Jeremy Johnstone

This evening I decided to play with a really kewl new app called Fluid. What this app does is allow you to create Site Specific Browsers. One of the first usages which popped into mind was a product I helped develop, Yahoo! Web Messenger. An annoyance of mine with it is that it had to live in a browser tab, something prone to getting closed accidentally, and also didn’t have any decent notifications of new messages when not in focus. Being the perfect candidate for Fluid, IMHO, I set out to give it a shot. In less than an hours time I built a pretty kewl demo and here’s how you can use it too. (more…)

I’ve spent the majority of the day (and a good chunk of the evening) refactoring the HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP for the Yahoo! Web Messenger products (we are known internally as the “Eden Team“). Being that all but one of our products (the messenger inside Yahoo! Mail, which still uses a Flash based SDK for the network transport) we developed on this team are mostly Flash based (Flex/AS3 technically), the non-Flash based components have badly needed some love for a while. Before digging into the Javascript I decided to browse around for a better OO pattern for Javascript classes. Not being someone who likes coding in Javascript much (part of why I joined this team), it’s not something I have been staying current on lately. Looking at the code for SWFObject 2.0 I discovered they had a pretty clever approach which gives you public and private class variables, public and private methods, and even something akin to a static initializer. Here’s a bit of sample code to illustrate the concept: (more…)