I’ve just come back from spending the day at Nitobi, for their “Hack Day 3″. Basically it entailed sitting around in their gorgeous office in downtown Vancouver, eating pizza, drinking beer, chatting about software & programming with a bunch of other nerds. A day well spent by anybody’s standards. ;-)

At the end of the day we all gave presentations on what we’d been working on. Some interesting stuff. One chap did a 3D flash rendering of the Nitobi office space, which was bloomin’ cool – very nice to see what Flash is now capable of. Another guy did a cross-browser JS debugging tool offering functionality like Firebug or Venkman, only, well, cross-browser. Nice chap, too.

For my part, originally I’d intended to improve the jQuery version of my Smart Lists app to allow for more than one instance in a page (someone recently emailed me about it), but once I got there I figured it wasn’t terribly demo-able ["Hey look guys... no bug!" Yeah... perhaps not]. I also decided against working on the AIR version of generatedata.com since… I dunno, I just felt like I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than debug SQL Lite.

So, eyeballs intact, I added a few new features to Smart Lists:

• An (optional) second pagination set, so in case you have rather long page, you can include the << 1 2 3 >> at the bottom as well as the top.
• A “Num results” option to let you display the number of items found in the current selected flags.
• A “Show All” function that you can use in your page to list all content.
• Lastly, and by far the most cool, is the option to categorize your data with a second dropdown. e.g. if your list of data was houses for sale, you could have one dropdown for Area of Town, another for Type of house. Then, the user could select an option from each dropdown and view that specific item subset. [It's cooler than it sounds.]

Despite my staggeringly unclear presentation, I think people understood it – but I do rather wish I’d explained it’s extensibility a bit more. Virtually everything about the script is customizable. Oh well.

In the next week or two I’ll update the main script and jQuery version for these additions.