this:

RubyGems no longer performs bulk updates and instead only fetches the gemspec files it needs.

Finally! This should save me quite a lot of time, since I have gems.github.com as a gem source and it often had to update 300+ gemspec files.

That’s really neat: http://goosh.org/

Goosh goosh.org 0.4.4-beta #1 Tue, 03 Jun 08 22:59:00 UTC Google/Ajax

Welcome to goosh.org - the unofficial google shell.

This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell.
You type commands and the results are shown on this page.

goosh is written by Stefan Grothkopp <grothkopp@gmail.com>
it is NOT an official google product!

Your language has been set to: en (use lang to change it)

Enter help or h for a list of commands.

guest@goosh.org:/web> help

Firefox 3 will have a feature which specifically could improve the usability of webapps. It allows developers to register handlers for protocols for their apps. Example: Gmail could register a handler for mailto://-links which then would open the email compose site with the recipient prefilled when an email link is clicked, instead of opening the local email application.

For this, Firefox 3 will provide the registerProtocolHandler method.

Resources

• DOM:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler
• Bugzilla #372441
• http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html

I think this is one of most interesting and coolest new features for developers in Firefox 3: Access to file input fields via Javascript.
You can access the contents of a file input via the files attribute and it’s items. Each of the items have the following attributes and methods:

Attributes: fileSize and fileName
Methods: getAsDataURL, getAsBinary and getAsText

Then all that’s left is to throw the data into the parameters of an ajax request and send it to your server — no hacks with iframes anymore.

The following demo shows you these amazing new capabilities. Go crazy.

Demo: Access the contents of a text file

Demo: Display an image

Code

 1 
 2 function writeText() {
 3   var data = $('text').files.item(0).getAsBinary();
 4   $('result').update(data);
 5   $('textsize').update($('text').files.item(0).fileSize);
 6 }
 7 
 8 function writeImage() {
 9   var data = $('image').files.item(0).getAsDataURL();
10   $('imageresult').src = 'data:' + data;
11   $('imagesize').update($('image').files.item(0).fileSize);
12 }

Resources

• Bugzilla #371432
• W3C Working Draft
• http://www.squarefree.com/burningedge/releases/trunk-for-firefox-3.html
• http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/nsIDOMFile

As I wrote in a previous post I’m using testing versions of Firefox 3 for a while now.

With the final release coming nearer, I want to highlight features and improvements which–in my opinion–deserve more attention than just having their bug marked “VERIFIED FIXED” in bugzilla.

The search engine keywords are a new convenient way in Firefox 3 to use the search engines from the list in the top right, but without the hassle of switching to the right engine before searching. This makes the OpenSearch plugins much more attractive.

To set a keyword, click the search bar dropdown and select “Manage Search Engines…”. If you set w as the keyword for Wikipedia, you can just type w something into the address bar and it will redirect you to the Wikipedia search results for something.

Ressources
Thanks to Jesse Ruderman for collecting a bunch of important improvements. Also see Bugzilla #378553.