Monday, August 27, 2012
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Tuesday, August 21, 2012
Thursday, August 16, 2012
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Saturday, July 28, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
thoughts/mobile-killed-the-login.md at master · harryf/thoughts - brilliant - thanks @jamesmadson
Miscellaneous
Images
 Format: Links
http://github.com - automatic! [GitHub](http://github.com)Blockquotes
As Kanye West said: > We're living the future so > the present is our past.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Handmade Portraits: Liberty Vintage Motorcycles - Amen.
In a crowded Philadelphia garage, Adam Cramer revives vintage motorcycles and the American tradition of grease-stained self-reliance.
Read the full Etsy blog post at blog.etsy.com/article/12438/
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Todo lists are hard as hell to make - life gaming, app design and just wanting to learn backbone.js
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Usergrid | A highly-scalable data platform for mobile applications
Usergrid is a cloud-based data platform that manages objects and aids in the development of mobile client applications. It provides a core set of commonly used social media application objects, including a rich user model, as well as the ability to create new objects and object collections.
Monday, July 9, 2012
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Monday, July 2, 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Adventure Game - What is this awesomeness all about?
Promotion Bundle
Buy all episodes and we will give you extra stuff. Here's what's in the bundle:The bundle will be available for EUR 19.95
- All five episodes (EUR 19.95 value)
- 3 gift codes. You can give these to friends (EUR 11.97 value)
- Instant access to a special prologue chapter
- Playable anywhere. Even on your iPad. No DRM.
Pre-order available!
For a limited time we are selling the bundle for
EUR 12.99. Once the game is released, the price will go up to EUR 19.95.Only EUR 9.99 until 27 Jun 23:59
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Monday, June 25, 2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
google-blockly - A visual programming language - Google Project Hosting - SO AWESOME!
Blockly is a web-based, graphical programming language. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required.
Check out the demos:
- Maze - Use Blockly to solve a maze.
- Code - Export a Blockly program into JavaScript, Dart, Python or XML.
- RTL - See what Blockly looks like in right-to-left mode (for Arabic and Hebrew).
Blockly is currently a technology preview. We want developers to be able to play with Blockly, give feedback, and think of novel uses for it. All the code is free and open source. Join the mailing list and let us know what you think.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
PaulUithol/backbone-tastypie - looking forward to playing with this.
public PaulUithol / backbone-tastypie
JavaScriptPythonA small compatibility layer to make backbone.js and django-tastypie work together happily. — Read more
Latest commit to the master branch
Set auth headers for the extra GET on an empty POST response as well.… …
… Fixes #18.commit f253883cc9PaulUithol authored 11 days ago
name age message backbone_tastypie 11 days ago Set auth headers for the extra GET on an empty POST response as well.… [PaulUithol] test 11 days ago Set auth headers for the extra GET on an empty POST response as well.… [PaulUithol] .gitignore 5 months ago Upgrade test libs, add a .gitignore [PaulUithol] MANIFEST.in 8 months ago Add MANIFEST [areski] README.md 8 months ago Fix Readme wrong application name to include in INSTALLED_APPS [areski] setup.py 8 months ago Fix installer setup.py to include package data [areski] README.mdBackbone-tastypie
A small conversion layer to make backbone.js and django-tastypie work together happily.
Usage
Add
backbone_tastypieto yourINSTALLED_APPSsetting, and add the following to your base template:<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ STATIC_URL }}js/backbone-tastypie.js"></script>How it works
Specifically, it overrides
Backbone.syncto do a GET request after creating an object (if there is no response body), and overridesBackbone.Model.prototype.idAttribute,Backbone.Model.prototype.url,Backbone.Model.prototype.parseandBackbone.Collection.prototype.parse.
Backbone.Collection.prototype.urlis overridden so it can build urls for a set of models when using thefetchRelatedmethod in Backbone-relational.
Monday, May 28, 2012
jQuery - The Little Things | Rodney Rehm - Great post
A couple of days ago the following snippet made its way into my Twitter timeline:
$("#menu > ul > li").on("mouseenter", function() {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeIn(300);
}).on("mouseleave", function() {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeOut(300);
});as you can see in the fiddle, »It Works!«:
while this code does what is expected (namely showing/hiding nested lists), it has a couple of problems that are not visible and thus not apparent to the developer.
I won't be explaining anything that hasn't been covered in other blogs 1232343234 times in the last couple of years. But apparently we can't stop repeating these things over and over again.
Registering Events
Registering multiple event handlers on the same set of elements:
$(selector)
.on("mouseenter", function() { /* … */ })
.on("mouseleave", function() { /* … */ })can be replaced by a single call to
.on():$(selector).on({
mouseenter: function() { /* … */ }),
mouseleave: function() { /* … */ })
});Instead of manually registering
mouseenterandmouseleaveevents, we could have simply registered a hover:$(selector).hover(
function() { /* mouseenter */ },
function() { /* mouseleave */ }
);And just to cover this too, you can register the same handler for multiple events:
$(selector).on("mouseenter mouseleave", function() { /* … */ });All of this (and quite some more) is explained in the docs.
Event properties
When jQuery invokes event handlers, it passes an $.Event instance. This object contains all data associated with the event. It's a normalization of the native event objects (IE vs. real browsers) which you can still access through
event.originalEvent.We've previously established that we can register a single function for multiple events. But now we have to somehow identify if we are to show or hide the nested menu. We could do that by checking the list's display status:
$("#menu > ul > li").on("mouseenter mouseleave", function(event) {
if ($(">ul", this).css("display") == "none") {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeIn(300);
} else {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeOut(300);
}
});Or we could ditch the slow and ugly DOM access and simply ask event.type:
$("#menu > ul > li").on("mouseenter mouseleave", function(event) {
if (event.type === "mouseenter") {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeIn(300);
} else {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeOut(300);
}
});Delegated Events
I couldn't explain the basics of event delegation any better than Steve Schwartz. If you don't know how delegating events works, read that post!
Thanks to event delegation, we stop binding the
mouseenterandmouseleaveevents to every single<li>in our menu. Instead, we bind one event handler to the menu, and make sure it's only triggered for events happening on our "top-level"<li>:$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
if (event.type === "mouseenter") {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeIn(300);
} else {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeOut(300);
}
});Benefits of delegating events
- Quicker page load: DOM is only burdoned to register one event handler on the
<ul>, rather than registering a handler for each<li>- less memory consumption: 1 event handler instead of many
- New
<li>automatically "inherit" the event handlingConsidering the Context
Event delegation is possible because events "bubble" through the DOM. So each parent element in the hierarchy (up to
document) is asked if it has a handler bound forevent. If so, the handler is executed and the event bubbles up to the next parent element.$(document).on("mouseenter", "#menu > ul > li", function() { console.log("document"); });
$("#menu").on("mouseenter", "#menu > ul > li", function() { console.log("#menu"); });The above code prints
#menu document. That is becausedocumentis the very last element in the bubbling chain. Knowing this, and the fact that we can abort the bubble process with event.stopPropagation() or event.stopImmediatePropagation() we can make sure that the event bubble stops at#menu:$(document).on("mouseenter", "#menu > ul > li", function() { console.log("document"); });
$("#menu").on("mouseenter", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
console.log("#menu");
});The above code prints
#menu. The handler ondocumentis never executed, because the bubble was stopped.With that in mind, our handler should now look like this:
$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
if (event.type === "mouseenter") {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeIn(300);
} else {
$(">ul", this).stop().fadeOut(300);
}
});Selectors
There is tons of material on the web explaining jQuery selector performance. I'm not going to repeat all of that, just what's important to us in this case:
- use
$(context).find(selector)instead of$(selector, context)- use
$(context).children("ul")instead of$(context).find(">ul")Most of jQuery's traversal functions accept a selector just like
.find(). In the case of.children()(and.siblings(),.next()and so on) the selector is used as a filter. So$(context).children()will give you all direct descendants, and$(context).children("ul")will filter that down to all direct descendant<ul>.With that in mind, our handler should now look like this:
$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
var $ul = $(this).children("ul").stop();
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
if (event.type === "mouseenter") {
$ul.fadeIn(300);
} else {
$ul.fadeOut(300);
}
});Just take a minute and browse through jQuery's traversing functions. I bet there are a couple you haven't heard of yet.
Accessing Properties
There are two ways to access an object's properties:
var x = "bar";
var foo = {
bar: "hello world";
};foo.bar === "hello world";
foo["bar"] === "hello world";
foo[x] === "hello world";With that in mind, our handler should now look like this:
$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
var $ul = $(this).children("ul").stop(),
fade;if (event.type === "mouseenter") {
fade = "fadeIn";
} else {
fade = "fadeOut";
}event.stopImmediatePropagation();
$ul[fade](300);
});Ternary Operator
Do you know the ternary operation?
$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
var $ul = $(this).children("ul").stop(),
fade = event.type === "mouseenter" ? "fadeIn" : "fadeOut";event.stopImmediatePropagation();
$ul[fade](300);
});Shrinking Things
Since both variables
$ulandfadeare only used once, they could also be replaced by inline code:$("#menu").on("mouseenter mouseleave", "#menu > ul > li", function(event) {
event.stopImmediatePropagation();
$(this).children("ul").stop()[event.type === "mouseenter" ? "fadeIn" : "fadeOut"](300);
});Strictly speaking, this should be the most performant scenario. We're not (only) writing code for the computer, but for other developers as well. While dropping the variable declarations may be nice from a performance point of view, the resulting code gets more complex to read.
I do not recommend taking this step. Keep code readable, even if that makes it a little more verbose.
Hard-Coding Options
Baking possibly configurable values into your source code is a bad idea - simply because you have no way of changing these properties later on. Try to avoid writing code that does things like
.fadeIn(300). Those300milliseconds may look awesome on your development machine, but totally crap out on some old computer running IE6 (or on an iPhone, iPad, iWhatever). This doesn't solely apply to animations, but given the example code, we'll focus on that.If you've ever read the .animate() docs, you'll probably know about
"slow"and"fast". In its animation functions, jQuery accepts numbers (being a duration in milliseconds) and strings (being names of predefined durations). These predefined durations are accessible injQuery.fx.speeds:jQuery.fx.speeds = {
slow: 600,
fast: 200,
// Default speed
_default: 400
};
$(selector).fadeIn("foobar")will sillently fall back tojQuery.fx.speeds._default(because"foobar"wasn't defined).For our script we could've setup
jQuery.fx.speeds.listlist = 300;and used it by replacing$ul[fade](300);with$ul[fade]("listlist");. With that, we have the option of changing the 300 milliseconds whenever we want or need to.Conclusion
- Use Event Delegation
- Mind your selectors, avoid
find()if jQuery has a traversal function for it- DRY: Dont Repeat Yourself - keep your code as concise as possible
Continue reading / watching jQuery Anti-Patterns for Performance by Paul Irish.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
AppData - Facebook application leaderboards, charts, and metrics - Data Awesomeness
Our Network
Inside Facebook is devoted to tracking Facebook and Facebook Platform news for developers and marketers. Read more...
AppData is the most reliable way to monitor traffic trends for over 75,000 Facebook applications. Read more...
Inside Social Games is the first blog dedicated to tracking the convergence of games and social networks. Read more...
PageData is the easiest way to track metrics for hundreds of thousands of Facebook Pages. Read more... -->
Inside Mobile Apps is devoted to tracking mobile platforms and social applications for developers. Read more...
