Software As She’s Developed

Mahemoff’s Podcast/Blog – Web, Programming, Usability from the Author of ‘Ajax Design Patterns’ (AjaxPatterns.org)

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Entries Tagged as 'SoftwareDev'

Upcoming: UXCampEurope and SWDC

May 22nd, 2010 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

Google I/O is over and I’ll post a bit about the HTML5 hack session I ran later, but here I want to highlight a couple of upcoming sessions in Europe:

UXCampEurope. If this is anything like the Bay Area and London UX camps I’ve been fortunate to attend, it will be huge, and being Europe-wide and [...]

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Offline Apps with Application Cache: Quickstart, Tips, and Deep Dive

May 19th, 2010 · 5 Comments · SoftwareDev

I've been mucking with AppCache, aka ApplicationCache. It's the secret sauce that lets you build offline apps, which is great for performance and fabulous for pretending to be an iPhone app when you're not.

Quickstart an Offline App

As with most HTML5 technologies, the basic usage is quite simple:

Create a trivial trio of HTML, CSS, and JS [...]

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Cached Positions in the Geolocation API

May 4th, 2010 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

The Geolocation API is surprisingly short and simple. A simple lookup is a doddle:

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JAVASCRIPT: navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(position) {   alert("You're at " + position.coords.latitude + ","           + position.coords.longitude); });

About the most complicated thing is "cached positions", and even those are quite straightforward. So what's that all about?

A cached position is what the API returns [...]

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HTML5 is a Brand

May 3rd, 2010 · 5 Comments · SoftwareDev

HTML5 has conflicting definitions.

If you go by the official WHAT-WG spec, HTML5 is a list of specific features, including Canvas, Video, Audio, the new form controls, the new semantic markups, and microdata.

If you go by the media and Steve Jobs, HTML5 is simply a new platform that lets us do rich, interactive, applications without the [...]

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Audio/Video Tag: Don’t Forget to load() before you play()

April 30th, 2010 · 2 Comments · SoftwareDev

This is a gotcha that will catch a lot of people out because it goes against the expectation that you just change an image's appearance by setting its "src", done. And also, it's a deviation from the more general convention that you change DOM properties declaratively to make stuff happen. Probably for good reason, given [...]

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500th Blog Post

April 29th, 2010 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

That's all.

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Yoink: Extracting All Scripts and Stylesheets on the Page

April 26th, 2010 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

This here is a script that will put the code of all scripts and stylesheets into a single variable. Usage:

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JAVASCRIPT: yoink(function(all) {   console.log("scripts", all.scripts); // string array   console.log("stylesheets", all.stylesheets); // string array });

As you can see, you have to provide a callback because this stuff is asynchronous. It downloads the files one at a time [...]

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SPA Hacks: Hacks Emerging From the World of Single-Page Web Apps

April 14th, 2010 · 2 Comments · SoftwareDev

This is a permalink for my JSConf.US talk. Full slides are online here:

THE LOST HACKS: Ridiculous browser tricks from the world of single-page Applications

The talk will overview TiddlyWiki and Single-Page Apps, and then cover eight specific hacks:

File access without browser extensions Javascript-HTML chameleon files SVG-VML chameleon files Inline SVG iFrame squriting Script islands Embedded images Fragment IDs

I'll be posting a link to the [...]

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Web-O-Random is New

April 14th, 2010 · No Comments · SoftwareDev

Web-O-Random is a new site I made, a simple random number generator with simple URLs. The About Page tells the story:

Random Numbers

http://weborandom.com A number between 1 and 100 http://weborandom.com/6 A number between 1 and 6 http://weborandom.com/-10/10 A number between -10 and 10 http://weborandom.com/5/10.000 A decimal number between 5 and 10, at 3 decimal place precision

Random Lists

http://weborandom.com/larry,moe,curly A random [...]

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WebWait Updated

April 14th, 2010 · 4 Comments · SoftwareDev

One of the projects I wanted to work on in my time off was WebWait.

It finally does what I wanted it to do all along: Permanently record benchmarks. You can get a unique URL for each benchmarking session you run by hitting Save. Funny - WebWait was running as a Rails app for several years, [...]

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