Well my goodness, I came to make a blog post, and an hour went by with me just tweaking blog settings. Tsk, tsk, tsk…
I ran across, of all things, a medical applications review website today, and looking at the design, I was impressed with it. Impressed enough to give imedicalapps.com a quick shout out.
March 4-8, in Good Ol’ SLC, it’s the Adobe Marketing Summit.
Why you should attend:
-That dude that jumped from SPACE will be there. He’ll jump on you for $5 I think.
-The Black Keys are headlining. Yes, those Black Keys.
-You want to improve your business.
Here’s a neato intro video:
I’ll expand on this post with a specific example in a few days, but I wanted to get a shout out to Vladimir Kharlampidi for his new Swiper library.
It’s a Carousel, it’s an app-store slider, it’s Windows Metro, all in one slick, performant package. It’s new, it’s FREE, and it just works.
It even asks you to Touch it. How lascivious!
There are some bugs and missing API calls ( .index() and .currentSlide() need to be fixed, and you absolutely need to get to the baseSlides when params.loop = true — I’ll prob. submit the pull requests) so if you want to get programmatic you have to do a little bit of landscaping, but it’s competitive with any other HTML slider out there, works 100% with touch, and it’s fast.
Oh, and did I mention it’s FREE?
Check it out, and tell your friends.
Strack
CES (the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) is a pretty interesting place. The sheer size of it makes for so many different and interesting situations that one could find something to write about, regardless of the subject matter.
The subject I’d like to talk about is trends. And I don’t mean what trends are finally here and available as products (multi-touch, waterproof electronics, etc). I mean the trends that are coming up just under the radar, right on the horizon.
See, I’ve been coming to CES for 3 years now, and you kind of get this… Continue reading…
As I mentioned several months ago, Meteor is a fantastic new JavaScript framework.
I like it so much that I just wrote a book about it.
I’m giving away a couple of copies for free, to celebrate and get the word out about Meteor. If you want to be entered in the contest…
This is more a note for me to remember the link than anything, but if you’re interested in learning more about HTML-based (or just regular) Data Visualization, there’s an excellent collection of products condensed into one place:
My two personal favorites on that list: D3 and Raphael.
D3 is as robust as a cake-loving kid with a slow metabolism (shout out to my brother John!), and there’s a great tutorial for D3 from Scott Murray that will get anyone started. (skip/glean through the first couple of tuts if you’re already a JS/CSS junky)
Enjoy!
-Strack
I ran across this article from TNW, on facebook (of all places).
Now, I don’t want to over-plug the Creative Cloud, but the perspective from this article is really spot on.
Read the Article Here
The price really is amazing for all you get. The only real question is, are you familiar enough with all the products to take proper advantage of such a great deal?
I know for me I’ve avoided using Dreamweaver in the past for HTML / Javascript editing. It just seemed too bulky. With DW 6, however, I’ve changed my mind. The add-on features it has make it worth learning and using. Yes, [insert your notepad-like editor of choice] will always be faster for quick editing, but the load up time is now tolerable (not the first time you open it after install– that still sucks), and SO worth it now:
And that’s just Dreamweaver. The new Photoshop and Illustrator are amazing, with about 5 other products all getting honorable mention ribbons.
And then– Add the cloud services: Storage, Collaboration, Test Servers, etc.
And if you’re a student or past customer, $360 for a full year? Ridiculously good deal. That’s less than you spend on coffee.
If you’re one of those people that uses multiple products in your everyday workflow, Creative Cloud makes today a very happy day indeed.
-Strack
I’ve been reading a lot lately (rather than posting, sorry kids) and Chris Coyier asked for people’s “Ah ha” moments with Javascript in a recent article.
Well, I had such just such a moment last night at about 3am, and even though it wasn’t for Javascript, Chris’ solicitation inspired me to share it.
Nope, it wasn’t for Javascript. It was for HTML. Specifically, it was for HTTP requests, and website development in general.
So, the old school website philosophy, which is tried and true, is pretty easy to grasp. A full web application is an “enterprise” level MVC design pattern:
Simple, straightforward, and proven.
Well, with the introduction of AJAX methodologies almost a decade ago (has it really been that long??? Man, I’m getting old…) we now have a significant portion of the processing / logic being done on the web page itself.
This is a good thing! I’m definitely not saying it isn’t. I’m just punching your ticket on my thought train that led me to my “Aha!” moment…
…as I was saying, the “clean” MVC pattern has been enhanced now, making HTML/Javascript pages become applications in their own right, using MVVM or MVP or other design patterns (I promise, I’m coming up on the point here, just bear with me).
These new patterns utilize JSON, AJAX, and Websocket calls, to interact with online services. Meaning, the webpage itself is now the application, with its own controller/presenter/view model component, and Jquery/Javascript calls to get information from a service is now the model. There is no longer a need for the webpage to make GET/POST calls. In fact, the only thing the web server is needed for now is the downloading of the initial HTML for the web page, and serving up JS and CSS files.
Webpages aren’t webpages anymore. They’re applications. GET/POST should now be looked at as just-another-data-source for the Model of that application, and for “downloading” the application (FKA webpage).
That may not be an “Aha!” moment for anybody else, but the implications of it most definitely were for me:
So there you have it- You can start treating HTML as an application. Not a pseudo-application. An actual application. The call to the web server is now the download+installation process, and nothing else.
I’m 100% sure I’m not the first person to think about it this way, but it was definitely a paradigm shift for me, and qualified in my mind as an “Aha!” moment.
-Strack
Was watching a great intro video about CSS positioning from CSS-Tricks, and found a great site:
It’s a pretty boss CSS / HTML renderer, in that you don’t have to reload the page every time like jsfiddle
And it integrates with github so you can save your code directly there, which is pretty sweet.
Here’s an example URL:
(don’t make fun of my code!!)
http://dabblet.com/gist/2363633
And the corresponding github gist:
https://gist.github.com/2363633/
Best of all, you can use Gravatar as a login.
It doesn’t do Javascript at all, so jsfiddle.net is still wonderfully needed, but thought I’d give it a shout out.
-Strack
