Breadcrumbs in Web Navigation. On breadcrumbs vs. the back button, one user said: “It’s safer to push ‘back’ because I know what I’ve seen. If I push this [breadcrumb link] I don’t know if I’m going to get what I got before. I don’t want to waste any time.” Moral: unless it’s a single‐page application, do not break the back button in your web app.
Dashcode has been rumored to exist for a while, but now we know for certain: it’s being bundled with new MacBooks, and some kind soul sent his copy to Cool OS X Apps. It’s way more robust than I expected. Breakpoints, easy interface building (complete with a library of “ooh shiny” components), a GUI for your widget’s PLIST file, and built‐in localization. This is awesome. I really ought to start working on version 2 of my Azureus widget.
The ability to pick shit up quickly and solve problems is far more important than the ability to regurgitate arbitrary facts. If I can hand you anything from a broken mail configuration to a broken coffee machine, and you tell me “I know nothing about this, but I’m on it,” you’re somebody I want working with me.
In other huge JavaScript news, FireBug 0.4 is out. This is a huge release, so rather than enumerate the many new features I’ll just tell you to go download it now and find out for yourself. I’ve been beta testing it for a couple weeks and I already can’t imagine going back to 0.3.
Sam Stephenson has a blog, finally. (No, Projectionist doesn’t count.) His first post is monumental: he all but guarantees that Dean Edwards’s Base will be integrated into Prototype, allowing for true inheritance. (I’m guessing this is a 2.0 feature because it’d prompt a rewrite of stuff like the Ajax classes to use the new model. This isn’t something you submit a patch for.)
This poor man has been shot and will die late at night inside the Louvre; his wounds, although mortal, fortunately leave him time enough to conceal a safe deposit key, strip himself, cover his body with symbols written in his own blood, arrange his body in a pose and within a design by Da Vinci, and write out, also in blood, an encrypted message, a scrambled numerical sequence and a footnote to Sophie Neveu, the pretty French policewoman whom he raised after the death of her parents. Most people are content with a dying word or two; Jacques leaves us with a film treatment.
Meanwhile the albino monk, whose name is Silas and who may be the first character in the history of motion pictures to speak Latin into a cellphone, flagellates himself, smashes the floor of a church and kills a nun.
“If it wasn’t for us, you would be speaking German,” they would say. “No, if it wasn’t for you,” I would tell them, “I would probably be speaking Yoruba.”
PROTIP: If you’re going to write a “considered harmful” essay, install WP‐Cache 2.0 before, not after.
If you’re using string keys in a JavaScript Array, you’re doing it wrong. But don’t worry — it’s easy to fix.