Dave Johnson

July 11th, 2007

Tonight the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour is stopping in Vancouver - home of Nitobi. I think that the bus should be rolling into town right about now.

Andre will again be giving his _amazing_ presentation about Ajax / JavaScript / HTML development in AIR so be there!

It is at Ceili’s (formerly Sky Bar) - check here for all the detailson.

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, JavaScript, Nitobi, air, onair | 2 Comments »

June 28th, 2007

Who wants a job? We have some very exciting Flex and Ajax development opportunities coming up with some high profile companies and we need some kick ass people to help us out.

To apply just do something awesome with our components or maybe something cool with say JavaFX, Adobe AIR (not that Adobe AIR) or Flex.

Send it to jobs=at=nitobi.com.

Just to give an idea of what goes on here and why it is great …

mmmmmm mountains - don’t worry it’s really nice in the summer too

xbox 360 or wii anyone?

sea monkeys ???

we also work … sometimes

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, Flex, Nitobi, air, jobs | No Comments »

June 20th, 2007

Just a quick note about the recent release of Complete UI and Grid in particular.

There are a few things to note about the recent release.

As Mike mentioned, both Grid and Combo now, like the rest of Complete UI, support standards mode - w00t. This has been a long time coming but it seems to be working pretty well so far!

Also of note with Grid is that it is much faster to load up in most cases. For example, the editors sample loads in about half the time of the the previous release. But don’t worry, there is still lots more room to improve there and we are actively working on it!

Complete UI also has two new components - Calendar, and Spotlight. AND Calendar has been integrated into the Date Picker control for Grid!

More fun stuff coming up with support for Safari 3, AIR and some new components and major updates to old ones like Tree and Grid.

Posted in Web, AJAX, Nitobi, air, safari | 4 Comments »

June 14th, 2007

With the release of Safari 3 Beta and the recent renaming and Beta release of AIR (formerly Apollo) from Adobe, we have started to work on getting our components running in both of them.

We have run across a few problems - the biggest of which is the lack of any decent debugging tools for either one. I am sure that this will soon change. Currently the best thing around for debugging is Scout.

Grid is being a bit of a challenge given that there is no XSLT support in AIR - though there is in Safari 3. Jake and I got it almost working with a day or so of work / screaming at our computers. Here is a screenshot of what we got so far:

We are pretty happy with the progress and the fact that no one has been hurt - yet

There a few known problems in AIR currently such as CSS opacity not working, table width=0px with colgroups does not work and a few other small things like that. We are certainly happy that Safari 3 and AIR both support addRule and insertRule for working with CSS while a little disappointed in no XSLT support in AIR yet good support in Safari 3.

Posted in Web, AJAX, XSLT, Components, Nitobi, apollo, completeui, air, safari | No Comments »

June 3rd, 2007

We were able to get out the Q2 release of Complete UI without too much trouble!

With the help of a keg of beer last night Jake, Mike, Alexei and I were able to pull everything together at the last moment (of course there are a few small things we are still fixin up) and get it out there. Grid is looking awesome with much improved performance and we have also released Spotlight and Calendar - as I have mentioned previously.

Its up online so check it out and let me know what you think

Time to catch up on my blog reading / writing and have a looooooong sleep.

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, Nitobi, completeui | No Comments »

May 30th, 2007

A mere two days now until the next quarterly release of Complete UI!

We be workin hard like little elves to get out a very much improved version of Grid and new products called Spotlight and Calendar.

To celebrate our efforts we will:

a) Ship Complete UI Q2
b) Drink a keg of beer and play XBox
c) …
d) Profit!

I don’t even want to think about what might happen if we don’t release on Friday!

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, Nitobi, completeui, beer | No Comments »

May 28th, 2007

In between all the other exciting stuff happening here like JaveOne, XTech and RobotReplay, we have also been working on improving the Complete UI suite!

In particular we will have a new Calendar control (which is integrated with Grid of course) and also something we call Spotlight that can be used to build a tour of your web application for help users.

What I have been working on (as anyone who has seen my twitter can attest to) is fixing up our flagship product, Grid. I have mostly been focusing on two aspects of it:

• Improving layout and theming. This has been a long time coming and it is much better now but there is still some work to do to get it up to par with all the other components. Layout has been changed a lot and should make it much nicer to work with.
• Improving performance. Another thing that has been a long time coming is better general performance. We have slimmed things down a bit in terms of code size and in fixing the layout we have also increased performance significantly.

I should also mention that Mike has been doing a bang-up job lately on getting the Java backend code ship shape as well as improving the docs - which everyone will probably be very happy about!

There has also been a slew of bug fixes going out for several of our customers that will become available to everyone with this release.

We are shooting for June 1 (this coming friday) so stay tuned!

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, Nitobi, completeui | 1 Comment »

April 20th, 2007

I posted some of our initial JSP taglib support for the Nitobi Complete UI and yesterday we posted some more good stuff!

Mike has been hard at work making a plugin for Eclipse WTP so that you can drag and drop your Nitobi components in the Eclipse IDE. He has also put together a plugin for Stuts 2. And for those that just want plain old JSP support he has also updated the JSP taglib. Go check out Mike’s post for the details of just download it below and give it a go!

Eclipse Plugin 0.8 (This is plugin uses the trial versions of the components)
Struts 2 Plugin 0.8
Nitobi Taglib 0.8 (some small kinks worked out)
Nitobi Server Library 1.0.1 (This updated library (used to be called nitobicomponents.jar) is needed for the Struts 2 plugin)

Posted in Uncategorized, AJAX, Eclipse, Components, Nitobi, jsp, struts, java, taglib | No Comments »

April 3rd, 2007

So I finally got around to putting together some screencasts of all the components in the CompleteUI Ajax suite we released in March. These are not highly technical, they are meant to highlight the UI features that will benefit the end users so they’re applicable to both a developer and non-geek audience alike. The first one is an overview of all the components (~15min) the rest compiled to show individual components. Andre was even nice enough to edit them all together for me. They’re all at native resolution to make everything as clear as possible so it’ll be nice on a monitor bigger than 1024×768.

• Nitobi CompleteUI Overview
• Grid
• ComboBox
• Tree
• TabStrip
• Fisheye Menu
• CallOut
• Ajax Shipment Tracking Application

Enjoy!

Posted in AJAX, JavaScript, Components, Nitobi, completeui | 2 Comments »

March 29th, 2007

This one almost never saw the light of day but it has been resurrected. Not even really sure what is on it aside from Ryan Stewart

Posted in AJAX, Flash, Flex, Podcast, Nitobi, FABridge, apollo | No Comments »