Why XUL will win..

My favourite blog post this year has to have been Jamie Zawinski's "why working on hula would just not get you laid."

The obvious counterpoint to this is, well what would get you laid (or at least let's you say, god, this is just sooo cool, that it's fun). Well XUL just does this every time for me. Clients absolutely adore it, (it looks so similar to their normal desktop applications). As a developer, it is the perfect opposite of Microsoft products.

• predictable
• reliable
• well documented
• portable.

It works everywhere, and doesnt involve huge kludges to workaround known bugs in different browsers. real "write once, run everywhere."

Just to counterpoint that introduction, XUL is so dangerously cool, it even makes writing a mini groupware project fun. 

I've been using Evolution quite a bit recently, but It's just not quite there for calendaring. I access my data from at least 3 machines, let alone on the road so there is no real clean way at present to do this). . It would also be very useful to keep track of what projects I'm working on, and for which client. So the hourly billed clients get something resembling the right bill.., and the fixed cost projects can be checked to see how badly I underquoted.... - now there's a specification!

So out of sheer fustration, last month I started hacking on a XUL calendar - doing the way it's supposed to be done (I consider sunbird as a rather poor example of this.). You can get a bit of an idea of it by just testing one of the templates - week.xul

Adding entries work by highlighting a time block, then pressing a key (or the new button), then filing in the details. This for me is what a calender should do, no fuss with popup windows or crap like that. (have a play with colours - that's really nice here, as changing projects in the real version set's the colour..)

Drag works reasonably ok for resize / move. There is associated month.xul and groupweek.xul (which are less developed), and the project/client/user admin stuff. But to be honest this is one of those - I need this, if someone else wants to play and send me patches, feel free, but I'm not going to get all excited about packaging and releasing it...

But that's the thing about XUL, you just feel like playing with it because it's fun (like todays addition of TODO to it), I cant remember the last time I had that feeling working around bugs with IE's javascript ;) [google for IE bugs if you are in doubt there]