November 2007

HOWTO: Dojo Grid, Checkbox Selection

Submitted by David Snopek on November 20, 2007 - 9:36am

In the next release of Memorati™, I am going to use the new Dojo Grid widget. One of the problems I had, is that the grid does selection the way desktop grids do:

  • Clicking the row selects it.
  • Clicking while holding the shift or ctrl key selects multiple rows.

This is fine! But it isn't what users of web applications expect. They are accustomed to selecting a row by clicking a checkbox in the left-most column, like in Gmail.

In this article, I describe how I got the Dojo Grid to use a checkbox for selection.

For simplicity sake, I am going to build off the example described in the Dojo Grids: Diving Deeper article by Bryan Forbes on the SitePen blog. Let's assume that your grid boiler plate looks like this:

var data = [

Language Learning without Grammar

Submitted by David Snopek on November 7, 2007 - 10:11am

I just read a post on Steve Kaufmann's blog about language learning and Web 2.0, which included a link to this YouTube video he made on the same topic. As a guy experimenting with creating Web 2.0 language learning applications, I feel like this message is aimed directly at people like myself.

I completely agree with the general message of the video: Focusing on grammar in language learning is detrimental and yields very little in the way of actual proficiency in using the language. But its the specifics I keep getting hung up on.