Just finished the first day at Barcamp London (it feels very odd to be in the office during the weekend and not working on products). I had very much fun and met some interesting new faces while hearing good presentations of seasoned presenters. My personal contribution so far was a quick talk I knocked together on the tube towards barcamp about JavaScript versus CSS and there will be a follow-up article/blog post on this soon. For now, you can download the PDF of the talk – 96KB but without the dancing and singing it is only half the fun.

I am too knackered now to write more, so stay tuned :-)

Dan Webb and Luke Redpath have released an Unobtrusive JavaScript for Rails Plugin. Well done! Now let’s do the same for Visual Studio and .NET!

I just stumbled upon workfriendly, a web service that shows a web site inside a frame that looks like it is Microsoft Office Word 2003. The clue is that instead of just showing the page in the frame, the service also turns off imagery and layout and makes the web site appear as if it was a Word document. Perfect for those offices where the boss frowns upon web surfing.

I just installed Aptana and peeked at some of the Aptana Screencasts to see what this IDE can do and I am very impressed.

I am a sold to Homesite, ever since version 2.5, but lately I found myself more and more using my Mac and I hate using different IDEs. WordWrangler and CSSEdit seemed to odd as an IDE (give me shortcuts, not floating toolbars), Dreamweaver was just too overwhelming and costs too much, and others were just not my cup of tea.

Aptana, however, seems to be really focused on web development and integrates all the big JavaScript libraries. That way using the YUI is a lot quicker as the IDE autocompletes all those long namespaces.

Now, if only I knew that it supports UTF-8 as well as UltraEdit does, then I’d be sold to this one. I’ll give it a spin and keep you updated as to my findings.

Esther Schindler has been busy asking members of evolt’s the list what their biggest pains are when dealing with clients are. Or – in other words – what developers would love their clients to know. The result is called Becoming Clueful and was released at IT Business Net yesterday.

It is an article full of good information, albeit I’d loved to see some more structure in it rather than a string of quotes. Something like a Top 10 myths and Top 10 annoyances with a lot of footnotes as to who said it would have been easier to read.

Anyways, my bit is on page 2:

“Clients seem to think that web development is like getting your car fixed in one of the quickfix garages: You agree a fixed price, bring it in, and pick it up after a certain amount of time,” says Chris Heilmann, a web developer in London. “In reality, a good web product needs buy-in and dedication from both the development agency and the client.”