I wanted to talk about our freshly released Spry 1.6.1 update.

This release was based on changes we wanted to do to be compatible with the just released AIR 1.0. We needed to make some changes to the way our processing worked. That plus the raft of big fixes we made, plus the new Rating widget, deemed that we update the zip so everyone has the latest.

So as far as Spry and AIR go, the big things are: We can't run eval() in the AIR space . This means that any spry:if or spry:test can't be run directly. Also, adding event handlers after the onLoad event won't work. So all onclick="ds1.setCurrentRow():" type of things have to be done using an onPostUpdate REGION observer.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/air/photo_gallery.html

The solution we used also solved a long standing data issue and gives developers a great deal of flexibility with their data references.

A spry:if can now be handled with something like:

<script>

function checkName(rgn, doIt)
{
return doIt('{name}') == 'Adobe Photoshop';
}

</script>

<div spry:if="function::checkName">

But even better is that you can make custom data references like so:

<script type="text/javascript">

function FormattedPrice(region, lookupFunc)
{
return "$" + parseInt(lookupFunc("{ds1::price}")).toFixed(2);
}
</script>
...

<div spry:region="ds1">
<ul spry:repeatchildren="ds1">
<li>{name} - {function::FormattedPrice} </li>
</ul>
</div>

Notice the {function::FormattedPrice} data ref. This method allows you to easily do data formatting!

We have added a simple sample that shows this working, and have updated the API docs to explain this new methodology.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/data_region/Function_colon.html

As I have posted before, we also are releasing the Rating widget for real.

Also, check out some of the good fixes in the Changelog.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/ChangeLog.html

Thanks,

Don

A late welcome to 2008. I have been meaning to update you all on what we have been doing lately. That last comment by Fred finally got me moving!

I have a couple things for you all.

First: What's up with Spry? Well, part of the Spry team has been working on Dreamweaver features, so our time dedicated to Spry has been temporarily lessened. Dreamweaver is the priority project and since we are on the DW team, we need to ensure that it gets what it needs. So we haven't been able to work on Spry as much as we would like. The other part of the Spry team has been busy as well, working on widgets and helping to execute our super cool plans for widgets in the next version of DW. I can't say what that is, but I think the DW community will be quite happy with the new widget stuff.

Secondly, we just pushed a new widget to preview! You can now check out this page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/preview/ and see our new Ratings Widget. We have links to source code and relevant samples. Please check it out and provide feedback on it. Let us know what you like and don't like. Tell us what's missing or could be done better.

See, so things are getting done!

We don't have a date for Spry 1.7 yet, but there will definitely be one. We just need to get our DW stuff done and then we will be back, working on the next version. We will try to preview other items as well, as they get completed. Stay tuned.

Thanks,

Don

I know I say this every time, but it has been a while. Spry 1.6 has been out for 2 months and change. The Spry team has been a bit distracted with Dreamweaver work, but we will have a new widget to preview in the near future. Lots of other exciting things are happening in our widget world, but at this point I can only tease...

So there is still some confusion on the relationship between, Dreamweaver, Spry and the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver. I am going to take this time to try to clarify the 3 ideas.

The Spry framework is a free javascript library(s) available for download on Labs. It contains the core javascript file, samples, demos and documentation for all the features with the library. Spry has a wide range of features, including data, widgets, effects, DOMUtils, form submission, etc.

Spry is developed independently of Dreamweaver, although the Spry team is technically part of the Dreamweaver team. Since Spry is a much simpler project compared to Dreamweaver, that means that the Spry team can put out releases every few months, much faster than Dreamweaver's 18 month cycle. This means that the feature set of Spry will always be well ahead of Spry feature IN Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver CS3nsupports Spry authoring in a few ways. It has support for creating XML Data Sets and implementing Spry regions/repeats. Widgets are rendered as they would be in the browser, making for easy styling. Spry Effects are implemented in the Behaviors Panel. Code hinting and coloring make navigating through Spry pages easier.

Dreamweaver implements Spry behind the scenes like this: There is a set of Spry files within the DW Configuration folder that are used in DW's design view. These are the 'design-time' files. They are stripped down and modified so that DW can use them while building Spry pages in Design View. These are the files that allow the widgets to render in Design View and allows the panels to open and close on the Accordion, for instance. These design time files are only used by DW for it's design work.

There are also copies of Spry files that are copied to the users folders when they add a Spry component to their site. These are the same files that you will find in the Labs download. At the time we were building DW CS3, Spry 1.4 was the current version and this is the version of the javascript and CSS files that DW outputs.

There are these 2 versions, design time and regular, for this reason. We wanted to be sure that the design time experience was separated from the regular Spry files. This would allow us to update the regular Spry files without possibly breaking Dreamweaver. The design time files will keep working no matter what version of the regular Spry files are there. This will allow periodic updates to DW so that Spry users can have the latest regular Spry files without affecting the performance of Dreamweaver. (If DW used the real Spry files for its design time work, we would have to rigorously test any update of Spry in DW. Having 2 versions saves us that trouble.

So, how to update DW to use the latest Spry files. Well, for the first few months, it was some tedious copy and pasting. It was a matter of finding the regular Spry files in the Configuration folder and just replacing them with the new ones. But the design-time files needed to be left alone. Some users were copying the Spry zip into the config folder and things were breaking left and right.

In the mean time, we were working on the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver. This is an extension that automatically updates the file in the Config folder for you. It also provides an interface (Site > Spry Updater...) that helps you copy these new files to your site. It also updates the code coloring and hinting for the new features.

But here was also another point of confusion. The Spry Updater does not add any new Spry features (widget, etc) to the Insert Panel. It simply updates the existing DW files to the latest versions. So now the Spry 1.4 accordion is now Spry 1.6. Since the HTML didn't change, just the javascript, adding the new js file means that the accordion is automatically up to date.

It takes a lot of work, months actually, to add a new Spry widget to DW. That means that it is difficult for us to keep DW on parity with Spry. Spry has 16 widgets. DW CS3 has 8. Spry now has 5 datasets, DW has one. We are looking into ways to fixing that disparity...

So again, the updater doesn't add new features to DW (except that command). It updates the existing features to the latest version. They only change is the version of the js and css files in the Config folder.

I should also mention that the Updater itself is a nice piece of work. It started out as a simple command for updating files and it is now a robust extension that can be used for updating site files for many things. Right now it is packaged as a Spry Updater, but extension developers can tune it to their own needs and make other kinds of updaters. It was a great effort by our Romanian team.

I hope this clarifies things a bit. Keep an eye out here for the widget preview!

Thanks,
Don

October 1st brings a couple good things.

Thing Number One: the Spry team finds itself in Chicago, for the Adobe MAX conference. It is our annual user conference, with meetings and classes and networking and putting faces to emails. Your humble host, along with other members of the Spry team, and some hard-core Spry users, will be teaching Spry at MAX this year.

Thing Number Two: We released Spry 1.6 today.

As I mentioned in my previous post, this release is about raising our game with respects to web standards, accessibility and progressive enhancement, among other topics. We wrote a set of articles discussing these topics. You can check them out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/articles/best_practices/.

We added some advanced versions of our demos. There are a couple flavors of the Photo Gallery: one using the HTML data set. The other with static data that is progressively enhanced. There is also a version of the Products demo that degrades nicely. The default Photo Gallery demo has been updated to be simpler and more modular, using a first iteration of some image widgets we are working on. See the new stuff here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/demos/.

Ah, the sweet Element Selector. Along the lines of jQuery and DOMQuery, the Element Selector (SpryDOMUtils.js) is a utility used for grabbing multiple parts of the page using CSS Selectors and applying functions to them. Our speed is on par with other tools and we have robust and accurate CSS3 support. Read about it here and check it out here.

An important note: We changed the way we handle text values within the XML Data Set. This will affect folks that send entity encoded HTML or HTML embedded in CDATA in their XML. Read more about it in http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/data_region/XMLDataSetStringHandlingSample.html and also in http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/data_region/HTMLFragsInXMLSample.html

We have a few more widgets: We rounded out our form validation collection with a Password Validation widget and a Confirm Password widget. The HTML Panel is a widget that uses HTML fragments and allows graceful degradation.

We have included packed and minimized javascript files for everything. This gets all of us some significant file size savings, for example: SpryData.js: 128kb to 41Kb. SpryEffects.js: 77 to 29.
A note on the difference. Minimized files are compacted, with whitespace removal and other compression techniques. Packed files are smaller: they minimize the files and then they set up a text replacement table that reduces the string size. They are smaller but there is a small performance hit when the browser initially undoes the packing. You can avoid this CPU spike by using the minimized versions, but the file size is bigger (yet still quite a bit smaller than the regular versions). We provided both versions so you can choose the best path for yourself.

On the data front: We added a new data set: The DataSetShell allows multiple data sets to share a spry:region.

We did want to mention that we do read the forums every day and file bugs and enhancement requests for things that people find. We didn't get to fix as many as we wanted this time around, especially some of the enhancements, but we do have them filed and plan on getting a bunch done for 1.7.

But on the positive side, we are also releasing the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver CS3! Finally, a simple and easy way to not only update Dreamweaver CS3 to Spry 1.6, but it also allows you to copy over the updated files to your local root folder. It was a great summer project for a couple of the Spry team guys and it should make the updating process very easy. The extension can be downloaded for free from the Labs site. Just follow the usual download link: http://www.macromedia.com/go/labs_spry_download.

Over the next couple posts, we will talk more about the standards stuff, explaining more and responding to any comments you may have.

So go download Spry 1.6.

Thanks,

Don

As I mentioned before, we are busy finishing Spry 1.6.
I thought I would give a heads-up on what to expect in the next release.

Since pretty early on, we have been criticized for using custom attributes and that turned into "Spry doesn't follow standards." Well, that is partially right. Spry Data uses custom attributes, as allowed in XHTML. Spry Effects and Widgets have no such concerns. So we decided to take this release to answer some of those concerns, both with code and with words. This next release will focus on accessibility, standards and things like unobtrusive Spry techniques.

We often hear things like: "My page doesn't validate", but find that many users don't know what that means. So we are going to talk about what validating, standards, eXtensible HTML and custom attributes means, and also try to present the pros and cons of each idea. It's more of an 'education' push rather than a 'convincing' push. If users really understand what these things mean, then they can decide what is important.

We worked on what we are calling the Element Selector. This allows page manipulation via CSS Selectors. Those familiar with DOMQuery or jquery might be interested in checking it out. This will allow for unobtrusive Spry pages, allowing Spry attributes and constructors to be attached and fired off from external javascript files. We have always said that making unobtrusive Spry pages is possible; now we offer a tool to make it that much easier.

We are also adding keyboard navigation to the Menu Bar and ensuring consistency between our widgets on the accessibility front.

We will be rounding out our Form Validation widget collection.

But I am not going to give away the whole thing now...
Look for Spry 1.6 in early October.

Speaking of October, back in the previous one, Kin made a Spry Poker Game for the MAX conference in Vegas. Check it out: http://shinarp.com/SprySamples/iPhone/poker/

Thanks,
Don

The weeks just zoom by.

The Spry team has been 'heads down' on the 1.6 release.

A couple things to note: We (well, our documentation team....) pushed the Spry 1.5 LiveDocs to the site. They are at http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Spry/SDG/index.html.

One of our Community Experts from Germany has just written an article on using Spry and PHP: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/spry_php_images.html.

Kin and I have been looking for some new things to do with Spry, pushing the envelope a bit. Yours truely spent some spare cycles making a periodic table using HTML Data sets and some fun CSS. I wrote a case study for it, describing the thinking behind the code. Check it out here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/spry_periodic_case_study.html.

A short one this time...

Thanks,
Don

This part of the Spry team is back at his post in California, busy with the next Spry release. I wanted to pass along a couple Spry developments here.

First, the Spry team has decided that we wanted to get some more features into the zip before we could really call it gold. To us, a gold or 'production' release not only means that is it stable code, but also that the package includes all the big features that users will need to use Spry robustly. Since are working on additional features that will make a more complete release, we decided to hold off on the gold release until we were all happy with the feature set.

So the next version will be Pre-release 1.6 and we are expecting to release at the end of the summer. We will be dealing with HTML fragments, unobtrusive Spry and a slick CSS selector utility.

But in the meantime, we just posted a widget that we couldn't quite get in for 1.5. We are happy to preview our new Tooltip widget. You can find that and additional links, including the overview doc, on the Preview page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/preview/

Also, we have had many questions lately about styling the Menu Bar widget. Towards that, we posted a few more styling samples on the samples page: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/samples/#widgets

Lastly, I just found this toolkit for IE7. http://www.ie7pro.com/ It does many things, but mostly, Spry developers finally have a way to View Generated Source for IE7. Of course, I presume that everyone already has Firebug installed for Firefox...

Thanks,
Don

It's been a while. This part of the Spry team is in Europe, splitting time between vacation and visiting Adobe offices and attending user group meetings. I wanted to talk about some Spry 1.5 things, now that it is out in the world.

First, we are happy that we finally got to release our JSON and HTML data sets. That's a big advance for the data portion of the toolkit. People have been asking for Nested data sets for some time now and we are pleased to get it out there. The effects got a nice boost too, with smoother action and more transitions. Check it out of you haven't already.

One thing that has come up since the release is Spry 1.5 and Dreamweaver CS3. People are asking how to update Dreamweaver to use Spry 1.5. Let me explain the DW/Spry products and workflow.

First, a note on timing. Dreamweaver CS3 was released with Spry 1.4. This is because the DW team have to 'lock down' Dreamweaver well before the April release date. So they had to lock the Spry features this past winter, therefore Spry 1.4. In the meantime, the Spry team continued to work on its next release. It so happened that Spry 1.5 was finished shortly after the DW release date.

The Spry team develops our features as we see the need and in response to customer requests. And having a much shorter release cycle, there may be 3 or 4 releases of Spry between the next release of Dreamweaver. But since Dreamweaver supports Spry, the Dreamweaver team and the Spry team will work together to add Spry features to Dreamweaver in subsequent releases. So Spry will always be ahead of Dreamweaver, feature wise. This may be frustrating to Dreamweaver users but both teams are looking into ways of updating Spry support in DW.

But by taking advantage of Dreamweaver's extensibility layer, we can do some things to let Dreamweaver keep up in some ways. We can update the Spry source files used in the sites and update the code hinting for new features. To do so...

Dreamweaver has 2 sets of files: One set of files are the actual Spry files that are used in the browser. It is these files that DW copies to the site folder and are uploaded. There are also a series of 'design-time' Spry files that DW uses to work with Spry IN Dreamweaver. These files allow the widgets to render correctly and show the different panels/states. You don't need to worry about the design-time files. Those will never change.

There are a couple ideas about updating Dreamweaver sites to Spry 1.5.
First, there is updating the Spry files in your site. If you download the Spry 1.5 zip, you can simply copy the new javascript files (and CSS if you need it) to the local root folder and upload the new files and the widgets and data should work as expected.

The second idea is having Dreamweaver copy the Spry 1.5 files to your site when you use Spry components. To do this, we need to update the Spry files in the Dreamweaver configuration folder.

Keep in mind, only the Spry widgets and data that Dreamweaver supports may need updating. Also, not all uses will need or want to update Dreamweaver. If your Spry files are working well and you have no need to update, then no problem.

The Dreamweaver team is working on an extension that will help users update files and copy the new features over to the site. We expect to have that ready for the Spry production release, which will be released this summer. Until then, we are thinking about releasing a simple extension to Labs that would update the Spry source files in Dreamweaver. It would also provide code hints for the new functions and data sets. While we finish this extensions (it takes some testing before we release anything), there are ways to update Dreamweaver to use Spry 1.5 files. For now, it takes a bit of manual file moving.

In short, the Spry files exist in: 'DW application folder/Configuration/Shared/Spry/'

If you want to update SpryData.js to 1.5, copy the new file and replace the file in DW/configuration/Shared/Spry/Data/

Repeat for the other files you want to update. Spry team member Kin has posted a detailed list of files and instructions on how to update here on the Spry forums:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/messageview.cfm?forumid=72&catid=602&threadid=1269066&enterthread=y

It's a wise idea to make a copy of the Shared/Spry folder before hand, in case something goes amiss...

Only the files that currently exist would ever need to be updated.

The Dreamweaver team is however, looking into the idea of providing extensions that will add additional Spry support in DW. This would allow DW to keep with Sprys quicker release schedule. Nothing final on that yet; there are still questions to be answered there...

To be clear: these new files (other than the code hinting) will not add any new functionality to Dreamweaver. It will simply allow DW to copy over new files to your site when you use the features.

Also, DW will detect if you have, say, SpryAccordion.js in your site. If it already exists, it will not copy over the new file. It doesn't know the file is new. You can just manually copy the new files to your site folder..or, more tediously, delete the Accordion files (or whatever component you are using) from the SpryAssets folder and then insert an accordion onto a new page. DW will then copy the new files to the SpryAssets folder again.

So, more on this later. We have some things in the works that will help with this scenario.

Thanks for reading,

Don

Quick notes from the Spry world.

First, tomorrow is Spry's 1 year anniversary on Labs! Thanks to everyone that has joined our Spry community. We appreciate your interest and all the feedback we have gotten over the past year. Spry is better because of it.

Second, the Spry team is busy putting the final touches on the Spry 1.5 Prerelease. We expect it out next week.

Have you seen the Spry LiveDocs? http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Spry/1.4/help.html
LiveDocs allow you to post comments and questions that we use to improve the documentation. The idea is that LiveDocs will have documentation that has had time to settle. Features like the new 1.5 stuff will exist on Labs and in the zip. Once those are out for a few months, we will move them to LiveDocs. We also incorporate the suggestions into the next rev. Check them out.

We also now have a Spry Developers Center. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/spry/ Check out the articles there. Let us know if you have ideas for new articles or even if you want to write one yourself!

An example of Spry for those of you with Adobe CS3 products. If you open the Help Pages and do a search, the results are done with Spry!

Due to user demand, the Spry team put out the SpyURLUtils.js file last week or so. Once included on the page, you can set up a variable that gathers either the URL parameters or hashes and populates the var. Now you can easily use them throughout the page. The samples we wrote show how to use them to have a particular Tabbed Panel tab open. This grabs the panel number from the URL and uses it in the constructor. There is also an example of how to specify a specific row for a detail region with Spry Data and URL params. http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/preview/samples/utils/URLUtilsSample.html These will be in the Spry 1.5 release and on the Labs site once we go live.

And a final note, at the end of the month, there are going to be a couple Spry seminars in Europe. This humble member of the Spry team will be presenting an overview of Spry. If you can be in Rome on May 29th, or in Milan (Pavia) on May 31st, please come by and check it out. http://www.actionscript.it/showEvent.cfm?id=76

Next stop: Spry 1.5.

Thanks,

Don

It has been a big week here at Adobe. We announced CS3, so we can finally talk about Spry integration into DW. While I will jump into that topic in more detail later, I just wanted to quickly discuss a point that has been brought up in reference to widgets, accessibility and standards.

We are using tabindex in our widgets, like on the Collapsible Panel and Menu bar, to enable keyboard navigation. It has been pointed out by some that this doesn't validate as it is an improper use of the attribute.

We are taking the tack of favoring accessibility and usability over validation in this scenario. Both IE and Mozilla-based browsers have implemented the tabindex to work on most page element just for this reason. We feel that this usefulness for accessibility outweighs validation concerns.

Of course, our widgets are set up to also accept tags in the tabs, which will allow it to get focus. Choose either method.

While tabindex will fail current W3C validation, the standards are catching up. Note that Tab Index is discussed in W3C specs, including the WAI-ARIA:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-aria-role-20060926/#Build

The Spry team will be discussing standards and accessibility more in the near future.
Thanks,
Don

P.S. Note on the 1.5 Preview: We just added the Effects Migration doc that explains the changes that will be required to go from 1.4 to 1.5.

I am pleased to announce that we just pushed the Spry 1.5 preview to Labs. This is a sneak peak at some of the new functionality that will be available in the Spry 1.5 release. There is no new zip today. That will not be ready for a while yet, but we wanted to show you what we are up to.

This is an opportunity for the community to see major new features and to provide feedback. We want to make sure that our thinking matches your thinking in the way we implement complex new features, like Nested Data Sets.
The preview materials can be found at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/preview/
So, today, we are happy to present, finally:

Nested Data Sets - You can access data in nested XML structures. This lets you make the nested lists. We also have a way to do advanced flattening. This takes the nested information and flattens it into the main data set. We want your feedback on our implementation of this.

JSON Data Sets - Per your requests, use JSON data as your source.

HTML Data Sets - My favorite new feature: use HTML tables or other HTML structures as data sources. This will go a long way towards javascript degradation and search engine optimization.

Session Handling - We created a method for detecting session timeouts during the XMLHTTPRequest. Samples for different server models show how to handle the reply.

Form Submission - Samples on how to do form submission via the XMLHTTPRequest.

Paging Data sets - We made some good enhancements to the Spry Pager.

Effects rewrite - As noted in my previous post, we changed the way effects work. Check out the new methodology. No need to change your code yet, but I wrote a document talking about how to change over to the new code.

Radio Button Validation Widget - Cristian whipped this one up in response to use requests this week!

Auto Suggest Widget - Our first data/widget hybrid, set up a suggest text field with data set suggesting.

Spry API - Finally! It's pretty close to final, but we need to get it out to you all.

Plus a couple more items for you...
Let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Don

I wanted to talk about one of the changes we are making for Spry 1.5. This is just some information so that you will be better prepared for Spry 1.5. In my previous post, I mentioned the March preview- May release timetable. We are still on track for that. JSON support is now working and we also have some samples on form submission and session handling ready to go.

I wanted to give a brief overview of the changes we made for Spry Effects. For those that upgrade to 1.5, this change will impact existing pages with effects. The changes that will need to be made are simple and straightforward, and we will have a document specifically outlining the changes that will need to be made.

The main idea is that we changed from using functions to using classes to enable the effects. This mirrors how widgets work today.

For instance, in Spry 1.5, a basic effect will now look like:

<a href="#" onclick="theEffect.start();">Start Effect</a>
<div id="effectMe">The content to effect</div>
<script>
var theEffect = new Spry.Effect.Fade("effectMe",{duration:500, from:'100%', to:"0%'});
</script>

We have also changed some Effect names to be more straightforward. For instance, "AppearFade" is now "Fade".

We are also including some wrapper functions that will still run the old versions, but these will take a small change to the code to enable, but less so than moving the functions to objects.

An example:
<a href="#" onclick="Spry.Effect.Shake("theElement");">Start Effect</a>
would be:
<a href="#" onclick="Spry.Effect.DoShake("theElement");">Start Effect</a>

where we added 'Do' to the effect name. Then they will work as normal.

This was done for consistency reasons. Now all effects, single and cluster, work the same way. It also was done so that clustering was easier to control, with stopping and toggling being smoother.

And now it fully supports the observer notification model we use for Spry Data.

We think that this change will make using Effects easier in the future. We are always reticent to force changes to existing pages, but in this case, we think it's worth it.

And of course, if your page is working properly and you don't want to upgrade, then no changes need to be made!

So that is it for this time. Just some Spry foreshadowing.
We should have the preview up in a few weeks.

Thanks,
Don

Thought I would pass along an update on where we are with the next version of Spry. We have some really good stuff in the works.

Kin has been working on the hornet's nest that is nested data sets. It's almost done. As we went through different use cases, it confirmed our fears that it was a beast and there are many ways to slay the beast, each with its pros and cons.

A small 'ferinstance': Because of the way we flatten, generating something like:

• Artist 1
  • album
  • album
  • album
• Artist 2
  • album
  • album

What happens when you sort the 'album' column? It depends on how you break up the data. Right now, we are using the idea of Spry.Data.NestedDataSet which is a derived from a standard data set. We also have this idea of a 'join', or advanced flattening, where columns from the nested XML are appended to the parent data set.

The point is, there are many issues that needed to be solved for this to work in most (I hesitate to say 'all') scenarios. We will have good documentation when this comes out and samples as well. I will discuss it here before and after we release it.

We have been hard at work building new features, but working on Dreamweaver has taken priority recently and that has put us behind a bit.

Therefore, we are going to do a couple things:

We are going to preview our new functionality in mid-to-late March. We will post our new work to Labs as a preview. It won't be formally zipped, but we want to make it available to the community and we want early feedback on our new stuff, esp the nested data sets. We want to make sure our approach hold water with real world scenarios.

We are now planning on the next formal drop in last spring, probably in the May time frame. This will give us time to polish and vet the new features and get the samples and documentation in order.

We are also working on unobtrusive samples of Spry. We will demonstrate how to use Spry in a way that doesn't use custom attributes.We want to show that it can be done and how do it. We will also use the time to address the concerns of the standards and accessibility concerns that have been bubbling within the community for a bit now. We are serious about making Spry both simple and a proper way to code Ajax pages.

We have made some sizable changes to the way Effects work. They should be more uniform and controllable now. But it will require small changes to those pages with existing effects. These changes are small and only need to be taken if you want to update to the latest version. I will discuss this in more detail in a future post. We still have some time before this is released, so no need to worry now. Just a head's up...

And, I have to continue to bite my tongue on the new Dreamweaver/Spry features... We are talking about some eSeminars in the springtime to talk about Dreamweaver and to go over some of these new features I have mentioned here.

So that's it for this time. I don't mean to tease here, but I wanted to let you know what was happening and that we are indeed hard at work on the next version.

Thanks,

Don