User Experience Engineering and Front End Development

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It?s Friday. Play some drums?. HTML5 style

Brian Arnold created a fun sample drum machine simulator using HTML5 <audio>. PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   function playBeat() {         if (isPlaying) {                 var nextBeat = 60000 / curTempo / 4;                 // Turn off all lights on the tracker's row         [...]

Machsend: P2P file sharing via Browser Plus

Alex MacCaw has released Machsend, a Yahoo! Browser Plus plugin that enables P2P file transfers from inside the browser. It showcases what can be done with a BP plugin, leaving you wish cross browser functionality. I guess it is kinda fun to hack the browser :)

GChart 2.5: Faster, sharper, canvas-rendered, pie, line, and area charts

John Gunther has released GChart 2.5, a client-side library that adds a new canvas-rendering option for sharper, better looking, alpha-transparent, pie, line, and area charts. John told us: Canvas-rendering corrects GChart's most serious visual quality limitations (including the most often mentioned problem by its users: the banded-filled pie slice). Coupled with its existing feature set and ease of [...]

More than you ever want to see about encoding

Paul Baukaus linked to jsescape, a little form that shows escaping and unescaping across a number of encodings. Andrea Giammarchi had his own post on encodings in a different way.... as he talked about en-code which you can check out in action here on the page that lets you do simple encodings, especially for source code, in [...]

GeoMaker - geo locations as microformats or a map from texts or URLs

As preparation for an upcoming tech talk about Placemaker I thought it would be good to take a bit of the pain out of the geolocation service by making an interface for it. Placemaker works the following way: you post some content or a URL to it, it goes through the content or gets the [...]

Modernizr: HTML5 and CSS3 detection

Modernizr is a new library that detects various HTML5 and CSS3 features and lets you know so you can use them: Writing conditional CSS with Modernizr Now, once your page loads, Modernizr will run and go through all of its tests. It will automatically add all the classes to the <body> element of the page, and these [...]

A whole lot of testing for JavaScript implementations

A couple of releases related to unit testing and JavaScript came out on the same day. First, the JScript team posted a set of ECMAScript 5 tests.... 900 to be exact, and the focus on features that are new to ECMAScript 5. All of the tests are released under New BSD. Then, the V8 team announced Sputnik, a [...]

Firefox 3.5: The fastest fox has landed

It is great to feel the good vibes at Mozilla HQ today as we launch Firefox 3.5! It is always an interesting ride to see a browser develop, and realize how complex and large the work is. Congrats to the browser developers out there who are working hard to make the Web better. With final [...]

LABjs: Simple abstraction for loading dependencies correctly

Kyle Simpson has developed LABjs, a library that lets you define your JavaScript file dependencies, and then loads them as efficiently as possible. Kyle told us: This project is a simple little tool (1.6k compressed!) for being able to load javascript files dynamically. It's like a lot of similar projects where the goal is to improve the [...]

New Sessions at The Ajax Experience 2009

Summer is right around the corner - so before you make any vacation plans here's one quick action item to cross off your to-do list: Register now to lock in exclusive $300 savings for The Ajax Experience conference, September 14-16 in Boston, MA. It's only been two weeks since we announced open registration for The Ajax Experience with [...]

MySpace open sources advanced browser performance tool for IE

Developers tend to tease MySpace for its look, but the insiders are incredibly impressed by some of the engineering behind the scenes (e.g. their internal monitoring tools are said to be second to none). They have surprised us again with their new tool MSFast which is "a browser plugin that help developers to improve their code [...]

Fun with text-shadow

Zach Johnson is at it again, this time giving us a fun Friday treat with CSS text shadow, all via: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   document.getElementById('text-shadow-box').onmousemove = function(e) {     var xm = e.clientX - 300;     var ym = e.clientY - 175;     var d = Math.sqrt(xm*xm + ym*ym);     text.style.textShadow = -xm + 'px ' + -ym + [...]

Scripty2 has landed

Thomas Fuchs has been working in the open on scripty2 for a bit, and now the website has launched. It even comes with nice documentation and fun demos: What's new in scripty2? It is a complete rewrite, and comes packaged in three parts: scripty2 core contains the main namespace and an area for extensions to be added. It [...]

First beta of YUI 3.0 released

Congrats to the YUI team for releasing their first beta of YUI 3: We?ve spent a lot of time in this release cycle refining the core elements of YUI 3 ? YUI, Node, and Event ? to ensure that we have the right API going forward. Performance is improved, and we?ve refined our module/submodule structure. In [...]

JavaScript sandbox using Web Workers

We have been sandboxing JavaScript in iframes for a long time. The Web Worker API has the nice property that it doesn't have access to objects like document and the like, and just runs code that you can pass over to it. With this, Elijah Grey has created an experimental jsandbox API that gives you an [...]

iPhone 3GS runs faster than claims, if you go by SunSpider

Rana Sobhany of Medialets has posted on Sun Spider benchmarks of the iPhone 3GS as well as other devices which shows off the performance angle of 3GS: The WebKit Open Source Project provides a JavaScript test Suite dubbed SunSpider. According to the description on the SunSpider home page, ?this benchmark tests the core JavaScript language only, [...]

MooTools: Saving the dollars, replacing document.write

The religion behind a simple $ has been fierce in the Web world. MooTools has decided to make the Dollar Safe Mode which is similar to cousins such as jQuery.noConflict (in MooTools case it just looks for the $ function). Now you can just use document.id if you want to play in the wild, or [...]

ProtoFish: advanced hover menu

ProtoFish is an advanced hover menu based on Prototype, written by Peter Slagter. You can easily add a delay to your menu (on mouseout) and choose your own hover class. All ProtoFish menu's will respond to users who use the TAB-key to navigate through your page. It is trivial to use. Once you load up [...]

Sprite Me! Helping you sprite up, but maybe you shouldn?t?

There have been many tools to help make image spriting easier, by packaging up your images into one large image and splitting it up again via CSS. Steve Souders just showed off a new little tool he created, Sprite Me at the Velocity conference that kicked off today. He has made it easier to work with [...]

HTML 5 and the Wizard of Oz

Kyle Weems, the CSS Squirrel and author of the occasional and bizarre comic of the same name, targets his latest rendering at Ian Hickson: Click-through to see the full comic. The related blog entry fleshes out the basic complaint some more: Why is it that the person who is the center of this process is allowed to [...]

Content courtesy of: ajaxian

Controlling iTunes remotely

So I just got this shiny new MacBook Pro. Absolutely love the thing. I’ve been away from the Macintosh platform for far too long… Anyway – I’m sitting in my office listening to music and realized that the speakers, while okay for what they are, suck by most standards. So I pop over to my PC [...]

gZip your JavaScript

Most browsers these days (with the exception of Safari, I think?) will accept gzip encoded content. This means you can drastically reduce the size of all those bloated javascript libraries you might be using on your web site. So how do you serve gzipped js files? There a few methods out there. I chose the one [...]

IE and responseXML issues

After working on a small AJAX library, I decided to test it in IE. Everything worked great, except when requesting XML. The responseXML property of the XHR was null. I’ve had this issue in the past where the server isn’t returning the appropriate Content-Type (text/xml). But that wasn’t the issue this time. I checked my [...]

Force directed node interface 2

Here’s an example of the force directed node interface that I’ve been talking about. It’s not complete. It’s just a working prototype. You still cannot load project details, but I’m waiting to add that if I decide I want to take this any further. Since the dimensions of the interface have been reduced to fit in [...]

Force directed node interface

I’ve been working on the experimental Flash front-end I spoke about in the last post. The idea is to use a force directed or force based system for displaying categories, keywords, projects and their relationships. I was curious about what kind of user experience that would create. Here’s a video of the force directed layout interface [...]

PHP5 + JSON + as3corelib = a beautiful thing

I’ve decided to play around with an experimental front end for viewing projects in Flash. Since I OOPified (yes, that’s a technical term) the site and modeled the data, all of my objects can be easily serialized into JSON strings and passed back to the front end. Then using the as3corelib’s JSON classes, I can [...]

Wordpress XML Parsing Error

XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity > Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to parse RSS file. (Reserved XML Name at > line 3, column 38) in [...] > > Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in [...] Yesterday it was called to my attention that the RSS parser that was pulling the feed from my blog [...]

Free web based imaging software

Aviary has recently released another web-based application. Raven, which is still in beta (all of their applications are. that’s so web 2.0!), is a web-based vector editor. Their product suite consists of four applications at the moment: Peacock – a visual laboratory Raven – vector editor Phoenix – image editor Toucan – colors watches Peacock is kinda cool. Image generation [...]

Flash is (or is not) coming to the iPhone

Somewhat of a sore spot for Flash and iPhone developers, the hope that the Flash player would make its way to the iPhone is still very much up for debate. A recent quote from Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, has some left some believing it’s very much on its way and others thinking it’ll never make [...]

Rewriting the back-end, again?

I’ve decided to rewrite the back end for alien109.com again, taking advantage of OOP in PHP. Man, such a difference. Everything is so much easier to maintain and follow now. Plus, I’ve implemented more of an MVC pattern. Seemed like overkill for such a small site, but proved to be educational, if nothing else.

Content courtesy of: /dev/null