Click here to get the full Powerpoint file.

Thanks go to Allen for organizing a good event. It was also neat to learn a bit about Joyent and where they’re @ (thanks Jim). Sorry I couldnt make drinks afterward. Looking forward to the next one. I for one would be interested in hearing more about HTML5. Also, an hour long “open mike” rail-on-Microsoft would be fun too . Probably should be accompanied by drinks tho.

Live in Vancouver? Want to learn more about JavaScript? Check out the VanJS users group. Incidentally, I’ll be giving a talk on Jan 9 on Offline Storage. Jim Pick will also be talking about Server-Side JS and no doubt some Joyent goodness! I’ll post the slides here afterward.

Sub-topics will include:

• HTML5 Offline Storage Options
• UserData
• Flash Local Shared Object
• Window.name
• probably more.

Also I’ll be giving away a copy of my book to anyone who cares.

• Apple has given PhoneGap a technical analysis , and PhoneGap does not violate the Terms & Conditions of the App Store.
• Apple will review PhoneGap applications based on their own merits and not on their use of PhoneGap.

This is great news for the development community because it means we can continue to write simple cross-platform applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and deploy them natively to a number or devices without having to do tonnes of rewrite for each one.

I also decided to include the full source code incase somebody wanted to get in there and fix or add something. As always, feedback is welcome.

Download it here.

• Using the Spry Framework in Dreamweaver CS4 (Arnout Kazemier)  Oct 5th 3:30pm 403B
• Spry Widgets and Dreamweaver CS4 (BYOL) (Chris Converse) Oct 6th 1:00pm 408A
• Ajax for Designers (Greg Rewis) Oct 5th 11:30am 405 + Others
• Skinning JavaScript Framework Widgets in Dreamweaver (Joe Lowery) Oct 7th 3:30pm 402A
• Best Practices in Cross-Browser Testing with Adobe BrowserLab (Kristin Long) Oct 7th 2:00pm 406A + Others
• Roadmap: Web Professional Tools and Services in Creative Suite (Lea Hickman) Oct 7th 5:00pm 504

Basically I’ll be discussing ways that serious JS dev can approached in Dreamweaver, giving demos of some cool new stuff including:

• BrowserLab
• DOM and CSS debugging features
• Framework support
• Web Widgets
• Spry

I’ll also talk about some things to watch out for and talk about where I would like to DW go in the future. MAX is Adobe’s annual conference and will be held between Oct 3-7 in Los Angeles this year.

For this trip I had really been aching to finally read the acclaimed “Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared Diamond. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning title and a national bestselling book – and one I have heard quite a lot of buzz about. The back cover is filled with endorsements from such luminaries as Bill Gates, and Colin Renfrew of Nature Magazine. The book is basically about how and why the various cultures on Earth developed differently, with some acquiring technology and power, and others seemingly remaining stagnant in their development. The author tries to refute the racist assumption that some groups are inherently less intelligent because they never began using iron or developed writing of their own. He ties all this to positive-feedback loops involving geography, climate, the interplay between societies, and naturally the arrival of guns, germs, and steel.

Sounds fascinating, right? Sure it is. How can it not be? To top it all off, the author himself has had a rich and interesting life story having spent considerable time abroad living in New Guinea, with his life occasionally in peril (be it from malaria or hostile tribes), and he mixes anecdotes from his experiences into the narrative of the book.

The great thing about a book like this too is once you’ve read it, there are like thousands of people out there you can talk about it with – because the book was so popular. Because I was travelling in Panama at the time and bumping into other tourists, this turned out to be true. But something curious kept coming up in these conversations – nobody I met had actually finished the book – and this included several academics I ran into from the Smithsonian. Myself, when I got about 3/4 the way through my eyes began to droop and I stopped looking forward to the next page and chapter. I mean, seriously.. this is one boring book. Its not boring because the topic isn’t interesting, but the author really had an odd way of approaching the subject. The most striking flaw is the amount of repetition. He keeps going back to the same examples over and over to illustrate the application some new subtlety or theory – and after a while you just get really tired of hearing about it.

My point is that I found it interesting that while people were so eager to praise the book for it’s ideas, people were almost ashamed to admit they found it kindof boring and didn’t actually finish it. It certainly doesn’t necessarily follow that because the subject matter is weighty, the narrative is dry or unapproachable. I would contrast GGAS with other popular non-fiction books like Steven Hawking’s Brief History of Time or Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, which were both fascinating and very well written at the same time.

I wonder if Bill and Colin read the whole thing.

• All the basics (of course). Types, syntax, and all the little quirks that differentiate JavaScript from languages like Java and C#.
• Explain clearly how developers can take advantage of first-class functions, context, and various dynamic features of the language.
• How to design your programs using object-oriented patterns like inheritance, multiple inheritance, and how to use expando’s, and do things like object inspection.
• What tools you should be using to do development.
• How to avoid common performance pitfalls and how to generally speed up your applications.
• How to do wicked-awesome DHTML and CSS magic.
• How to store data offline for later retrieval.
• How to take advantage of some of the cool features in HTML 5.

About 2/3 of the book is instructional, and the rest is in-depth reference material of all standard and non-standard JavaScript objects and features (including DOM). This is complete with code examples and explanations.

If you’re learning JavaScript as a beginner and not sure if you should get this book or something more basic – get this. The first few chapters tell you everything you need to know from the perspective of somebody totally fresh to the language. If you’re an experienced developer wanting to get a desktop reference, this is for you too – but you’ll probably focus on the last 1/2 of the book.

I’m really looking forward to hearing some feedback from anyone who’s taken a look at it – good or bad. So feel free to post your thoughts if you’ve bought it and had a chance to form an opinion.

Get your copy from Amazon.

• Improved the font ripping tool to specify the text hinting style. This is really important for controlling the clarity of the text.
• Added the source code to the windows app. You can now compile this yourself.
• Fixed a memory leak in the display code.
• Begun working on alignment code for the objective-c classes. These still need a bit more work.

Grab the new file here.

Here are some updated screenshots: