My current play-with-random-web-tech side-project is is a solitaire game. Well actually it’s a framework for implementing solitaire games because I’m a programmer and a side project is the right place to exercise my desires for needless abstraction. I want a nice felt-looking background texture and the way to do that is you add some noise …
Tag Archives: javascript
Simply logging JavaScript calls.
When debugging complicated JavaScript one thing I find myself constantly doing is using console.log() to print out what functions are being called in what order. JavaScript is single-threaded and event driven so it’s often not entirely clear what functions will be called in what order. Traditionally I’ve done something like this: function foo(bar) { console.log(‘foo(‘+bar+’)’); …
PhantomJS – minimalistic headless WebKit-based JavaScript-driven tool
PhantomJS is a commodity version of what I built at Danger and others have built for specific use cases again and again – a headless, scriptable web browser. Pretty cool.
Detecting advanced CSS features
I decided to do some fancy typography in my résumé, but I wanted to have a sane fallback for browsers that don’t support the latest features. I have my name rotated 90 degrees using CSS3 transforms, but simply applying the transform: rotate(-90deg) CSS property isn’t enough to get the effect I want. To make it …
jQuery selector escaping
jQuery selectors are powerful and simple to use, until you have attribute values (including ids and classes) that have funny characters. I wrote a plugin adds a simple function $.escape that will escape any special characters. For example if I have a string s that contains an id but I’m not sure that all of …
A brighter future for mobile applications?
Since the Chrome OS announcement the other day I’ve been thinking more about what a world with rich enough web APIs to support all general purpose applications might look like. I’m not sure that it’ll happen, but it sounds like Google is putting their weight behind it and they’ve been successful in the past at …
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Not solving the wrong problem
I like a great deal of what Google does for the open web. They sponsor standards work, they are working on an open source browser, they are building documentation on the state of the web for web developers. It’s all really great. Today they posted what they called A Proposal For Making AJAX Crawlable. It …
Three Months of ActionScript
I’ve been working largely in ActionScript 3 for the past three months. After spending four years working primarily in JavaScript I didn’t expect to encounter too many problems with her cousin. That expectation was pretty well borne out. I was particularly excited at the chance to play with ActionScript’s optional strict typing since that has …
Twitter Translation
My friend Britt mentioned today that he was about to launch twitter.jp. How exciting! But I don’t understand Japanese. If only I could easily translate all those tweets in languages I don’t understand. I played around with Google’s new AJAX Translation API before and I wondered how hard it would be to use that from …
Google AJAX APIs outside the browser
Google just announced their new Language API this morning. Unfortunately their API is another one of their AJAX APIs – that are designed to be used from JavaScript in web pages. These APIs are pretty cool for building client-side web applications – I used their AJAX Feeds API in my home page – but I …