In the past, I used MySQL for any of my DBMS needs. It wasn’t really an informed decision based on solid facts, actually I had never really given it any thought. It was what most developers used, it was what vBulletin used (one of the main projects of my company is based on vBulletin), it was what most hosts had pre-installed, in other words, it was the popular choice and I went with the crowd. Unlike most decisions taken that way, this one turned out to be correct (so far at least). In the university where I study (yeah, I do that too occasionally :P ), there is a great and extremely useful…
I’ve previously discussed many times the color picker I have to create, and blogged about my findings on the way. An essential component of most color pickers is a slider control. I won’t go through much techincal details or JavaScript code in this article (after all the usability guidelines presented don’t only apply to JavaScript applications, and this is why I used Adobe Kuler as a good or bad example for some of them), it’s been done numerous times before and I prefer being a bit original than duplicating web content. You can google it and various implementations will come up if you need…
A while ago, I posted a script of mine for creating 2-color cross-browser imageless linear gradients. As I stated there, I needed them for a color picker I have to create. And even though 2-color gradients are sufficient for most components, in most color spaces, I had forgotten an important one: Hue. You can’t represent Hue with a 2-color gradient! So, I had to revise the script, and make it able to produce linear gradients of more than 2 colors. Furthermore, I needed to be able to specify a fully transparent color as one of the gradient colors, in order to create the photoshop-like 2d plane…
First of all, sorry for not posting as frequently as before. I’m feverishly working on a new project with a really tight deadline and I don’t have as much time as I previously did. For reasons that are irrelevant to this post, I have to write lots of Java code. So, sorry if I disappoint my fellow readers, but this post isn’t about JavaScript or CSS, it’s about Java. I wanted to display “pretty dates” (a bit like Twitter’s, for example “yesterday”, “5 minutes ago”, “last year” and so on) in a few places and I couldn’t find a Java implementation, so I decided to code my own. For anyone that…
In this post I’m going to share some tips to increase a site’s usability that are very quick to implement. Not all of them are cross-browser, but they are the icing on the cake anyway, nobody would mind without them. 1. Make buttons and button-like links appear pressed This is a personal favorite. When you use CSS to style a button, or when you use an image (either as a background image or in the tag) to depict a fancy button, it will remain the same when being pressed in some or all browsers (depending on the case). You can use this easy trick to let the user know that he actually clicked…
If you are a creative professional, or just passionate about colors, please take my survey: http://bit.ly/colorsurvey It will greatly help me to make a future project of our company more usable (some of its features at least) and it only takes a few minutes (it contains 10-19 questions, depending on your responses). Any suggestions, corrections, questions etc are of course welcome. Thanks a lot in advance to everyone that takes the survey! :D Of course, when it ends and I find the time to analyze the results, I’ll post them here for anyone interested. (Hint: That means that if you are…
I frequently meet these “hardcore” developers that deep (or not so deep) inside them, tend to underestimate JavaScript developers and boast about their own superiority. I’m sure that if you spent an important percentage of your career working with JavaScript and are even barely social, you definitely know what I’m talking about. It’s those desktop application programmers or these back-end developers that tend to consider JavaScript a toy, and try to convince you to engage in “more serious stuff” (if they appreciate you even a little; if they don’t they just mock you endlessly and/or look down…
As Math.log currently stands, it’s a bit useless. It only calculates natural logarithms (base e). We can easily modify it however, to calculate logarithms of any base: Math.log = (function() { var log = Math.log; return function(n, a) { return log(n)/(a? log(a) : 1); } })(); We can now specify the base as a second parameter, or still use the default one (Math.E) if we don’t specify one, so older scripts won’t break or if we want a shortcut to the natural logarithm. ;)
As I mentioned in an earlier post of mine, I have to create a color picker, so I’ve already started to write the code for the Color class it’s going to use. I need it to natively support RGB, HSL, Lab and CMYK. And the latter part is causing unexpected trouble. It seems that there is the notion out there that conversion from CMYK to RGB is easy. Newsflash: It’s not. As every graphic designer knows, the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the the RGB color gamut (even the sRGB color gamut). You can’t take a CMYK color and convert it to an out-of-CMYK-gamut RGB color! That’s nonsense! And it’s…
I have to write a color picker in the near future and I wanted it to have those little gradients on top of the sliders that show you the effect that a slider change will have on the selected color. Consequently, I needed to create imageless gradients, in order to easily change them. My very first thought was creating many div or span elements in order to show the gradient. I rejected it almost instantly, for ovbious reasons (*cough* performance *cough*). My second thought was SVG for the proper browsers, and gradient filters for IE. As it turned out, inline SVG was too much of a hassle and I…
I usually view mockups in a browser, so that the impression I get is as close as possible to reality (I learned this the hard way: A mockup that seemed great in the neutral and minimalistic environment of a picture viewer, ended up looking way too fancy when viewed in a browser, something that I realized after having worked for 6 months on the site). If you do the same, I’m sure you’ll feel my pain: Every time I do that, I have to carefully scroll down just as much as to hide the margin that the browser adds, and left just as much as to center the image. Not to mention the click required to…
Yesterday, I had a session at MediaCampAthens (a BarCamp-style event), regarding CSS3 colors. If you’ve followed my earlier posts tagged with “colors”, my presentation was mostly a sum-up of these. It was my first presentation ever, actually, the first time I talked to an audience for more than 1 minute :P . This caused some goofs: When introducing myself, I said completely different things than I intended to and ended up sounding like an arrogant moron :P I tried not to look at the audience too much, in order to avoid sounding nervous, and this caused me to completely ignore 2 questions (as…
As someone who dealed a bit with print design in the past, I consider CMYK colors the easiest color system for humen to understand and manipulate. It’s very similar to what we used as children, when mixing watercolors for our drawings. It makes perfect sense, more than HSL and definately more than RGB. I understand that most of us are so accustomed to using RGB that can’t realise that, but try to think for a moment: Which color system would make more sense to you if you had no idea and no experience at all with any of them? Personally, even though I have lots more experience with RGB, given…
If you are following the current news on web development, you probably heard that the new Safari 4 has a great feature: It natively allows the user to select multiple files via a single input control, if you specify a value for the attribute multiple: or, in XHTML: You might not know that Opera supported multiple file uploads for a while now, based on the earlier Web Forms 2.0 standard in a slightly different (and more flexible) format: Can we use those currently? Sure we can, but we should provide fallbacks for the other browsers. Using these features will put pressure on the other browser…
When using CSS, we can just include both declarations, one using rgba, and one without it, as mentioned in my post on cross-browser RGBA backgrounds. When writing JavaScript however, it’s a waste of resources to do that (and requires more verbose code), since we can easily check whether the browser is RGBA-capable, almost as easily as we can check whether it suppports a given property. We can even follow the same technique to detect the support of other CSS3 values (for instance, multiple backgrounds support, HSLA support, etc). The technique I’m going to present is based on the fact that…
I used to take pride in my short, bulletproof and elegant String and Number type checks: // Check whether obj is a Number obj + 0 === obj // Check whether obj is a String obj + '' === obj I always thought that apart from being short and elegant, they should be faster. However, some quick tests gave me a cold slap in the face and proved my assertion to be entirely false. When comparing the following 4 methods for string and number type checking: “My” method (mentioned above) Object.prototype.toString method: Object.prototype.toString.call(obj) === '[object String]' or…
Ever wanted to run a snippet of JavaScript on a browser that doesn’t support a console in order to debug something? (for instance, IE6, Opera etc) You probably know about Firebug Lite, but this either requires you to already have the bookmarklet, or include the script in the page. Although Firebug Lite is a great tool for more in depth debugging, it can be tedious for simple tasks (eg. “What’s the value of that property?”). Fortunately, there is a simpler way. Do you remember the 2000 era and the javascript: URIs? Did you know that they also work from the address bar of any javascript-capable…
You might just dislike JavaScript libraries and the trend around them, or the project you’re currently working on might be too small for a JavaScript library. In both cases, I understand, and after all, who am I to judge you? I don’t use a library myself either (at least not one that you could’ve heard about ;) ), even though I admire the ingenuity and code quality of some. However, when you take such a brave decision, it’s up to you to take care of those problems that JavaScript libraries carefully hide from your way. A JavaScript library’s purpose isn’t only to provide shortcuts to tedious…
Recently, PPK stated that he hates Google Chrome’s automatic updates. I disagree. In fact, I think that all browser vendors should enforce automatic updates as violently as Google Chrome does. There should be no option to disable them. For anybody. But what about the user’s freedom of choice? This might sound a bit facist at start, but imagine a world where all browsers would get automatically updated, without the possiblity of an opt-out. If you went online, you would be bound to have the very latest version, regardless of how computer (i)literate you were (Many — if not most — home users…
UPDATE: New version First of all, happy Valentine’s day for yersterday. :) This is the second part of my “Using CSS3 today” series. This article discusses current RGBA browser support and ways to use RGBA backgrounds in non-supporting browsers. Bonus gift: A PHP script of mine that creates fallback 1-pixel images on the fly that allow you to easily utilize RGBA backgrounds in any browser that can support png transparency. In addition, the images created are forced to be cached by the client and they are saved on the server’s hard drive for higher performance. Browsers that currently support…
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