Monkinetic Weblog

A while back I blogged about Mashuptown, the awesome site and podcast that has been showcasing mashups (two unrelated songs mixed together in some clever way) for the last, oh 8 mos, or so.

Quick idea for an OS X app/hack: How about something that would let me embed a terminal window in a splitview in any OS X application window? Then I could attach a terminal to, say, a Safari window where I have reference materials loaded up, or to the TextEdit document where I'm documenting some process.

Seth pointed me to prototype.js, a handy Javascript library for doing a variety of gee-wizzy things in webapps, one of which is performing a variety of useful AJAX functions. After fighting with it for way longer than necessary, I turned to:

When using AJAX, remember that the A is for Asynchronous.

In case you haven't noticed the Quick Links (or haven't cared, as is likely with a large percentage of my reading demographic) I've been working on a rewrite of one of our apps at work, and part of that rewrite is some nifty AJAX-based stuff. I think it's going to make the app quite a bit nicer to use. I've started calling this the "Frankenapp": it's a FileMaker Pro webapp where FMP's template output is post-processed by PHP, and includes several hundred lines of JavaScript, plus the code that handles the XML back-and-forth (also crossing the FMP-PHP bridge) to make it act nice.