For those who are fortunate enough to find themselves doing development on the mac platform, there is an alternative, which although it may not be the newest game on the block, it is one of the best all around. Sissy FauxVelopers need not apply to use this app. It has no build your app with one click buttons. It is designed to take the development experience to the next level for those who like to get their “fingers” dirty and actually do some major textual manipulations.

From the first launch it’s basic simplicity and power are immediately perceptible. It is feature packed enough to quell the pining soul of the most advanced developer, but simple enough to handle basic text document edits. From customizable coloring of the interface (I prefer the “All Hallow’s Eve” scheme) to the elegant line numbering and code folding features in the applications “trough”, this bad boy was built to move mountains and work minor miracles.

With built in support for dozens of predominant document formats, it provides out of the box streamlining of your developer workflow while also allowing you to add your own file format specifications should you happen to be crafty enough to have come up with your own file formats and specifications.

Additionally you can create functions to validate your files layout and formatting right into your file specification. Giving you on the fly access to all the features you want when you are developing.

This great product has seen me through many development projects, and has greatly increased my development capacity through it’s simplistic yet powerful functions.Although this product isn’t free, it is well worth the €39 purchase price, and it comes with a 30 day trial for all parties that may be interested, but not yet committed to the purchase.

Go give it a test spin. All you have to loose is pain and frustration.

Download Demo

Homepage

Fancy Upload is one of those tools. Providing a slick interface and some dynamic classes, Fancy Upload leverages the abilities of the Mootools Javascript library and ties that with some flash integration to create a great solution with an infinate number of uses. Go check it out.

http://digitarald.de/project/fancyupload/

FoxyCart has created a great set of e-commerce tools that allow you to easily set up a fully functional online store/shopping cart with very minimal effort.
Foxycart offers support for either Paypal payments pro (for credit card payments only at the moment) or some of the more popular payment gateways. as well as support for live shipping rates from Fedex, UPS, etc.
All in all, foxycart packs a nice sales punch. And is my shopping cart solution of choice.

www.foxycart.com

Foxycart Demo Store

People every day find themselves without the ability to easily produce that documentation, and may not get their assets replaced by their insurance company, because they cannot prove the exact assets that they owned.

Treasurebox is built to provide a safe secure online storage location for that documentation, very accessible, and easy to use. The MooTools framework and extentions to it are used extensively to increase the usability of the product.

The initial release is currently in public beta. I would love any readers to sign up (No Credit Card or billing information required) and leave some comments here about your thoughts.

Treasurebox
Twenty Cent Productions, LLC

Obviously there are many different ways to do this, you can validate the data on the back end as it receiving script is processing, and send an error, requesting that the user input correct information. Or you can do Front end processing on the data when the form is submitted and through JavaScript tell the user that the data is not correct, or you can validate the data as the client is inputing the information, thus allowing the client to correct the error before continuing on (especially useful in large/long forms). Or a combination of the 3, validate on the fly, on submit, and on return.

There is a myriad of different front end scripts that have popped up to handle the front end/live validation, one that I started using was LiveValidation, It was a useful library, but Since I was already using MooTools anyway, there was additional overhead to use this additional library, as well as the validation messages all appeared inline with your other content, and this tended to be a difficult thing to work with in cramped conditions.

This led me to search around a bit more and I found Formcheck, A live validation script based on mootools. It was lighter weight, since it was using the library that I was already using. The configuration/integration was about 100 times easier to implement and manage. And the notification appeared as a hovering box rather than and inline notification, which was just the icing on the cake.

Light, Easy, and Pretty, who could ask for more.

Formcheck Demo

Formcheck Documentation

Formcheck Download

http://moo.floor.ch/

I look forward to the enhancements that will be made available with the 1.2 release. Exciting.

In later posts I will share and discuss scripts that use/extend the base functionality of MooTools to create some very amazing, usability enhancing, tools and effects.