These are some quick updates on stuff I've been doing recently:

New Websites!

I've finally created a website to fill the void of my domain - my portfolio. This was actually a side-effect of finally putting up a decent new site for Link web development - the web development me and my friend started two month ago. Check them out. There were some very nice tricks in the making of these sites.

It's also a good chance to mentioned I've finally discovered how useful those IE-fixers can be - mainly PIE and IE-*.js bundle are. Creating the above sites, I've spent less than 30min total adapting the sites to work across all IE version (6 ). As a side bonus - people are going to feel how slow their outdated browser really is, and might decide to finally update (yeah, right...).

Mootools Plugins

I've published some new mootools plugins. Mostly it's stuff I came across and found interesting:

1. ARIAMessager - This Class is something I've been thinking about for a really long while, inspired by a lecture I saw on YUI Theater on web accessibility. What this class does is very simple - it allows you to post messages to a screen reader. This is very important for notifying the reader on dynamic updates to the page, but also for enriching the overall experience.
2. Element.rgba - This is a 3-in one package - revolving around supplying cross-browser support for rgba background values. The first part supplies an Element method for setting these values - setRGBA. The 2^nd monkey patches Element#getStyle and Element#setStyle to transparently support this feature. The 3^rd adds Browser.Features.rgba - which v1.3's new way of doing feature detection.
3. Event.async -

   Another cool plugin - this introduces a new way of doing iteration. The main concept calling the function as a timeout, thus making all function call async. Without the plugin, you could have done this:

           arr.each(function(item,key){
               setTimeout(function(){
                   console.log(item,key);
               },1);
           });
           

   Assuming the loop itself is much faster than calling the function, there is a good chance that several of these functions will run simultaneously (instead of waiting for each iteration to finish).

Upgrading to 1.3

Following a message on the mootools' users list, I've finally took the time to upgrade most of my classes to 1.3. This didn't take that long, but it did improve some of my classes, mainly HistoryManager, which, aside from being one of my favorites, also turns out to be quite useful - I've been getting a lot of good feedback on it. For a class that was developed as a pass-time exercise, it really impresses me that it can withstand production ready applications.

That's it... Most of my work these days is about finding work. It's quite frustrating to find out that I can't easily find work in a field that I'm good at. Especially since the Israeli market is so poor on high quality front-end programmers.