I just posted a few more screenshots of the upcoming Form Tools 2 release on the Form Tools site. This batch of images are of the new Submission Account module. Basically it just allows users to edit their own form submissions through a new, simple user account type. Unlike the other modules I’ve posted about, this one won’t be bundled with the main build. It’s a useful feature, but only for a significant subset of users. Downloading and installing it will be a cinch, though.

Submission Accounts module screenshots

An interesting article from Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1842030,00.html

It calls out McCain for his lack of integrity these last few campaign-saturated months. We’ve all come to expect a degree of disingenuousness from politicians – I’d argue that to some degree it’s part and parcel with being in politics in the first place – but recently McCain has stepped waaay out of bounds, so much so that Time, the New York Times and other news organizations are flatly calling labeling him a liar. You’d think this would be enough to sink his campaign, but not so.

How on earth has this become acceptable to Americans? What’s genuinely troubling is that truth and facts no longer seem to matter enough to decide the result of an election. American politics itself has become so undermined that it’s who puts on the better show; who captivates the voting public for long enough to cinch the votes. Say one thing and do the other? No problem. Dumb down the population enough into thinking in terms of blue and red and politics just becomes entertainment – content be damned. With few exceptions, every online news story with a positive or negative statement about one of the nominees is filled with comments by enraged Democrats and enraged Republicans. God it’s tiring.

Still, exciting times coming up! US Election, Canadian Federal Election, even a municipal election (from most to least exciting… I’m a lousy Canadian). I’m throwing a Election Barbeque/Booze-up for the first. I figure it’ll help dull the pain.

A big thanks to studbs, Jan Eriksson and Derek Pennycuff for the bugs reports + fix. I’ve finally got round to updating the Smart Lists jQuery extension to support the latest version of jQuery (a slight change in the way jQuery did things made the script inoperable).

The jQuery version still lags a little behind the Prototype version, feature-wise, but it’s at least stable.
Read more about the script here.

I know there’s a million posts / news articles on this, but I just read Google’s comic (yup, a comic) outlining  their approach at building a new, modern web browser, and frankly I was blown away. A post seemed in order.

• Chrome’s HTML rendering is handled by Webkit, like Safari and Adobe AIR.
• They wrote a totally new javascript virtual machine called V8, which compiles code as machine code, rather than being interpreted. (!!) This means it’s considerably faster – something which is sorely needed with todays web apps.
• Tabs are now moved to the very top of the page – and this isn’t just an aesthetic nicety, it’s reflected in the code. Every tab now runs in it’s own virtual machine, which greatly increases stability. If something goes wrong, a TAB will crash (a “sad tab”), not the entire browser. JS running in separate tabs now has it’s own process so it’ll run asynchronously of what else is going on in the browser.
• An Opera-esque “new tab” page, showing your 9 most visited websites + list of sites you search most on.

There’s a LOT of other features, too, but I won’t post ‘em all. I’m just playing with it now.

*** One initial thing that struck me: Google Documents was notoriously slow for me on Firefox & IE when loading a spreadsheet. On Chrome it’s ASTONISHINGLY fast.

With the IE8 release just around the corner, this does rather steal the limelight away from Microsoft – again.