After trying for months to get my patches into Net_Dict without success, I have succeeded in taking over maintenance of the package. The new release, which fixes all known issues and brings the package back into compliance with PEAR CS went out on the 8th.

This is a very good thing. Net_Dict is used at eNotes for our slick AJAX dictionary. Speaking of, I rolled out a pretty big update to that recently. It’s refactored to use jQuery, which has rapidly become an indispensable tool for JavaScript work. The updates include:

• Renamed to “Minitool.”
• Tons of glossy effects. The window rolls down and fades in when activated, then rolls back up and fades out when closed. It used to simply pop into place. The search content also fades in and out when you select a tab. jQuery’s AJAX plugin runs asynchronously, so the request is happening in the background while things are animating. While it’s no faster than before, it alters the perception of the speed, so it seems more responsive.
• eNotes Search added (Shift-S). This mostly acts like the normal search function, except it only shows plain content matches, instead of guessing if you were searching for a specific author or title.

An excellent update, if I do say so myself.

It’s also interesting to note that The Wall Street Journal implemented something similar, but hooked into the right click. I feel that my approach is cleaner, since it doesn’t alter the behavior the user expects from the browser. The WSJ search pops up it’s results window, but the browser’s right click menu is activated at the same time, at least in Firefox and Safari. I seem to recall that IE lets you block the menu from appearing, but I haven’t tried it there. Regardless, I don’t like to break standard behavior that people have come to expect from their browser.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Code. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.