SSL Converter

This is such a great utility for converting SSL certificates - SSL Converter. I also like the extra warning that pops up when conversion mode requires use of your private key,

Your private key is intended to remain on the server. While we try to make this process as secure as possible (such as by using SSL to encrypt the key when it is sent to the server), for complete security we recommend that you manually convert the certificate on your server using the OpenSSL commands below.

If you see the above, you can just scroll down and copy-paste provided examples to run on your own machine, very useful.

Calendar for MooTools

Here’s another component that virtually all online application will need sooner or later. Via Ajaxian comes this neat calendar implementation for MooTools.

Canvas UI for MooTools

Finally, a decent implementation of panels using MooTools, which means I can finish my migration from YUI+Scriptaculous to MooTools some time this year if time allows.

Introducing YSlow

Yahoo just announced release YSlow as a first (hopefully, of many) great extension to Firebug that analyzes your pages and points out a wide variety of ways you can improve their performance. My first few minutes playing with it proved to be a lot of fun and I look forward to using it frequently going forward. Here’s a teaser to get you started straight from the home page of our application,

There’s much more to discover, go and grab it while its hot.

Chalk it up!

Dave Shea has just released his first set of stock icons called Chalkwork, and let’s just say I’m looking forward to seeing more along the same lines. Clean, generic and very recognizable. Grab it while it’s hot.

Can’t Yahoo! be just a little smarter?

Sigh. I just made a mistake of going to yahoo.com to check the stock price for RSA (which is now a division of EMC, but I didn’t know that). So what do I do? I type in “RSA” and off we go on a wild goose chase…

Optimizing page load times

Here’s a very useful (although somewhat technical) study of page load times and factors that may influence them, all more relevant in light of skyrocketing (mis)use of Ajax on the client side.

It is widely accepted that fast-loading pages improve the user experience. In recent years, many sites have started using AJAX techniques to reduce latency. Rather than round-trip through the server retrieving a completely new page with every click, often the browser can either alter the layout of the page instantly or fetch a small amount of HTML, XML, or javascript from the server and alter the existing page. In either case, this significantly decreases the amount of time between a user click and the browser finishing rendering the new content.

However, for many sites that reference dozens of external objects, the majority of the page load time is spent in separate HTTP requests for images, javascript, and stylesheets. AJAX probably could help, but speeding up or eliminating these separate HTTP requests might help more, yet there isn’t a common body of knowledge about how to do so.

Hat’s off to Aaron Hopkins.

Commonly user browser sizes

At some point during your web development process you will have to make a decision about your target audience’s browser size. We’ve seen all kinds of statistics showing user’s display resolution, but a new study by Thomas Baekdal looks at how much of that space is actually occupied by a browser. Good stuff, even if the data source is somewhat questionable (read: vague).

Trick out your image

Here’s another package that we use quite a bit here, NewSystemIcon. It adds two new sub-menus to the System menu that allow one to pick a non-standard icon to be used throughout the image as well as a menu to change a global background color. Some may find this useful when running multiple images at the same time or simply when they need to differentiate special ones.

Here’s a default look of the launcher,

Extended System menu,

Default Icon menu,

Default Color menu,

Green launcher with the Squares icon,

Blue launcher with the Book icon,

Head over to Public Repository to grab latest NewSystemIcon and see if you like it. Oh and let me know if you find any issues, this is a goodie after all.

Version history in color

I always found RBStoreExtensions package to be immensely useful when using StORE with more than, say, 2 developers. But it also felt a little limiting given how little context information it provided visually in the graph,

Slight improvement to RBStoreExtensions adds a blessingColors method that lets the blessing policy decide how to color all these version shapes. I personally find this a whole lot more useful and we’re all using it quite a bit now to figure out what needs merging, where the truly latest versions are and such,

I’m about to publish this to the Public Repository as RBStoreExtensions 1.1, so go ahead and grab it while its hot.

Update: Some people had asked me why the figures show more than what they see as far as text description of a version goes. I modified it even further in my image to show the first letter of store user’s name for each version by overriding,

PundleVersionFigure>>label
 ^' <1s>, <2s>'
    expandMacrosWith: self storeRecord version
    with: self storeRecord userName first