Richard Wong
19 August, 2008
If you are a busy web developer that also need to work on the interface, here is a handy list of online tools to help you save time and effort creating nice graphics for your sites or apps.
Buttons
- As Button Generator – Fully featured button creator allowing you to customize colour, gradation type, stripe, filter, image, and of course text.
- Buttonator.com – Another Button generator with a big range of different style buttons
- My Cool Button – Simple and easy to use button generator
Richard Wong
18 August, 2008
When it comes to cross browsers vector graphics, there have always been debate about whether to use SVG/VML or Canvas/VML. Even if you made the decision, you still need to know how to implement them.
Now Raphaël is aiming to simplify development with vector graphics across browsers. It provides us with a simple adapter to work with vector graphics using SVG/VML.
Below is an example of the basic:
// Creates canvas 320 × 200 at 10, 50
var paper = Raphael(10, 50, 320, 200);
// Creates circle at x = 50, y = 40, with radius 10
var circle = paper.circle(50, 40, 10);
// Sets the fill attribute of the circle to red (#f00)
circle.attr("fill", "#f00");
// Sets the stroke attribute of the circle to white (#fff)
circle.attr("stroke", "#fff");
If you want to create your own specific chart or image crop-n-rotate widget, you can simply achieve it with this library.
Raphaël – javascript library
Richard Wong
17 August, 2008
When it comes to pop-up windows, people don’t really associate them to being accessible and they are some what annoying. But sometimes it is necessary for whatever reason.
If you think about it, a link that opens up a new window is one of the most simple thing you can do with javascript & HTML. There is no reason for it to be ugly.
This is the old fashion and totally wrong way of doing it:
<a href="javascript:window.open(http://www.popup.com/);">Popup link</a>
Why? The a tag is not linking to a link but instead it is running some javscript. That means the whole meaning of the link is gone.
Here is what an accessible and clean link looks like:
<a href="http://www.popup.com" rel="pop-up">Open a Popup</a>
In this version, there is no inline javascript which is always a good pratice to separate HTML and javascript. It keeps everything simple and clean. The addition of the rel attribute is used to describe the relationship between the current page and the href destination of the anchor.
Now we have this beautiful HTML link. It is time to do some magic with javascript and jQuery.
( function popup() {
$( document ).ready( function() {
$("a[rel='pop-up']").click(function () {
var features = "height=700,width=800,scrollTo,resizable=1,scrollbars=1,location=0";
newwindow=window.open(this.href, 'Popup', features);
return false;
});
} );
}() );
This is a very simple javascript using jQuery. Basically, the code is looking for all the links with the rel attribute and assign a onclick event to open the pop-up window. Of course, there are different ways to abstract the above code to make it more flexible. But the idea is to have beautiful pop-up link and have the javascript to do the work later.
Richard Wong
15 July, 2008
Feedly is “a more social and magazine-like start page for Firefox”. It is a very well made and design application that really take the concept of homepage and RSS aggregation to the next level. They have social features like sharing, annotation and even twitter integration for each post.
But what interest me the most is the ability to do real-time summary of the most relevant content available on the web based on your interests, your reading patterns, and recommendations from your friends. In other words, you can see straightaway the hottest, latest post from your feeds.
After using it for a couple of weeks, I really enjoyed its clean design and functionality. I found myself using it more to do feed reading than Google Reader. The way Feedly organizes the post are far more natural to scan read a large amount of headlines and lead me to discover more interesting posts than before.
The coolest part of Feedly is that it doesn’t replace your beloved Google Reader. It actually integrate very well with it. All your read or star items are always synced that means you can use both to suite your needs.
So go ahead and give it a go at http://www.feedly.com/
Richard Wong
8 July, 2008
I have recently came across this interesting and useful Javascript tool called JSLint. You feed in your javascript code and JSLint will scan through and looks for problems in your code.
You might ask what is the different between this and debugging using Firebug? Well, although it is only a syntax checker and validator, it is much more stricter and follows proper Code Conventions. In other word, it will tell you errors you normally won’t get.
As you know, Javascript sometimes allows code to be implemented in a sloppy way which could be very troublesome for large complex projects. So I have been using this tool as a reference point to tighten up my javascript code.
So go and paste your code at JSLint and see how your code is doing. But I must warning you, it might hurt your feeling!
Source: JSLint
