Having given up on trying to get to sleep tonight I thought I’d do a bit of house cleaning and update my invoices script. The version includes a number of small bug fixes and the option of being able to specify the currency ($, £ or custom) from within the Program Settings page. A small improvement, but one that opens the door to our UK friends.

Thanks to Peter van Arkel for his bug report and offer to translate, and to James Glen for providing the impetus to get off my sorry butt and add UK currency support. ;-)
Click here to learn more about the script, try the online demo or download the (free!) code.

Excellent! Adobe is set to release AIR 1.0 tomorrow.

I sure hope they’ve fixed most of the more prominent bugs in Beta 3. I had to abandon work on an AIR version of generatedata.com because it was just too buggy. You can develop AIR apps via Flex or with standard HTML/JS, and since generatedata.com is a DHTML app, I naturally vouched for the latter. The problems I ran into was all seemed to revolve around the way it handled select fields. First it failed to display simple HTML optgroups; second, whenever the focus was on a select box it would draw the focus away from the main application; third, there were some position rendering problems with select fields placed in overflow:auto elements. That last one really got my goat so I put the project aside until a new release came out.

I’m looking forward to picking it up again – it’s a neat technology.

I’ve been meaning to make a personal post for some time but inevitably work gets in the way. Damn you work, damn you! So okay, here’s how I’ve been filling my days.

Work!

Since the start of the year my “day job” has been working for Encore Web Studios and through them, Blue Lime Media. On the whole I quite enjoy working from home, but keeping cabin fever at bay can be hard. Once I get back to Vancouver I’m going to try out Workspace for a month or two. It looks promising, but a little costly.
Here’s a few of the bigger projects I’m currently working on or have completed.

• UBC Library (complete)
• Techcouver “Web 2.0 Map” (complete)
• BC Film – backend database and UI for collecting tax information for film companies shooting in BC (complete)
• Royal Pacific Realty – creating an “intranet” for realtors and administrators (ongoing)
• Elections BC – revamping their existing site to use the Expression Engine content management system (ongoing)
• CTN Reports – a full, Ajax-driven site for cardiologists and radiologists to let them quickly generate patient reports (ongoing)

Personal Stuff

• I’m still planning on living in Saskatoon until April / May until my girlfriend finishes her degree. [Not to gloat, but she scored 99.5% on her Veterinary board exams. Not half bad!] Can’t WAIT to come home to Vancouver – this weather’s killing me. I miss being able to walk outside without fear of death from frostbite. Say what you like about Vancouver but that’s seldom a concern…
• I’m very much looking forward to the Open Web Conference in Vancouver, April 14th-15th. Some interesting talks being presented.
• In a feeble attempt to fend off the cold I’ve been staying in, reading a zillion books on Ajax and web development (and Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin series – they’re bloody brilliant). “Enterprise Ajax”, a book by the Vancouver company Nitobi was well worth the read. Lots of practical advice.
• I’ve been following the US presidential primaries very closely. At this point it’s actually beginning to look like it’ll be between Obama and McCain. Very surprising – a couple of months ago I’d have banked on Hillary fo’ sho’. Not sure if you followed the debate last night, but Hillary’s closing remarks did sound awfully concession-like, despite her insistence to the contrary. Texas and Ohio on the 4th will tell all…

Form Tools 2

Slowly plodding along, and looking cooler by the day.

1. Smarty templates. Ever since the script’s inception I disliked the strong coupling of HTML and PHP (though let’s face it, this is largely a problem with PHP as a whole). Last year I improved things by adding “code pages” for each display page, which contained the bulk of the PHP – but it still wasn’t that great. Solution? Smarty! The Smarty template engine completely separates the PHP and HTML layers making the pages a hell of a lot simpler to work with. The Smarty syntax is very simple and can be picked up by non-developers in very little time.Simply “smartifying” the pages wasn’t hard (they’re actually all done now) but the whole point is to make them easy to understand so that people who need to edit the pages can do so with very little difficulty. So now I’m going through each page with a fine tooth comb (what an odd expression) removing as much extraneous logic and code as I can. Tedious, to say the least – but worth it.
2. Modules. I’ve now come up with 6 modules I want to include by default, and the list keeps growing… erk. This will be an invaluable addition to the script. Ideally I’d like to devote myself to working on modules after this release – they’re fun!
3. Menus. I got rather fed up with working on the Smarty whatnot and decided to take a break by adding an unscheduled feature: customizable menus. Now you can customize the links of the navigation menu within Form Tools, letting them link to whatever page you with – internally within Form Tools or custom links (like on your site). This is always something I do manually when integrating Form Tools into a website. Now you can do it without editing any HTML!I’ll be posting some screenshots in the next week so you can get an idea of how this looks and functions.
4. Emails. MAN I hate the existing email functionality. It’s kludgy and the UI sucks. But no more! The new system is about 509862% better and allows to optional handling of the emails by separate SMTP scripts (either PHP Mailer of Swift Mailer – or both – I haven’t decided).

I think that’s pretty much it. Check back here for screenshots of Form Tools 2!

Howdy, folks. Since the New Year I’ve been working on a large Ajax project for cardiologists and – as with all my projects – I was using my old workhorse script, the JS Validation library to manage all the client side validation. But having put so much effort into generating a clean, fluid UI, the alert() JS error popups stood out like a sore thumb. Time to upgrade the script! And, rebrand it as Really Simple Validation.

This new release is a significant improvement, placing a lot more control in the hands of the developer. Here’s what’s been added:

• 3 (built-in) options on how to display the errors: one-by-one alerts (like the earlier version), an alert-all option (the new default) where a single popup appears containing all error messages, and lastly a very easy to implement display-html option which lets you bypass the awful alert() messages and insert the errors directly into your webpage to be styled as you see fit.
• The option to pass all error message information to your own custom function to display the errors in whatever way you need.
• Greater control over styling fields that contain errors

I’ve fully documented the script here, including a number of practical examples (plus source), to help you get operational in no time.

Enjoy!