mootools

With the initial release of Adobe AIR, a lot of web developers (myself included) are starting to get excited about developing rich web applications that run natively on the desktop across platforms. We've already seen several great AIR apps popping up all over the Internet, and thought we'd try our hand at creating one of our own.

Snippely was created by myself, Tom Occhino, and Valerio Proietti as our first attempt at creating a robust and useful AIR application.

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A month has gone by since this article was published, and in retrospect, I’m honestly sorry about some things I said about Olmo. It was harsh. It was a bad situation, every party involved could have behaved better, we all ended up saying stuff we didnt really mean. I already apologized privately to Olmo, and i wanted to do it here too.

Valerio.

Some days are goood days, others not so much. Today, not so much. This morning I woke to something of a firestorm on the interweb about, well, something stupid, and frankly, it was my stupid.

Yesterday Olmo posted a video of a presentation of Mootools that he gave to a group of developers at the LA Web Application Developers Meetup. When he posted the video on the official Mootools blog I noticed it, but was busy with other things and only gave a cursory scan of the video itself. What little I saw of it seemed fine and I made a note to go watch it when I had time.

Frankly, I should have known better. Olmo’s lack of maturity, even for his age, always was notable, but he was a helpful part of the team regarding actual code.

The video itself contains numerous pejorative and flat out erroneous statements about other frameworks, jQuery in particular. It’s insulting. Nevermind the fact that it doesn’t help people understand Mootools at all to spend your time bashing other frameworks, it’s just so stupid to harbor that kind of perspective.

To be fare, I’ve tolerated this kind of trash-talking amongst a few of our developers because it seemed to be one of their motivations - to make the best framework around. It was never, ever in any public discussion and seemed to be more like sniping for fun. This was a mistake and unprofessional on my part. Public or private, these other projects deserve our respect and admiration. We’re all trying to do the same thing, and while we like our approach, we learn things from everyone else’s methods as much as by our own ingenuity.

To be clear: what Olmo said in his talk are his opinions and he was waaayyyy out of line. The kind of “sniping for fun” talk I’m referring too was much more playful, locker-room kind of stuff. Not that it matters much now.

The apology here is not that Olmo gave his little rant, nor that it got posted on our blog. I am personally sorry that he did, but that’s not the point. No, my apology is for letting this kind of perspective have a place on our team. It’s immature, but it’s also disrespectful, and while I looked at it light heartedly as something fun, Olmo seems to have truly felt this way and I should have recognized that as both dangerous and infectious.

Olmo is no longer a part of the Mootools development team. We wish him well, but frankly we can’t tolerate his immaturity any longer. Additionally, I’d like to apologize to the rest of the Mootools development team whose reputations may have been tainted by this whole affair. There are some stellar people who help out with our project, and I’m already in their debt, and this is no way to repay it.

To the jQuery team, I don’t know how else to say it than this, but I know it’s insufficient. I do regard your work with respect. It’s different than our approach, but solid work none-the-less. If there is anything I can do to make up for this mishap, just say the word.

Valerio Proietti

We haven't had this blog for very long, and talking to many users recently, I became aware of the fact that many people just don't understand how powerful MooTools actually is. The purpose of this series of articles is to shed a little light on some of the functionality provided by MooTools that many users might be missing. I think maybe it's time we got everyone caught up to speed. First topic... Natives and Elements!

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Today I found a nice article on coderseye.com:

I spent a half hour tinkering around in Aptana, downloading MooTools 1.1, and setting up a few tests. The result is extremely pleasing. Not only is MooTools way better and easier to use than I remember, but it works out of the box with AIR.

That’s Very nice to know!

I personally haven’t yet tried MooTools in AIR extensively (i only did a few basic tests) but I’m definitely looking forward to creating something in the very near future. Maybe a downloader app? We’ll see!

During the last few days, we've added some nifty CSS3 selectors to the trunk. Continue reading to know what this is all about, or try SlickSpeed now!

UPDATE: SlickSpeed can now be downloaded from googlecode.

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After more than a year of continuous and dedicated development, we decided it was time to launch a blog to keep you in the loop.

Here we’re gonna post about the latest moo trends, the latest breaking changes, the latest plugins that see the light everyday.

Hoping its enough for an introductory post, I’ll leave you at better things, for now.

Cheers

Valerio