Keyword: Gradual Engagement

Luke Wroblewski at A List Apart published a nice article, with a rather radical title:
Sign Up Forms Must Die

Mapstraction

Yesterday i was about to start a new super-geek project that would create a javascript library that handles general map API calls, instead of using specific GMap or Yahoo or other maps calls, when i figured out some people were faster than me again :)
The project is called Mapstraction , and it already has some impressive functionality.
After playing with it a bit, i figured out some of its limitations, most importantly for me, i cannot create marker events.
The development of the library seems a bit stalled at the moment, i joined their mailinglist to see how is it going.
To bypass some of the shortcomings of Mapstraction, Derek Fowler already created some patches, that you can grab from his blog. (Nice blog layout BTW :))

Sugar Bookmarks

At dri, we recently published our first SugarCRM project called Sugar Bookmarks. Download count at 27 at the moment:)

Yahoo on performance

If you ever digged into the deep of website (speed) performance analysis, you are possibly already familiar with the YSlow extension, which gives you a number of tips how to reduce page load times and download size. Some of them are easy to carry out, some of them are not. Yahoo just released a new set of optimization tips:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/yahoo-releases-new-performance-best-practices [Ajaxian]

Here we go again

Hi folks,

after all, i decided to put more content into this blog, in the pure hope to get more readers of you out there. So from now on expect some posts at least once a week, and feel free to leave a mark.

imgmap 2.0beta6 out

Alright folks, for anyone, who is listening here, new version is released, you can go and grab it at:
http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/index

Changes include:
- TinyMCE3 support
- Adobe AIR support

New version released

...grab it at http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/download or http://code.google.com/p/imgmap/

changelog:
Version 2.0beta3
Added MAP id attribute support apart from existing MAP name usage.
Added function getMapId().
Added function getMapName().
Added function getMapInnerHTML().
Added TinyMCE support plus example. (Thanks to John Ericksen)
Added FCKEditor support plus example. (Thanks to Alfonso Marti­nez de Lizarrondo)
Added custom callbacks on certain imgmap events.
Added Safari support. (Thanks to Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo)
Improved handling of bad coordinates.
Fixed several bugs and issues.

Moving to googlecode, plugins update

Hi folks,

There have been some activities recently around the project that i'd like to inform you about:)

Firstly, i have imported all the source code into an svn repo at imgmap.googlecode.com.
Anonymous checkout is possible, commit is only for project members (if you are interested in this, drop me an email)

The source will soon be packaged into a new release as soon as everything is close to stable:)

Apart from including some long-awaited examples how to use the editor, the two big stars will be the tinymce and fckeditor plugins.

The tinymce plugin, is close to stable, thanks to John Ericksen who helped a lot with it. It might still fail on IE, if any of you have any confirmation of this, please use the googlecode project issue tracker. This plugin is separately downloadable at the moment.

The fck plugin i have just started last week, and with the help of some our fck experts i think we can finish it pretty soon:)

I am planning to create some wiki pages for the project, first an FAQ article, so if you have any questions feel free to bomb me with them.

Cheers,
Adam

GPL version downloadable

The GPL covered version of imgmap form now on is available in the download section, go ahead and check it out:)

http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap/download

adam

New version finally here

I have updated the online editor to the most recent version, go and check it out. It is not tested very broadly, so all feedback/bug reports or even wishlists are welcome.

adam

New version on the horizon

Just a quick note to inform that the image map editor has been subject to some serious improvements, and it is 98% ready to be deployed, ... so now really watch out for the new version in the next few days :)

Online Image Map Editor

During my recent (06/2006) work at AITIA International, Inc., I managed to create the Online Image Map Editor that is available at : http://www.maschek.hu/imagemap.

With the help of the editor you can easily draw ALL the standard image map shapes (rectangle, circle, polygon), and you will have full control over the generated HTML code as well.

The editor natively uses the canvas HTML element to draw the shapes on a given image. The ExplorerCanvas library from Google is used to get the same result in browsers, that does not support the canvas element but can use VML instead. ExplorerCanvas works quite well, however it is still beta quality, and not as fast as the native canvas drawing, so expect some lags in IE. The editor is currently tested to work in FFX 1.5 and IE 6/7. Due to some problems of canvas resizing the editor can only draw rectangles in Opera 9+ browsers.

Feel free to play around with the editor: use your own images or use the built in samples, draw your areas or edit the HTML code, save the result to your clipboard.