the singularity of being and nothingness
Posts tagged Web 2.0
Getting Into Skype
Jul 3rd
So I finally moved into this century last week by downloading and installing Skype on my computer. Notwithstanding the $15.00 I paid for my headphones, I really like what I see so far.
My primary motivation for getting Skype is my freelance work. While I love talking to clients, it is incredibly taxing on my cellphone minutes to try to manage weekly calls with several clients. I'm hoping that Skype will enable to reduce–or eliminate–this issue altogether, while also providing a way for me to be able to work with both hands while chatting on the line.
So here's some initial thoughts: Skype seems to provide pretty good call quality on my cable connection. In the few calls I've done, I've not had terrible difficulty hearing the other person, and the connection never broke up. Plus, I like that Skype provides a built in contact manager and internal chat client for quick catch-ups with clients that do necessitate a full-blown call.
Negatives: I've noticed that in Firefox 3, Skype recognizes phone-numbers (or at least phone-number formatted strings…) and applies some functionality to them. At first blush, this is cool–but it does get annoying, and can seriously break an otherwise consistent design flow. But More >
Coming Soon…Very Soon!
Jun 10th
Remember the CSS Gallery I wrote about a while ago? Yes, the one that I'm building? Well, IT'S ALMOST DONE!!
I am incredibly excited. The design, I feel, really came together, and the final result is something simple and sleek, but still (at least IMO) memorable.
One of the most exciting things about this project for me is that it's allowed me to flex some ColdFusion 8 muscles–muscles that I have had not yet really had a chance to use until now.
What kind of features are there going to be? I'm glad you asked!
On the client side, I completely Web 2.0-ified the site submission process. When you click "Submit", instead of getting redirected to a form page, I'm using Thickbox to present the form. The form itself is pretty sweet, too. First, there's a fairly interesting hint tool that I developed. But the power of the form is that not only does it check the XHTML and CSS validation on the site you enter while you're finishing up the form, but even the form submission itself is AJAXed. No stupid submit and refresh here!
Once a site submission is approved and live, each site will have comments attached, as well as a rating mechanism. As More >
Yet Another Way to Waste My Time…!
May 4th
A while back (probably 3 months, or so), I ran across moshimonsters.com through an online design gallery. At that time, the site was nothing but a landing page, so I paid little attention–other than appreciating the shiny-ness of the design.
Today, this site popped up again on another design gallery, but this time the full application was live. Needless to say, I neglected other responsibilities and dove right in.
Moshi Monsters is an online "monster pet" game. Each person gets to create their own monster, name it, decorate the monster's house, etc. Pretty standard stuff. Oh, and there's the obligatory "games" that help you earn points towards buying food, furniture, and booze for your Moshi Monster.
I've done a million of these before, and have quickly lost interest. What is unique about MM, however, is that it has brought the "digital pet" genre into the Web 2.0 world. Not only can you network with your friends that have their own Moshi's, but the game also integrates nicely with Facebook (and other social networking applications) to extend the experience beyond the confines of the moshimonsters.com site. Plus, the site itself is very enjoyable as it is very professionally animated, and contains alot of fun easter-eggish More >
Adobe's Spry Framework, Part Second
Mar 24th
A couple days ago, I posted an example of how Adobe's Spry Framework allows one to easily and quickly incorporate XML datasets into an application, allowing for a great alternative to page-to-page navigation and data mining.
One of the limitations I pointed out was the initial amount of coding involved. Well, that was because I'm an idiot.
While I've used Spry's Spry.Data.XMLDataSet() many times before, I literally had no idea how powerful it is, nor that it could interact with dynamically generated XML files, such as I was doing with ColdFusion components in my last example. However, such is not the case. Not only does this method allow me to do everything I was doing before, it involves a heck of lot less code. The entire invoke for the datasets here is:
var dsCities = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc method=getCities", "cities/city");var dsLocations = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc?method=getLocations&cityID={dsCities::@id}", "locations/location");
Two lines of javascript! Now of course, there is more to handle some of the behaviors…but I have effectively cut out about 100 lines from what I was doing before. Pretty cool!
Finally, the best part about this is it allows me to take full advantage of the framework's "spry:state". With this, one can set different "states" that will fire in relation More >
Web 2.0 Goodness – Adobe's Spry Framework
Mar 24th
Ok, so as everyone who reads this blog knows (or should know…), I am a web designer/web developer. On the development side, I am best at ColdFusion , one of the under-appreciated programming langugages out there. While ColdFusion is awesome, one of the drawbacks of it (as well as of PHP, .NET, etc.) is that it is a server-side technology, meaning (surprise, surprise) that all of the code processing done is accomplished on the server. So, any of the cool Web 2.0 stuff out there, like asynchronous form submission, has to use Javascript.
While ColdFusion 8 has some seriously cool AJAX features built into it that handle alot of this kind of thing with ease, it is not free and wonderful hosting companies (like GoDaddy) are slow to upgrade their servers to the newest version. Therefore, the onus is upon the developer to utilize the various work-arounds until ColdFusion 8 is firmly entrenched.
One tool that makes life significantly easier is Adobe's Spry Framework . While Spry includes a lot of the cool effects of other Javascript frameworks, one of the best parts of it is the easy way in which it allows Spry to make server-side calls to allow applications to harness More >
Slowly Getting Handier with Javascript
Oct 30th
Okay, so for people who are javascript heroes, what I'm going to write about is ridiculously lame. But I think it's cool.
Yesterday, I was working on an application for a client. Part of it needed to use the fancy lightbox feature for images. But on top of this, the client wanted to be able to not only place captions on the lightbox images, but also make elements of the caption linkable.
This is not hard, but for those not used to writing HTML, much less nested HTML, this can be a challenge–definitely not user-friendly from a client's perspective. The easy solution was to provide a "template" that the user could copy, paste and alter as needed. Unfortunately, this is not a very good solution as slight mistakes can cause terrible problems which are not easily resolved by those who don't know how to fix it, much less what the problem actually is.
So I set out for another solution. I've always admired WYSIWYG editors in that they allow users to easily add complex bits of code (like <a> tags with multiple attributes) through a form, which itself inserts the complied code into another form. Always intimidated by javascript, I thought this More >
A Little Taste of Spry 1.6 Goodness
Oct 3rd
A few days I blogged about Adobe's release (and sexy-fication) of the javascript framework Spry 1.6. While I have not had a lot of time to play around with the absolutely unique elements, some cool additions are the improvements they made to the password verification and confirmation widgets. With the root password widget, the developer can create a pretty robust set of validation rules for user-entered passwords, such as setting minimum and maximum lengths, required special characters/numbers, etc. The best part is that the Spry framework makes these validations incredibly easy to implement on a normal HTML form. For example, here is an example password field I have created:
<span id="passwordValidation"> <input type="password" name="password" id="password" /> <span class="passwordRequiredMsg">Please enter a password.</span> <span class="passwordMinCharsMsg">Your password must be at least 7 characters long.</span> <span class="passwordInvalidStrengthMsg">Your password must contain at least 1 number.</span></span>
That's it. Basically, the entire password widget is a span wrap on the password field. Within this, special validation messages can be defined. On this example, I have set an error message for "required," "minimum characters" and "password strength".
On the function side, the following is all that is required to fully validate this field:
var password = new More > A New Day, A New Spry
Oct 1st
Recently, I have blogged about how incredibly cool Adobe's javascript framework—Spry—is and what potential it has for making great dynamic web content. In those posts, I was talking about Spry pre-release version 1.5. Up until 1.4, it would not seem that Adobe was too terribly interested in marketing Spry. After all, there had not been even a logo created for the project, and the online documentation and samples was incredibly difficult to navigate. With 1.4, Adobe made the smart move of bundling Spry into Dreamweaver CS3, with native Dreamweaver support for Spry tags and functions, a major benefit for noobs like me getting their feet wet with a javascript framework.
However, about a month after the release of Dreamweaver CS3, the Spry team released 1.5. It included some seriously cool updates on all fronts–data, widgets and effects. But for whatever reason, they did not release a Dreamweaver updater. This means that to use 1.5, the user had to download it and replace the bundled 1.4 files with the new version. While not a huge deal, it is not particularly helpful for Dreamweaver support of the new features as they were not included in the original release. As a plus, a More >
Adobe's Spry Framework, Part Second
Sep 17th
A couple days ago, I posted an example of how Adobe's Spry Framework allows one to easily and quickly incorporate XML datasets into an application, allowing for a great alternative to page-to-page navigation and data mining.
One of the limitations I pointed out was the initial amount of coding involved. Well, that was because I'm an idiot.
While I've used Spry's Spry.Data.XMLDataSet() many times before, I literally had no idea how powerful it is, nor that it could interact with dynamically generated XML files, such as I was doing with ColdFusion components in my last example. However, such is not the case. Not only does this method allow me to do everything I was doing before, it involves a heck of lot less code. The entire invoke for the datasets here is:
var dsCities = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc method=getCities", "cities/city");var dsLocations = new Spry.Data.XMLDataSet("getlocations.cfc?method=getLocations&cityID={dsCities::@id}", "locations/location");
Two lines of javascript! Now of course, there is more to handle some of the behaviors…but I have effectively cut out about 100 lines from what I was doing before. Pretty cool!
Finally, the best part about this is it allows me to take full advantage of the framework's "spry:state". With this, one can set different "states" that will fire in relation More >
Web 2.0 Goodness – Adobe's Spry Framework
Sep 12th
Ok, so as everyone who reads this blog knows (or should know…), I am a web designer/web developer. On the development side, I am best at ColdFusion , one of the under-appreciated programming langugages out there. While ColdFusion is awesome, one of the drawbacks of it (as well as of PHP, .NET, etc.) is that it is a server-side technology, meaning (surprise, surprise) that all of the code processing done is accomplished on the server. So, any of the cool Web 2.0 stuff out there, like asynchronous form submission, has to use Javascript.
While ColdFusion 8 has some seriously cool AJAX features built into it that handle alot of this kind of thing with ease, it is not free and wonderful hosting companies (like GoDaddy) are slow to upgrade their servers to the newest version. Therefore, the onus is upon the developer to utilize the various work-arounds until ColdFusion 8 is firmly entrenched.
One tool that makes life significantly easier is Adobe's Spry Framework . While Spry includes a lot of the cool effects of other Javascript frameworks, one of the best parts of it is the easy way in which it allows Spry to make server-side calls to allow applications to harness More >
