Category Archives:

Lab

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Chris LoSacco

Updated : SVN Notifier 1.0.1

Thomas Roessler sent us a note that we had a pretty major security hole in our lab widget, SVN Notifier, that allowed unrestricted system access (yikes!) to nefarious commit messages. We spent some time in the code today and plugged up that hole, and made a few other fixes and tweaks as well. This latest release, 1.0.1, is recommended for all users (you can get it from the lab).

Thanks very much for the heads up, Thomas!

| Comments (2) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Andy Lewisohn

Start RESTing on your laurels

There's a new ActionScript 3 library available over in the Arc90 Lab called RESTService. Now developers can make fully aware HTTP calls from Flex/AIR applications. There are some caveats for use on the web, but the desktop is fair game.

Take a look and let us know what you think.

| Comments (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing our first Apple Dashboard widget : SVN Notifier

It's widget time in the Arc90 lab. For all of you Mac developers who are a fan of the Dashboard and use Subversion for version control, take a glance at SVN Notifier. Growl support comes along, too!

Check it out and let us know what you think.

| Comments (25) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on March 17, 2008 by Richard Ziade

Eliminate Interface Clutter With Arc90 Lab's Collapsible Panel! (As Seen On TV)

4 drawers base cabinetI'm one of those people that goes to great lengths to keep my visible workspace clean and uncluttered...at any cost. I revel in the clean, straight lines around my desk. Open up one of my drawers and it's a whole other story, though. Out of sight, out of mind. Yes, it borders on anal-retentive hypocrisy, but still.

It's not a whole lot different for user interfaces. Sometimes, an easy and familiar way to "put away" interface clutter is to give users the ability to "hide away" parts of the interface. The Flex interface library is really great. It has just about everything you need to build rich, slick interfaces...except a drawer to put all my junk in.

Our own Andy Lewisohn has changed all that. Today on the Lab, we're releasing a collapsible panel custom component for Flex. It's simple to implement and nicely fits into the existing Flex UI framework.

So get on over there and grab it...and start hiding that clutter!

| Comments (7) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on November 28, 2007 by Chris Dary

Introducing : jQuery MultiSelect

Ben Sgro, one of the newest editions to the cadre of arc90 developer extraordinaires, has created a new version of our MultiSelect tool, this time written in jQuery. It has been added to the Arc90 Tools section at the Arc90 Lab.

jQuery MultiSelect, much like its predecessor, is an easy way to turn an HTML select into a stylish drop down that supports multiple selections in a compact view.

If you are not familiar with jQuery, their homepage slogan is "The Write Less, Do More, Javascript Library". The following source code comparision reinforces that claim.

Javascript MultiSelect jQuery MultiSelect
Lines of code* 422 225

 

Not only does the new version have a significantly smaller source code footprint, it is also easier to follow than the original. This is partially due to the powers of jQuery, allowing complex DOM manipulation and method chaining to accomplish tasks with less code while still maintaining readablity.

* Our lines of code comparision was done by removing all comments that occupied one or more lines. Whitespace does count in the total.

| Comments (10) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on October 8, 2007 by Andy Lewisohn

Introducing: Modular

I'm a big fan of Cairngorm, I use it extensively in my projects and have always been happy with the results. That was until I tried getting it to work with Modules. All of a sudden, Cairngorm didn't seem so hot. Not one to just let go of a tried and true architecture, I decided to come up with a solution. There's been quite a bit of talk already on this subject, and my answer is based on some of what I found. It's over in the lab, check it out: Modular.

| Comments (10) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on July 5, 2007 by Richard Ziade

The Mobile Internet For The Rest Of Us

We've all seen how beautifully the iPhone renders web pages. It really is something. But there really are two major problems with the iPhone:

  1. It's still too frickin' small to surf the Web on until you zoom into to a readable level. Unless you really enjoy straining your eyes, you'll find yourself reading "Printer Friendly" pages on it. The human eyes are the new printer.
  2. I don't own one...and neither do 99.9% of you.

Number two is really a deal-breaker here. While I doubt I'll ever find myself spending hours a day reading on my phone, I do enjoy the occasional read in bed or while waiting somewhere...and alas, I don't own an iPhone.

awesome old-school mobile phone-1The kids at Arc90, in their infinite altruism, have put together a killer tool for browsing news on the Internet. It's called Rio and it's a dead simple way to read some of the most popular news sources on just about any Internet-enabled mobile phone. We've tested it on a slew of mobile phones including Blackberrys, Treos, Razrs and Windows Mobile devices, and yeh it looks pretty awesome on that iPhone thingy.

Just point your sub-par mobile phone to http://rio.arc90.com and bam a lean, mean mobile surfing machine is at your disposal. You can do one of two things here. You can either enter a news source or topic in the search box (like "lacrosse news" or "recipes") and you'll get the most popular news content for that search, all scrubbed and cleansed for your mobile reading pleasure. Alternatively, you can pick from the list of 50 or so popular news sources on the default Rio page. Once you find an article you fancy, simply click through it and it'll also be stripped down for mobile consumption.

Rio is the product of a wonderful mixture of RSS (RSS is a great way to deliver content to smaller devices - it's already stripped out the web junk), Live.com's excellent feed search (pretty much nothing out there like it) and Google's excellent little mobile web view. Rio is inspired David Winer's River of News style of news reading.

Awesome work by the Arc90 team on this one. I no longer need to pretend friends are SMS'ing me. You can learn all about Rio by visiting the Arc90 labs page.

| Comments (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on July 2, 2007 by Joel Nagy

Introducing : MultiSelect

Another new dynamic tool for websites or blogs has been added to the Arc90 Tools over to the lab. Check out MultiSelect, a sleek way to turn an HTML select into a stylish drop down that supports multiple selections in a compact view. It's a drag and drop installation, and you can change any select into a nice little MultiSelect.

| Comments (12) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on June 19, 2007 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : AppCache

The application scope is a sweet spot when writing for the web, where caching can make or break (really break) an app. It's also a huge convenience when working with variables that are largely static during the life of the application. Some languages, like Coldfusion, provide this functionality out of the box--but PHP is lacking this feature.

Enter Chris Dary, programmer extraordinaire here at Arc90, with AppCache, a really nice PHP5 implementation of the application scope that leverages memcached for caching. You can get it, and check out some examples, over in the Arc90 lab.

| Comments (6) | TrackBacks (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : ShuffleStack

Andy Lewisohn, one of our rockstar Flex coders, just put together a really slick solution to a very common problem. We often contend with large amounts of information that vie for attention on our apps' screens, and reusing the same components time and again just doesn't always work. Over in the lab, Andy shows us ShuffleStack, a Flex component that tackles this problem in a better way.

| Comments (4) | TrackBacks (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on January 4, 2007 by Chris LoSacco

Arc90 Mobile NYT Reader

I am a Treo 700p user, and I lived by Dave Winer's New York Times River. It was great for news reading on the go, and I found myself checking the site daily. Simple in concept, high on return and usability. And in talking to some of the other Arc90 folks, I wasn't the only one who had gotten used to the site. We were bummed when it recently went down for good.

So we've written our own version, the Arc90 Mobile NYT Reader. It takes all of the Times' RSS feeds, combines them into one big river, takes out the duplicates, remaps the links to go to the print versions and runs the result through the Arc90 River Reader to make it suitable for Treo's and other mobile devices.

We also added one additional feature. The river can often grow very large, since we're combining all of the Times' many feeds. If you don't want to load the whole thing, you can pass in an "items" parameter and only retrieve a subset. For example, http://river.arc90.com/nytmobile/?items=5 will give you the five most recent items. So no whining from the EV-DO-less crowd, ok?

| Comments (0) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on October 19, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Updated : New Link Thumbnail Goodness

Link Thumbnail is one of our most popular tools, and we thought we should let you know that we just made it better by leveraging a new thumbnail service called WebSnapr. WebSnapr is better for two reasons: the screenshots are bigger, and if a requested thumbnail doesn't exist, it will make one for you - in a few seconds! Very nice. Head over to the lab page to see an example of the new service in action, download v2.0, and enjoy.

| Comments (0) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on October 9, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Search Clouds

While looking for information about the Nintendo Wii he had just preordered, Joel Nagy found himself running across a growing number of search results that didn't have the facts he wanted. Instead, he got back articles talking about comparisons or previews. What to do when you get pages about the PS3 or Xbox when you're looking for the Wii? Search clouds provide an interesting solution.

| Comments (4) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

An Experiment with Rivers

Arc90 has a new experiment in the lab called the Arc90 River Reader. It's an extension of the simple rivers that are popping up on the 'net for news sources, except it accepts any RSS feed, and therefore has some slick usages. Read about it, then play with it, and we think you'll be impressed. I've already bookmarked it on my Treo, and you might, too.

| Comments (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on September 11, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : Alternating Rows

The Arc90 lab just got its fifth tool, Alternating Rows, a great script that takes plain table data and makes it much more readable. Just feed your table tag a couple of colors and let the tool do the rest.

| Comments (0) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on August 24, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

How to Trust Email Again

We all don't like spam. But when an email from your bank turns out to be a phisher looking for your account information, it's beyond annoyance. Over in the lab, we propose a clever idea for combating this stuff.

| Comments (2) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : External Link

As the "target _blank" debate rages on, the Arc90 developers have come up with a novel solution to this vexing (and hotly disputed) problem. We've released External Link over in the lab, a useful script that adds a new window icon to outward facing links. It's a best-of-both-worlds approach that lets the user maintain control, and it works like a charm.

| Comments (7) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on July 24, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : Image Caption

Great design shouldn't be a pain to implement, so Image Caption, Arc90's third tool from the lab, makes it as easy as possible. Start with your web site or blog, and one lightweight script and a line of style later, you'll be adding beautiful captions to your images, without any of the hassle. Check it out!

| Comments (55) | TrackBacks (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on July 11, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : Link Thumbnail

The Arc90 developers are at it again. Head over to the lab to check out Link Thumbnail, a super simple way to add thumbnails to your external links. It's a drag and drop installation, and you'll be styling up your plain old text links in no time.

| Comments (65) | TrackBacks (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on June 8, 2006 by Richard Ziade

25 New Ways To Use RSS

Over at the arc90 lab, we've posted 25 alternative uses for RSS. Most people view RSS as a neat technology that makes it easier to track blogs and news feeds. We see a lot more than that. More broadly defined, it's a push technology that allows you to let a content or information provider know that you want to be on top of their information. That information can be just about anything: sports scores, tracking packages, ebay auctions. Anything worth being notified about can find a potential use in RSS.

| Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on June 2, 2006 by Richard Ziade

A Simpler, Hosted Version of Sidenotes

The kids at Arc90 simply wouldn't leave well enough alone. The response to Sidenotes has been great, but we've found that a lot of people had trouble incorporating the script into their blogging platforms.

So we've whipped together a hosted version that requires one line of code to be added to your blog templates. Anywhere in the <head> portion of your template (whether Blogger, Movable Type, Wordpress, etc.), add the following line of code:

<script language="JavaScript" type="Text/JavaScript" src="http://arc90.com/lab/tools/c/javascript/arc90hosted_sidenote.js"> </script>

That's it! No need to upload javascript files or tweak CSS. Just add sidenotes the same old way as instructed in step 3 of the Sidenotes instructions. Also, be sure to rebuild your entries after you've updated the template.

Happy sidenoting!

| Comments (6) | TrackBacks (2) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on June 2, 2006 by Richard Ziade

A Super-Snazzy Syntax Highlighter

Some people have asked us how we made our code examples in the lab look all snazzy. It's some slick unobtrusive javascript that lights up your conventional <textarea> so your code is nicely formatted and color-coded.

The script is called dp.SyntaxHighlighter. It’s a free download licensed under LGPL. It’s extremely easy to implement so have at it.

| Comments (0) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on June 1, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Unobtrusive Sidenotes : The Aftermath

The response to Unobtrusive Sidenotes has been great. The tool is spreading like crazy (due in large part to Kottke.org and the Digg effect) and the feedback has been great.

Two things we're gonna rack our brains on (over some alcoholic beverage) are:

  1. How do we make the sidenote text work (if possible) or at least gracefully degrade in the RSS feed.
  2. How do we make it ridiculously easy to integrate this into the popular blogging tools. Now we're not saying "Wordpress Plug-In" or anything like that, but who knows...

We'd love to stop everything, take in that feedback and do more stuff but there's all kinds of other tools, experiments and ideas we're queiing up.

Thanks again for all the support. Again, the easiest way to find out the goings-on at Arc90 is to subscribe to the blog & lab feeds (links are in the footer below).

| Comments (1) | Technorati Tags :

Posted on May 25, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Introducing : Unobtrusive Sidenotes

We're pleased to announce the first of hopefully many tools, experiments and ideas out of the arc90 lab. This one is really cool. It's a dead simple way to include color-coded sidenotes in your blog or web page. What are sidenotes you ask? They're like footnotes, except cooler. They're color-coded against highlighted text and sit alongside the main body of text rather than at the bottom. This is partly inspired by a brief experiment The Atlantic Monthly did about a year ago with an article by David Foster Wallace. It's available in PDF format for download.

Installation of the script requires virtually zero coding skills. Simply download the code, drop in the javascript tag reference and CSS and the tool does the rest. Be sure to check it out over at the lab. You'll find full instructions and examples there.

| Comments (30) | TrackBacks (2) | Technorati Tags :