I’m really excited that the final release of Ext JS 3/ is here, along with a preview of the Ext JS Designer application. This is built on top of Adobe AIR and allows developers to piece together their Ext JS app with a rich UI, tweaking configuration options and embedding components as required.
To my knowledge, there is no other JavaScript framework approaching the richness of Ext JS, and this designer takes it to the next level. I’m extremely excited about what the brilliant Ext JS team has in store for the future.
Start off by creating a fresh new drive of the size you’re after using the VirtualBox user interface. Then, locate both the your old, smaller HD and the new, larger one and run the following command:
VBoxManage clonehd --existing oldhd.vdi newhd.vdi
After some progress indicators ahve come and gone your HD should have been cloned to the larger one. You now need to use some software to expand your drive partition into the new space. Vista and W7 have this feature built in to Disk Management, or you could use something like GParted.
Jason alerted me to an SVN commit by Hammett which begins to introduce a new style of routing support into Monorail. The commit message says that he "Added RoutingEngine, initial work to create a cooler routing support inspired on MS MVC", and by looking at the test case for this new engine, it does indeed look cooler.
To add a rule:
routingEngine.Add(PatternRule.Build("ProductByName", "product/<name>", typeof(ProductController), "View"));
Which will match the URL http://www.domain.com/product/iPod and send it to the view action on the product controller, passing in "iPod" as the name parameter. It’s also naming the route as "ProductByName" but I’m not sure of the application of this right now…
The thing I like about this approach is that it’s a lot more readable than the current routing engine. It’s not going to set the world on fire but this, coupled with RC3’s new UrlBuilder, will make for a pain-free means of manipulating your URLs.
It was already brilliant but Joe Hewitt has now excelled himself by adding a javascript debugger to Firebug.
With Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar installed, you have an incredibly powerful set of tools at your disposal.
The single most important thing which 37 Signals are doing is showing that marketing is nonsense. Marketing is easy. Advertising is easy. Make a good product and word of mouth will support your sales.. and a good product is not necessarily something that everyone’s heard of. Remember that there are likely to be people doing the same stuff as your, but there is plenty of room. Marketing execs are bad. Advertising is bad.
Is there nothing better than Nero? That’s a 100 megabyte download, and most of the stuff that it tries to install has nothing to do with burning to CD…. burnatonce is brilliant for CDs, but it requires a ProDVD license (which is free) to work. Surely there is a middle ground?
Edit: In actual fact I had a non-commercial license for ProDVD kicking around, so burnatonce was actually really easy for me to sort out. The original point remains.
This is so cool. It’s just made me very interested in the PSP (via).
So, Apple+Option+CTRL+8 inverts the colours of your display in OS X. That’s nice and handy if you’re having trouble with the contrast of something. But… why “8″? None of the other digits do anything…
And just in time! I wanted to use the new Ajax effects in a project I’ve been working on, but not until they were final. That time has come.
Ajax aside, Routes (a stunning feature) have been upgraded to provide a sevenfold speed increase, and the swathe of render_ methods have been consolidated. Tobias provides an overview of this change.
Conditional validations are new too. The given example is very good; only validate a password for existance if it’s a new password… otherwise we can assume it exists.
It’s the little things that make me so happy.
Writeboard. As usual, they’re keeping zipped about exactly what this is going to be.
I use Basecamp on a daily basis – I find it to be pretty useful; their other stuff less so. What I do find interesting is that they are a high profile company coming out with well written, original web apps on a consistant basis.