I’m not sure if I’ve posted this before, but Thomas Frank’s JSON editor is an absolute lifesaver. Enter your JSON code and the editor visualizes it as a tree, complete with features to add & delete nodes.

Available as a download as well as a web app. Absolutely fantastic stuff.

Google’s new, optionally typed web programming language that can run in a VM or be translated directly to JavaScript.

Keymaster is a simple (100 LoC or so) micro-library for defining and dispatching keyboard shortcuts. It has no dependencies on any libraries so you can just drop it in your app and it will work, cross-browser.

Thinking of using this on the website.

An excellent post on waffle entertaining the idea that Apple is working on a new language to complement Objective-C. Charles Ying from satine.org thinks that a language close to JavaScript would be a good fit, due in part to extensive use of the language in iOS, iAd & iTunes.

It’s a strong theory – and one that I would like to se a reality, given the popularity of C-style syntax and garbage-collected environments. I not a big fan of low-level languages, but crying out for one that is more abstracted than Objective-C is met with a kind of resistance I’ve never really quite understood – a resistance that an Ars Technica article discussing the future of Apple’s languages and APIs explains perfectly:

And so continues one of the biggest constants in software development: the unerring sense among developers that the level of abstraction they’re current working at is exactly the right one for the task at hand. Anything lower-level is seen as barbaric, and anything higher-level is a bloated, slow waste of resources. This remains true even as the overall level of abstraction across the industry marches ever higher.

By Doug Crockford. One of the best Tech Talks I’ve ever watched.

(via Mr.doob’s blog)

Redmond is targeting real-world applications based on real-world data. For example, every single JavaScript and DOM API used by the top 7,000 websites was recorded. IE9 will deliver support for every API used by those sites.