the Fresh!

Go vote for “Dude, where’s my UI architecture?” for SXSWi 2010! That’s right, your’s truly is hoping to speak about improving UI architecture for the SXSWi 2010 event.

This is a topic I’m very passionate about and I hope I can count on your support to help the talk get picked for the event. There’s over 3000 submissions for only 300 spots, so every vote counts!

Also, there’s lots of other great technical topics to vote on. I’ve started a list of a few I’m stoked about on this linked-in thread, so if you’re feeling generous, lend some votes their way as well.

I wanted to slightly diverge from flensed project discussions for this post to talk briefly about two other projects I’ve recently released. The reason for talking about them here is that one or both of them may find some cooperative use or even code sharing with flXHR/flensed in the next version releases, so there is a symbiotic relationship between them.

The first project is called LABjs (Loading And Blocking JavaScript). Put simply, this is a little tool (2.5k compressed) that lets you load Javascript assets dynamically, in parallel, but still allows you to define “blocking”, which is to wait for one or a set of scripts to load before executing other code, such as perhaps loading more scripts.

The main purpose of LABjs is to load scripts dynamically, in parallel, instead of old-school <script> tags which only load one at a time, and block everything else on the page. This significantly speeds up your page load. At the same time, you do sometimes still need to block and wait for some script to get loaded before doing other things. So, you get both in one simple loader API.

For instance, say you’re on a page that needs jQuery, but also needs a number of jQuery plugins. You need to load jQuery core itself, blocking on that download, and the ideally load all the other plugin files afterwards, in parallel, to get the page rendered and functional as quickly as possible. LABjs makes this type of functionality drop-dead simple.

So, this old style of <script> tags:

<script src="jquery.js"></script>
<script src="jquery.myplugin1.js"></script>
<script src="jquery.myplugin2.js"></script>
<script src="jquery.myplugin3.js"></script>

Becomes:

$LAB
.script("jquery.js")
.block()
.script("jquery.myplugin1.js")
.script("jquery.myplugin2.js")
.script("jquery.myplugin3.js")
.block(function(){
    // init myplugin1, 2, and 3
});

LABjs is now in v0.7, and is demo’d and hosted on: http://labjs.com.

As I said, this type of loading logic is powerful and clean, and will probably replace the code loading logic in flensed/CheckPlayer/flXHR projects for their next releases.

Joe McCann wrote a great blog post describing and showing off the LABjs tool.

Next up, I’m gonna talk about mpAjax, which allows for easy parsing of multi-part Ajax responses.

Allow me to take a quick break from writing about cross-domain Ajax, flXHR, and other such geeky things. I will be brief in mentioning an application I just ran across and my suggestion you take a look at it.

I recently switched phones to the Samsung Propel Pro. This is a big switch for me, as I’ve been on the Treo line of phones, with PalmOS, for a very long time (since before most of you knew what a smartphone was).

Actually, I’m really just biding my time until the Palm Pre is released in GSM/unlocked form (non-Sprint), hopefully sometime early next year. Mobile phone vendors, if you are listening, the better future for mobile app development is in Javascript/HTML/CSS stacks, not these proprietary hinderances we’ve been forced to endure for so long.

For now, naturally, I have to replace all my old mobile applications with ones that will work for the Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard OS that Propel Pro runs. No small task as it turns out.

The real trick is that Propel Pro doesn’t run “Classic” or “Professional”, because it doesn’t have a touchscreen. This causes many problems with a lot of WinMob apps, because they are all written assuming a touch screen, and so those apps fail for those of us unfortunate (or fortunate, depending on how you look at it!) to not have touchscreens on our smart phones.

In any case, as my quest continues to find mobile apps that will work on my touchscreen-less phone, I finally found a twitter client that works well for me. @Twikini. Strange name, but a solid app none-the-less.

I’m particularly impressed by how usable the app is despite its “burden” of being without a touch-screen. On any tweet update, you can move the directional control left to do a “@reply” to the author, and right will give you a “RT @” retweet with the text already quoted. These two simple tasks have become so ingrained into DNA of what tweet’ing is about, it’s nice to see that they didn’t have to be buried in some menu option or rely on some fancy finger guesture to get at. They are quite literally at your fingertip, and I find that smart and well executed.

And the best part? The app costs just $4.95. What could be even better than that? It’s actually free! That’s right, all you have to do is write a simple blog post, like this one, and they give it to you for free. Genius, huh!?

Check out Twikini on twitter and by all means, if you have a Windows Mobile 6.1 STANDARD phone like I do, check out the app for yourself!

PS. Though this app unfortunately doesn’t do so (maybe they will, I can only hope!), if you are writing any kind of mobile app, you should be using PhoneGap!