When I first saw the new Windows Vista taskbar calendar I was amazed by its slick look and diligence. Knowing Microsoft they probably stole the idea somewhere. Heck, who cares.

I created a web version of the calender using the MooTools javascript framework, Ajax, XHTML, CSS and PHP. Key features: animations in transition, authentic Vista-look, quick navigation by jumping back and forth between months, years and decades without drop-down boxes and weeks can start with Monday or Sunday. Check it here!

This Vista-like Ajax Calendar script is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial 3.0 License.

Update 24 October 2007: A datepicker version is currently in development.
Update 1 May 2008: Version 2 has been released!
Update October 11, 2009: VlaCalendar's successor, Calendar Eightysix released

If you need to fetch data within Flash which resides on another domain, you will find out it will not work once you test it outside Flash.exe. XML.load(), LoadVars() and sendAndLoad() will return false because of cross-domain security issues.

Where the cross-domain file did not do any good, I found another solution to fetch cross-domain XML data. The so-called 'shim' file.

One important thing: this solution is for the situation when you have control of the server that supplies the (XML) data to the main Flash file on a server out of your control.

The shim file is basically a second movie, hosted on the same server as the data source. The main movie loads the shim movie using loadMovie or the data with loadMovieNum, so both movies are loaded into the Macromedia Flash Player at the same time (on different levels).

I've released my first (finished) Flash game, called Casino Machine: Jacks or Better.

It's a Video Poker game where you are required to get a pair of jacks or better in order to win any coins. You can find the game on Newgrounds.com.

More Casino Machine games like other poker variations and slot machines are in planning. Stay tuned!

On the Microsoft DevDays 2007 at Amsterdam, in the presentation 'IE7 and Standards' Molly spoke about some new CSS selection features build into the latest browsers.

I've gotten into it myself for a bit. Pretty neat:

/* Only child selector */
#content > p { }

/* Adjacent sibling */
th + td { }

/* Attribute selectors */
/* Every 'a' element with the 'title' attribute */
a[title] { }

/* Every 'a' element whose 'id' attribute value is exactly equal to 'cart' */
a[id="cart"] { }
/* Every 'img' element whose 'alt' attribute value is a list of space-separated values, one of which is exactly equal to 'offer' */
img[alt~="offer"] { }
/* Every 'img' element whose 'alt' attribute value contains the substring 'offer' */
img[alt*="offer"] { }

These selectors are quite handy, but too bad 40% of the internet users still use Internet Explorer 6 and lower that don't support one bit of CSS3... Yet it ceases to amaze me that CSS2.1 is only a candidate recommendation. Far from version 3.

Here and here are CSS3 compatibility lists. At the time of publishing this article Mozilla 1.7 RC 1 and Safari 1.2 are the most advanced in CSS3, and Opera, who has always had excellent CSS support, has a lot of catching up to do.

While your at it: CSS3 Preview offers a great view off (all?) new CSS3 features.

Dev.base86 is launched!

This website will be used for articles concerning various web development subjects like Ajax, PHP, .NET, CSS, Flash, Flex and beyond web 2.0. Think of personal projects, code snippets and news.