Link: PaperCube - Peter Bergström

	Peter Bergström's SproutCore-based PaperCube has been updated with some nice UI polish.  I hear a rumor that the code for this might even open source one day.  Great work Peter! 

The coding portion of SproutCore 1.0 is nearly complete, so it’s time to start work on some of the non-code parts of the SproutCore project.

Today I just push a brand new version of the SproutCore website.  The design is very simple, but unifies the wiki, blog, and main site so that they finally feel like they belong together.

We still have a lot more to do with the site before 1.0.  (More on that later)  But, the really interesting thing about the site is how it was built.

First, the new website uses SproutCore’s build tools.  Over the last few years these tools have been honed to generate highly optimized, cache friendly apps in multiple languages.  It turns out, you can use the same tools to create highly optimized, cache friendly** web pages** in multiple languages too.  The new site is really zippy in part because we let these tools work their magic.

Second, the new website is built in HTML5*.  SproutCore is an HTML5 application framework.  Although the “section” and “article” tags don’t have much to do with applications, we want to eat our own dogfood; so, there you go.

Third, and most important, the new website, like the rest of SproutCore, is open source.  You can get at the source HTML for the site by visiting the Github repository. Although this isn’t really “software”, Git makes it easy for people to clone the website, make changes, and contribute them back.  Now anyone can contribute.

I’ve also put up a project page on the wiki where we can track the plans for the new website.  The code name is “Boulevard”.

Left Overs

OK, so what’s left to do?

It would be nice to localize it, for one thing.  We also need to add additonal “marketing” content - including demos - that help explain SproutCore’s place in the world to new visitors.  There is also a lot of polish we can put into the site itself and it probably needs a few tweaks on IE.

But, hey, its an improvement.  And it’s really great to finally be at a place where we can spend some cycles on this kind of thing because the code is largely complete.

UPDATE: If you’re having trouble with the “screencasts” link, it’s probably because the DNS change is still propagating.  It should be visible in the next 12 hours.

• The site doesn’t validate HTML5 just yet.  But its a moving standard and we’re working on this so take this as a statement of intent.

Link: HTML5 drag and drop in Firefox 3.5

With Firefox 3.5 all the major browsers (including IE!) support native drag and drop.  The SC.Drag interface in SproutCore was designed from the beginning to follow the same protocols.  That means once someone SC.Drag to use native drag events, all your SproutCore-drag code will automatically work between browser windows and applications without you making any changes to your code.

HTML5 Ready.

Volunteers? :)

Geoffrey Donaldson has another hit with SproutCast Episode 3.  This episode covers controllers.  Also also is posting his source code on Github so you can follow along at home.

Viva la SproutCore Screencasts!  (via Vimeo)

We’ve had a fairly active IRC chatroom for SproutCore for awhile (#sproutcore on irc.freenode.net).

IRC doesn’t work for everyone though, so we’re trying a new kind of chat room as well.  SproutCore now has a Jabber Chat Room available at sproutcore@conference.jabber.org

Jabber Chat Rooms work just like IRC but you can access them directly from most modern IM clients including iChat, Adium, and Google Talk instead of using a special client.  They also are less likely to be blocked by your corporate firewall.

To access the chat room, you need a Jabber account.  If you have a Gmail account, you can use that.  Just follow the link below to setup your favorite client:

Google Talk with other clients

Once you have added a Jabber account to your client, just find the “Join Chat Room” menu option (usually under “File”) and enter “sproutcore@conference.jabber.org”.  Click the “autoadd” button if there is one to automatically join the room in the future.

That’s it.  Your setup.  You can now chat with anyone else who joins the room.

To be clear, this chat room does not replace the #sproutcore IRC channel.

Jabber offers some compelling advantages over IRC.  On the other hand, more people are used to IRC and not Jabber.  So we’re going to just try it out for awhile.  It doesn’t cost anything to run both rooms; you can choose whichever you prefer to use.

I’ve setup my IM client to autojoin this room so if have a Jabber client, pop in to say hi!

**UPDATE: **Meebo supports Jabber Chat Rooms also.  Get live help with your SproutCore projects from any browser. :-)