SocialHistory.js is a brand new piece of JavaScript code that, while clever, is also a little bit disconcerting at the same time. This script allows a site to determine what social networking (or regular sites) a visitor has previously visited. The creator of the script uses the example of implementing this to determine what social bookmarking links to provide on a page.

My first thought was the amount of market research a person could collect with this. What’s stopping me from taking the script, slightly modifying it so that it actually stores the data is collects and then using that data to determine if making pushes to promote my site on certain social networks would be worth my time? The answer is probably nothing.

But is that a good idea? The data is probably relatively harmless. For instance, the script can tell that I personally use sites like Facebook and del.icio.us but that’s true for, quite literally, hundreds of thousands of people. Maybe the data you could gather from SocialHistory.js to use for research means wouldn’t prove to be very valuable in the long term but I’m just not sure it’s any of my business to see that information in the first place.

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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.

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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+.

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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.

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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…

A Windows XP Update (KB918899) has taken the window.closed property and totally screwed it in Internet Explorer.

Before, this would work:

if (openWin.closed)
{
// blah blah blah
}


After the XP Update, that call to openWin.closed causes the “Permission Denied” error to occur. The best guess I’ve seen for the reason why is a hold IE is putting on the state of the window. The thread suggests setting the call to .closed on some kind of delay, with SetTimeOut I assume, but that didn’t seem to work for me.

Another suggestion was to try this:

if (typeof(openWin.closed) != 'unknown')
{
// blah blah blah
}


Using that if statement got me results about half of the time, but half of the time is just as bad as a generic “Permission Denied” error as far as I’m concerned.

I threw together a temporary hack solution involving a global variable and onFocus() to get what I wanted inside that if statement done. If someone comes across a legitimate fix for what KB918899 has broken let me know.

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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.

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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.

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