A lot of computer users, when using text editors or any other application that use monospaced (having the same width for every character, useful for programming and related tasks) fonts to render text (source code, plain text, e-mails, markup, etc.), stick with the default font. On some platforms, notably Mac OS X and most modern Linux distributions, this default font is a fairly reasonable and attractive typeface like Monaco or Monospace. On Windows XP and Vista, however, the default monospaced is Courier New.

Courier New, 10pt

Recently, Microsoft released several new fonts with its new operating system, Vista. One of these fonts is a monospaced font specifically designed for programming, called Consolas. This font, and a few other nice fonts, is available by default in Vista and Office 2007, and can also be downloaded as part of the Office Compatibility Pack for free.

Consolas, 10pt

Isn’t that better?

The only caveat is that Consolas is designed with ClearType font smoothing in mind, and if you do not have ClearType enabled, then things will look very ugly.

My task is to design and develop a client-side Javascript framework that takes event data in some format (iCal, XML, etc.) and renders it out to a number of different, configurable, dynamic views. What kind of views will Timegrid support? For starters, it will support all of the views that Google Calendar is currently capable of: weekly, monthly, etc. Timegrid is more flexible than Google Calendar though. Imagine that you want to render a table of events happening in various locations, and you want each column to represent a different room, and each row to represent a starting time. Timegrid will be able to handle that as well.

Timegrid is designed to be easily configurable, incredibly flexible and customizable, clean, and beautiful. Good thing I have all summer to work on it.

Timegrid Project Page

• Prototype – A fairly large (~50kb) Javascript library that defines several classes to make your life easier. There are many functions provided that simply reduce the amount of typing you have to do, and even Ruby-style closures for lists, through the Enumeration class. Of course, it also provides some great classes for AJAX tasks as well. However, be warned, there is very little official documentation for Prototype.
• script.aculo.us – A Javascript library that layers itself on top of Prototype and adds a plethora of eye candy. Some of the effects it includes are: drag & drop support, fading, sliding panels, and highlighting.

Working with either library is extremely pleasant, especially when compared to the task of manually coding all of the functionality that they provide for free. Also, I’ve seen the end results on many websites and they look great. Highly recommended.