On Monday, Google announced that some of their applications had been upgraded on the iPhone and iPod Touch. I finally got a chance to check out the new version of Gmail this morning on my iPod Touch and it’s probably one of the best iPhone specific sites I’ve seen yet. The only thing that closely rivals it is Facebook on the iPhone.

Joe Hewitt is the man responsible for Facebook on the iPhone. Fortunately for the rest of us he released the JavaScript and CSS he used in developing the site. The package is called iUI and is available under the New BSD License. You can get a feel for just what iUI can do by checking out some examples on its Google Code site.

Creating a mobile version of a site is probably one of those projects that most of us get all excited about and then immediately place on the backburner. How much longer can we put a mobile version off? The market share of the iPhone is exploding and tools like iUI can make it easier to get a mobile site launched than ever before.

I came across a post on Web Resources Depot the other day about a JavaScript library called mapper.js that lets you add a hover effect to any regular image map. mapper.js even lets you export your image maps as SVG files if you’re into that kind of thing.

This was kind of a convenient find for me because I had just gotten done building a simple image map for a client site. The exact map, with the hover effect, looks like this:

mapper.js works by taking the coordinates defined in the image map and drawing a corresponding shape on an element you have wrapping the image (like a div, for example). It’s compatible with Mozilla Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+, Safari and IE6+.

The makers of HullBreach, a browser-based space MMORPG for the Nintendo Wii, have released a JavaScript SDK for the Wii Opera browser that lets you do some pretty incredible things.

This SDK lets you write code that interacts with the Wii Remote (and its built-in motion sensor), draw rudimentary 3D graphics and even handle multiplayer communication. All inside the Opera browser available within the Wii itself.

One of the examples included on the site is a very basic StarFox demo that you have to see for yourself. I’ve included a screenshot below for those of you who don’t have browsers capable of supporting the SDK.

There are some reports online that this is an official Nintendo and/or Opera release but that certainly doesn’t appear to be the case. From what I can tell this is an entirely third-party development.

If you’re one of the lucky ones with a Nintendo Wii and you’ve got some free time you might want to give this SDK a try. If you get stuck there’s some pretty light documentation available.

I maintain a slightly aging Intranet application and came across a JavaScript “Permission Denied” error on a page handling pop-up windows. I know pop-up windows aren’t very Web 2.0 but you can save your evangelism for another day. In defense of all things flashy and new, the app is slowing migrating to AJAX. Very slowly.

Anyway, after some light searching I came across a thread at thescripts that goes into some detail on the problem before digressing into a programmer slapfight.

Let me try and save you the trouble of wading through that mess…
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After my post on the search for a decent JavaScript datepicker, I heard back from Tan Ling Wee:

Thanks for the compliment on the datepicker. I’ve rewritten the datepicker to make it more flexible and renamed it to Sparrowscripts datepicker, but have started charging a fee of $10 per download (unlimited use though).

Check out SparrowScripts for the datepicker and several other projects you might find useful.

There probably isn’t a web app on earth that doesn’t require some kind of date input. Everyone has their own way of handling this: dropdown menus, a simple text box, multiple text boxes or the dreaded popup calendar.

Most popup calendars are either absolute garbage or too complex.

The Fuushikaden calendar, written by Tan Ling Wee in December of 2001, is probably the best answer to this problem I’ve seen. The calendar pops in the page instead of a new window and can be customized with CSS. It’s very nicely done.

Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to find online anymore. I only dug up one good URL: http://www.theopensourcery.com/jscalendarx.htm that explains things in any kind of detail. While all that detail is nice, the site doesn’t have the code (and images) readily available for download. You have to do a bit of digging. Internet.com’s JavaScript site used to have a page for it but that’s gone 404.

The developer of this calendar has officially gone AWOL from the web for a few years now. The copy of the Fuushikaden calendar I use is so heavily modified and trimmed for my own use at this point that I’d rather find the original.

If anyone knows of a site that has the original code and images of this calendar let me know. In the meantime I’m going to keep looking.