Kodiak's Korner

Yahoo! released a preview of the Yahoo User Interface library version 3.0 yesterday. While I haven’t yet delved into the new package myself, it looks as though the new YUI will follow on the footsteps on other JavaScript packages like jQuery instead of following its own namespaced model. The preview code in the announcement on the YUI blog shows heavy use of YUI() and Y objects instead of the bulky YAHOO.whatever.whatever naming convention in use now and jQuery-esque selectors. It also says that the YUI team has “paid attention throughout the new architecture to the return values of methods and constructors” to allow developers to use chaining syntax in their code.

I have always preferred the maturity, robustness, and consistency of the YUI library, but the long naming conventions and poor selector support has often lead me to other packages for simple jobs. While the new YUI will be backwards incompatible with current code it looks as though the YUI team is taking a step in the right direction. I’ll definitely be watching as this new version develops.

A stupid error message I just experienced in Dreamweaver:

Evidently the L.A. Lakers missed their flight to Boston the other day because they simply weren’t there for game six last night…final score 131-92! The Celtics site is now referring to the game as the “Boston Masacre.”

Congratulations Celtics…I had been waiting since I was nine years old for last night.

Anyone want to buy a bar?

The Thirsty Moose Pub & Grub, better known around Massawepie circles as Outpost Dumas’ (”OPD” for short) is up for sale on Ebay. Mickey and Jan evidently want to retire.

For a cool $325k you could own all of the OPD goodness–the restaurant, bar, cabins 1, 2, 4, and 5 (but not cabin 3–right Gabe?), the barn, and eight acres of land in bustling Childwold, NY. If that’s not enough to make you bid, how about the prospect of serving hundreds of grown-up Boy Scouts every summer (OK, maybe not hundreds, it just seems like it) and even more snowmobilers every winter.

Ready to bid?

I downloaded Mozilla’s Lab’s new software Prism a while back. The concept behind Prism is pretty cool–basically it provides a desktop interface to a website. With most-basic use this means that your favorite web site gets an icon in your start menu and runs wrapped in a custom window without the standard browser features like location bar and nav buttons. If you want to get more fancy you can add advanced features like custom style sheets to alter the look of the site.

As cool as Prism seemed, I really couldn’t come up with a practical use of it. Sure, I wrapped GMail and a couple of other sites, but launching a separate program to get to those site seemed kind of pointless since I pretty much spend my day in Firefox already; I rarely use bookmarks as it is, rather I just start typing URLS and use auto-completion to navigate through the sites I visit regularly.

This morning I came up with a good use–Pandora. I often listen to Pandora while I work, running the “mini” pop-up player in a Firefox window. The only problem is that when Firefox crashes the music stops. So today I figured out the URL of the mini player’s page and created a new Prism app pointed at it. Since the Prism version runs in a different process from Firefox, the music keeps playing when an endless JavaScript loop kills Firefox (not that I ever create endless loops in JavaScript…). Plus, unlike some of the stand-alone Pandora apps out there, this one keeps the ads (that Pandora counts on for revenue–it is a free service, after all) showing.