Software As She’s Developed

A lot of discussion around object-oriented Javascript involves finding cunning methods to get a super reference. This is sometimes a reference to the super class, the super instance, or the super version of the current method. The latest installment in an Ajaxian posting this week on work by Erik Arvidsson. It makes for an interesting […]

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Working on a WordPress customisation recently, I added an "Edit This" link which only logged-in people can see. To get caching right, the server always outputs the same thing - an invisible link - and only in the browser does the decision get made to show the link or not. This exemplifies the pattern I [...]

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Guid0.js Guid0 is a GUID library for Javascript. Okay, it doesn't yet do official, bona fide, 128-bit, GUIDs yet, mainly for API design reasons. But this is a library you might find useful if you want to generate a unique ID in your Ajax app. Usage: PLAIN TEXTJAVASCRIPT: guid = new Guid(); guid.generate(); // Returns a unique ID, e.g. "dkvagrkx1rt" [...]

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I just did some tinkering with offline sound and it turns out you can embed an audio clip in an HTML file, and play it without using Flash. I could have demo'd this in a raw HTML file, but it was just as easy to stick it in a Tiddlywiki file. So I made a [...]

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Chrome now has Greasemonkey support. The Chromium patch came from Aaron Boodman, who is at once a Google employee and the brains behind the original Firefox Greasemonkey extension. It makes me wonder if this is the plan for Chrome add-ons. Forget about anything like Firefox's add-on mechanism and just rely on Greasemonkey. With the right APIs, [...]

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I've recently begun working on a project with Osmosoft, which I'll announce Real Soon Now, and have got my hands dirty with TiddlyWiki to the point where I'm now able to make at least some useful functionality. You effectively get an MVC framework for free with TiddlyWiki, so as a power developer, I can see [...]

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There's some tweets and such like about Ecmascript Harmony today. I also saw a nice demo of Ecmascript 1.7 goods today. Really, I can't get excited about future versions of Ecmascript and can't get emotionally all in a tangle about the trials and tribulations of Ecmascript. I mean, Javascript is arguably the most popular language in [...]

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I used 280slides.com for a quick presentation today at the London Javascript meetup. (The usual Jobsesque slides - usually one phrase plus an optional image.) The tool is very cool, as initial reviews suggested, but most of those folks had not used it in a real world situation. The tool has it's complications when you use [...]

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I find Vim easiest for browsing source and as I explore TiddlyWiki, I decided to use some fairly recent Vim features - vertical splitting and the explorer window. Combined, these give you the feeling you're an 1988 edition of Eclipse. Just like a modern IDE, but navigation is ten times faster. Here's the macro - which [...]

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Okay, it's remarkably lame, but here's my first TiddlyWiki plugin. It defines a new shout macro - you include <<shout some-message>> in a tiddler and it includes A SHOUTING VERSION OF THE MESSAGE. I adapted it from the sparklines plugin. The important code is at the end - you create a macro by defining a value [...]

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