Just add points? What UX can (and cannot) learn from games from Sebastian Deterding I couldn’t help but look at this slide deck and think about my own experiences with introducing game-like elements into the collection and maintenance of scientific information: Chempedia and Chempedia Lab.

A previous post outlined the steps I took to track down a bug in Google Chrome that prevented the firing of mouse events on certain SVG elements. After filing a bug report, one commenter suggested that I create a single file that illustrates the bug, rather than a full Google Closure project. That’s exactly what I did. You can view the test page here.

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A number of people have taken the time to try ChemWriter 2 and offer detailed feedback about their experience. To my surprise, the most common issue reported has to do with atom and bond hovering on Google Chrome. Simply put, it doesn’t work.

Paul Graham probably said it best when parsing the meaning of the term “Ajax”: JavaScript Now Works. In the five years since he made that statement, the performance of JavaScript has continued to improve. This is one of those developments that was easy to miss because it: (a) required the reversal of long-held negative perceptions; and (b) has unfolded at such as slow pace.

Correctly scaling and placing atom labels is one of the most difficult parts of writing a chemical structure editor. With its latest preview release, ChemWriter 2 has crossed this barrier. For the unfamiliar, ChemWriter 2 is a pure JavaScript chemical structure editor that can be embedded in web pages without any browser plugins.

The last post in this series introduced Google Closure, a suite of JavaScript tools for building and maintaining complex JavaScript projects. Whether you’re just starting out with Closure or have been using it awhile, an important problem you’ll have to solve is how to keep your copy of the Closure Library up-to-date with the Google Closure SVN. This article describes one method for doing so using git.

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Many years ago, JavaScript was considered a toy language suited only for implementing button rollovers and annoying modal dialogs. Those days are long gone. A key enabler of HTML5 and the astonishing levels of multimedia interactivity becoming widely-available within browsers, JavaScript will only increase in importance in coming years. And projects like Node.js are demonstrating that JavaScript is a serious contender on the server side as well.

Ein Fehler ist aufgetreten. Sieh dir dieses Video auf www.youtube.com an oder aktiviere JavaScript, falls es in deinem Browser deaktiviert sein sollte. If you’re involved a software project of any scale, you face the problem of collecting and acting on the numerous bugs, chores, and feature requests relating to it - and doing so in a way that promotes team collaboration.