So, a brief run down of what has been happening recently:

1. I’m on holidays! (yay!). We are currently down at Adelaide, which has not yet been informed of the fact that it is summer. Nice though, I hate the heat and it’s relaxing.
2. I’ve made a bit of an update to RSS->IMAP Server. The way it read the RSS feeds needed to be re-jigged a bit and a couple of bugs have been fixed in the process.
3. I’ve finally got myself a copy of Vista to have a bit of a play with. First impressions are good, but all in all not great. With so much time spent in development, and so much promised I can’t help but feel a little disappointed. Out of all the killer features that were to be included, only the Aero interface remains, and that is far from anything revolutionary or groundbreaking.
4. Fedora Core 6 on the other hand is just plain cool. There have been lots of little improvements and it looks very polished. The graphic effects that the open source developers have been able to come up with in a limited amount of time eclipses that which Vista has to offer.

I’m hoping to be able to get some stuff done using the cool script.aculo.us library. While I don’t like using javascript for no reason, some things like the auto-complete functionality seem really quite handy and it degrades nicely. So yeah, a little DMS perhaps?

A few months ago I went looking for a javascript based editor that did HTML syntax highlighting.

I found a few things that came close to what I was looking for, but nothing was really good enough to be usable. So, having worked with the “Content Editable” or “Design Mode” HTML stuff before, I decided that I would have a go. I got a fair way through, but I just couldn’t work out how to reset the position of the caret after I had added the required HTML to colour the code.

Codepress performs the rather straight forward function of inserting a control char ( ­ ­& shy;) where the caret was and puts your cursor back there by removing it again. Clever, wish I’d though of doing that. I’m not sure how it manages to keep the window location consistent yet, must have something to do with the call to window.scroll(0,0) every 50 ms.

Anyway, codepress looks great. The code is small and stable and it works really well. Check it out.

It seems that more and more people are using the WYSIWYG editing capability of browsers, with better and better rich text editors being created. Unfortunately it is still one of the most inconsistent areas of browser DOMs, leading to nasty detection code and masses of browser specific hacks / workarounds. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future with a W3C recommendation and everyone coming to the party (come and play Microsoft!)