Much like a magpie, I find myself oddly infatuated with shiny things. When a UI component somewhere just screams elegance, I find myself compelled to use it. A lot of the time a simple right-click will indicate the said UI was implemented in Flash, and it loses a tiny piece of street-cred.

I’m most impressed by FX when they enhance the user experience. By using subtle FX during transitions (or an element fading out rather than harshly ‘disappearing’ for example) we give our users an added element of flair while requiring nothing of their browser other than JavaScript being enabled. Any marketing type will tell you the value of a first and lasting impression. The UI really is the only thing the customer sees, isn’t it?

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The Dojo Toolkit 1.1 introduces support to run within Adobe’s AIR environment, and I think it may have re-sparked my interest in ActionScript. It was a lot easier than I had anticipated to get started coding, but came to a halt when it occurred to me that my newly created .air installer and badge would be at best a ~5MB download simply because of the default release size. A 5MB “Hello AIR” app is less than unimpressive, so I immediately started thinking of ways to better the situation. I need a custom minified Dojo Toolkit package.

Enter “dojo-mini” - an experiment in Dojo Toolkit deployment optimization. When Alex tagged the release, I immediately downloaded it, dropped it in as the toolkit for my upcoming AIR Demo and began browsing the source making a mental list of crufty files I could drop to shave some bytes away. I was amazed with my results:

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