My article on the development of Elephant’s Pajamas was published on the AOL Developers website. Elephant’s Pajamas is a Mac OS X Dashboard widget, powered by AOL Truveo, that provides access to funny joke videos. Truveo is a one-stop destination for searching video resources available all over the Internet, including AOL Music, AOL Video, YouTube, CNN, NBC, Fox News, and much more. Elephant’s Pajamas uses the Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) API provided by Truveo to search through all the funny joke videos available from the resources aggregated by Truveo, and then randomly select one video, which the user can view in their Web browser. Click the video below to see the widget in action!
The best place for me to begin is to introduce myself, and give you a little background. I am John Fronckowiak, the President of IDC Consulting, Inc. and a Clinical Assistant Professor at Medaille College in the Computer Information Systems department. I have over 20 years of programming experience. I’ve provided consulting services for a number of companies, and I’ve written over a dozen trade computer books. I’ve also written for Microsoft, IBM, and Apple.
I am a switcher to the Mac platform. While I have used and developed for the PC platform since the DOS days (and stil continue to on the XP and Vista Platforms with Visual Studio .Net) I have come to love and embrace the OS X platform. I hope to provide to you my insights on Mac development - from applications, Widgets, XCode, Dashcode, Cocca, Carbon, AppleScript, Objective C, Java, Ruby, to the iPhone - we’ll cover it all here at the Mac Developers Blog!