Sometimes you need to ask a users for multiple answers to a single question. But what’s the best way to go about it? A multiselect input field is kind of strange for the user, sticks out and doesn’t really behave like everything else on the web. A bunch of checkboxes is better for the user [...]
The problem with RSS (aside from only being used by nerds) is that it is almost untrackable. Sure there’s Feedburner and Google Analytics can tell you how many people came to your blog specifically through clickthroughs. But when you’ve got the whole post right there in your reader, why would you ever want to clickthrough to [...]
ECMAscript, 6th edition might bring us fat arrow notation – Douglas Crockford on fat arrows function (x) { return x * x; } // becomes (x) => x * x Douglas’ post concerns itself mostly with the intricacies of how this is bound to the function objectand what the fat arrow notation might bring, what [...]
My language brings all the geeks to the yard, And they’re like “It’s better than yours” Damn right, it’s better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge Programming languages – the second favourite thing for geeks to fight about (right after code editors and IDE‘s). Everybody knows Java sucks, that PHP [...]
Sometimes you find a piece of javascript, a perfect piece of javascript, it does exactly what you need! Perfect! You could spend hours, even days, getting something to work and someone’s already done it, shared the code on the internets even! Hooray! But … the code looks something like this: // to populate later var data [...]
A few weeks ago I decided I need a web designer in my close friends circle – someone to slap together designs for my half-baked weekend project ideas. So I took the nearest person with an eye for design and convinced her she’d be perfect for redesigning my blog. Completely out of her depth (is usually [...]
Every couple of weeks somebody will come running to me: “Swizec, Swizec, I did everything right, but this javascript isn’t doing what it’s supposed to! Whatever I click only the last item works. Halp!” Every time it’s the same bug – people just don’t understand how loops and closures play together in javascript. Invariably they loop [...]
A couple facts about three cool technologies node.js is a powerful way of writing backend code in JavaScript; why JavaScript? Because you have the kind of problem that benefits from asynchronous code (the average web app) and you like using the same brain for backend and frontend work mongoDB is an awesome NoSQL data store [...]
Last time I played around with Appcelerator Titanium I didn’t get a chance to really put it through its paces. Mostly because I wasn’t getting anywhere … I remember spending hours, even days, just figuring out how to get a Hello World to run in a simulator. Yesterday was my lucky day! Not only did I [...]
A couple of days ago I decided that doing my graduation thesis on a topic that, when suggested, brought a sparkle to my mentor’s eye and made him suggest I might want to think about picking a co-mentor just wasn’t hard enough – so I decided to do the whole thing in Haskell. I want [...]
