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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein
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Mon Sep 15 9:47 pm, 2008
Come round the fire children and listen to a tale of yore. Long ago, before the internet was an 'application' the only way to do something that behaved like an 'application' was to embed some other kind of technology as a plugin into an html page. Many people used Java, but then, there were some who began using Flash, believing that there could be a platform for designing and programming applications to be delivered over the 'web'. But these people were fooled, because over time it became clear that first of all, it was a 'goddamned pain in the ass' to attempt to get information in/out of Flash to the web around it, and secondly, every jackass with a couple hundred dollars were making 1/2 hour long animated intros to websites with the now universally despised phrase 'SKIP INTRO'. And, lo, Flash was a tool discarded and left for brochures and marketing departments run by creative directors named 'Brad', until Youtube came along.
Now, being alive and working in the year 2000, I actually did quite a bit of Flash. Was it Flash 3? 4? Not sure. They're not even doing numbers anymore, "Fl CS3" or something that Adobe thought of in the hour it takes for Acrobat to load and read a PDF. Everybody had some exposure to Flash then, just as you did to say, Perl and Cold Fusion. I'm in therapy now, it's ok (just as I'm sure younger technorati may encounter future sessions over what might become a traumatic django pony). But the point is, I'm now building a media player in Flash because we need one at work, and coming back to it after nearly a decade it's interesting to see what happened.
Primarily, it's geared to letting you make a media player easier. No longer the idea that it will become the defacto web application platform. Actionscript feels enough like Javascript that it's familiar ground. There's a sort of DOM, although the Adobe style layout and layers of tools to build it is mostly frustrating (which is why everyone seems to make minimal objects then manipulate them via action script files). With ExternalInterface you can actually interact via javascript with objects on the page. That's huge. Not huge enough for me to ever actually want to use it again day-to-day, but for a media player with no SKIP INTRO, an improvement. -
Sat Aug 30 12:05 pm, 2008
Jquery's recent redesign started a shit storm on their boards -- the main criticism being against the top hompage graphic which read (before it was promptly removed) "Be a javascript ROCKSTAR". The central complaint was that this portrayed a large degree of unprofessionalism, and that people trying to get their bosses or work places to adopt jquery would be put off. Which I agree with 100%. The design is pretty canned, and the illustration pretty cheezy -- but it brings up a good question, when does your open source community supported project become something that's expected to be professional. I can't believe Resig would not understand how really widespread and well used jquery is at this point, is his project no longer his really, is it directed more by the users? I remember a time when these branding, marketing and design expectations didn't exist for free/open software. Start with Tux, the linux logo -- or the Python site just a couple years ago, which was redesigned successfully. There are still plenty of older well used projects that have very bad sites, but there is a difference, these were very clearly not trying to look good, they were often merely utilitarian, whereas the jquery redesign seems trying to be clever or savvy (it's neither). And while I agree the redesign didn't look great, and the graphic unprofessional, it is notable this is now an era where free/open software are expected by its users to be shown professionally to non-technical people, and that presentation is now as important as the code itself.
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Fri Jul 11 10:30 pm, 2008
I'm not gonna lie, any site that requires oodles of resources and a cinema display is not near and dear to my heart. I find some comfort in that devices are getting smaller, and people's "surfing" habits (as a general term for all the things that used to be web and now encompass texting, geolocation, photo taking, etc.) is becoming less "golly I'm sitting down looking at the world wide web" and finally transparent. Why this is encouraging to me is that it takes away from what has become somewhat bloated direction of the web and brings it back to a direction more about delivering content. I don't care what font you're using. I don't care if things move or fade. I don't care if corners are rounded and buttons shiny. I don't care if there's a slider ajaxing in pretty photos. Even saying this is anathema to modern 2.bla web philosophy. Not that it can't look nice, certainly one of the things the iPhone and eeepc have done is bring some desktop web standards to truly portable devices. But because these devices have a mobile purpose, you're on a smaller space, your connection may be slower (or lots slower) the interface tends to be more lean as your exterior space tends to grow or be less consistent. You want to get what you need quicker, and without less padding. This means, in so many words, removing some crap. And good riddance I say, all I want is great content.
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My Deep And Unconditional Love For Internet Explorer
Mon Jul 7 7:30 pm, 2008
Everyone who knows me knows that I have a long term love and respect for Internet Explorer. Today's tribulations began with some simple straggling commas, which, apparently are enough to cause some of the excellently descriptive error messages IE is in part famous for, "Expected identifier". BTW, if you aren't using IE's dev toolbar and have script debugging enabled I would be surprised if you remain sane by the end of the work day via messages like "error on line 1210" (line 1210? of what file goddamnit?). I then proceeded to the quite excellent IE7 "Operation aborted" bug. In essence, absolutely destroying your page(s). No page(s) for you. Now in theory your DOM is perfect, and I know you, you were up all night double checking it and testing it and making sure it conformed to every known ideal of programmerly aesthetic. For the rest of us, there are indeed going to be some calls from a nested part of the DOM to a parent. Especially if you're using JQuery's Tooltip plugin, which does an ".append(document.body)" from anywhere in the tree (hence, again, destroying your site in IE7). Good times, good times.
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Sat Jul 5 8:30 am, 2008
I have a hard time remembering what I used to do before JQuery. I guess it was a hodge-podge of scripts tried and tested by others then modified and tweaked and stewed together. It was painful. "document.write"s, and awkward attempts to access something in the DOM, iterate over elements there, or god forbid, some AJAX. The ability generally to do things like
$.post("/some/url", { somevar: "somedata" },
function(data){
$("#somecontainer").html(data);
});
to implement simple AJAX snippets rather than slog through the stew is incredibly helpful. Being able to 'slice', or do 'next' on a set of elements, likewise, like a little bit of happy code sunshine. And it's small. Get it here. -
Fri Jun 27 11:35 am, 2008
I constantly forget about it when I'm working: let's say you've got an href (or some other block) around an image, you want to fit the image inside a fixed area, say 50px by 50px and give it a border no matter what the size of the image is. So, naturally you do "overflow: hidden" on the containing element, giving it a border, defining the height and width. Makes a nice 75px by 63px image act like a tidy square thumbnail. Problem is that IE doesn't respect this without an "position: relative". Safari, Firefox, Opera are OK as is (as you'd expect).
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Mon Jun 23 6:00 pm, 2008
eweek has a piece about Lindsey Simon at Google who sums up some commonly desired need for the pretty. Getting a designer who doesn't just slam out photoshop mocks, but who can work with code, produce decent css, and have a hand in a product is huge and in my experience very uncommon. Finding someone with an educated solid aesthetic but also technical knowledge isn't so easy. In addition, Simon said, "I don't want an Andy Warhol-type designer; I want someone who's scrappy, who's well-rounded and not afraid to look at code."