Posts in: Web Development & Programming
- To password mask or not password mask?
- That is the question Jakob Nielsen sparked with last summer’s column: Stop Password Masking. In this week’s A List Apart, Lyle Mullican discusses The Problem with Passwords, and writes: However, making such a sweeping change to a fundamental user interaction could present serious problems. Consider some contexts in which a password might need to be entered [...] [9 Feb 2010]
- Proposed File API specification
- Web applications should have the ability to manipulate as wide as possible a range of user input, including files that a user may wish to upload to a remote server or manipulate inside a rich web application. This specification defines the basic representations for files, lists of files, errors raised by access to files, and [...] [10 Dec 2009]
- Flash Player Errors and How to Fix Them
- Trevor McCauley posted two new tutorials today about Flash Player Errors and how to fix them. One covers runtime errors, or errors that occur while a movie is playing. The other covers compiler errors or errors that occur while developing and testing a movie. If you’re not using it already, may I suggest using Flex Builder [...] [4 Dec 2009]
- Yes, you really do need to learn JavaScript
- From Ed Finkler’s PHP Advent 2009 piece, You Really Need to Learn JavaScript: When I say “you need to learn JavaScript,” I don’t mean “learn how to copy and paste an example,” or “learn how to generate JavaScript with PHP.” I mean learn it as well as you already know PHP — or better. Why? Because JavaScript drives rich [...] [3 Dec 2009]
- Big Boston Warmup: Interactive Infographics done well
- Via @gsetser: The Big Boston Warm Up, an infographic presentation whose goal is to get you to donate a coat and help keep homeless people and families a little warmer this winter. The experience begins on the home page with a series of graphics that show the circumstances of Boston’s homeless. It’s a broad demographic profile, [...] [13 Nov 2009]
- Google releases Closure Tools, library and compiler for JavaScript
- From the Google Code Blog: Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That’s why we’re particularly excited (and humbled) [...] [6 Nov 2009]
- WebKit gets Web Inspector Updates
- Yesterday the folks at Surfin’ Safari announced several new and/or improved features to its Web Inspector. Web Inspector is a debugging tool similar to Firebug and Page Speed or YSlow. These updates will be be available in the next version of Safari. To use them now, install a nightly build of WebKit. The latest version [...] [4 Nov 2009]
- Debugging Flash applications with Firefox extensions
- Using ExternalInterface and Firebug Lately, the day job has had me busting booty on a Flash/ActionScript project that makes considerable use of the ExternalInterface class. ExternalInterface allows Flash to communicate with its HTML container using JavaScript. It’s a groovy feature, but one that changes the development process a bit. Unlike straight-up Flash development, ExternalInterface requires you [...] [1 May 2009]
- Frameworks: Yay! Nay! How do you decide?
- Frameworks in web development have been the hotness for a few years now. But not everyone is “frameworks! yay!” A few high profile developers have questioned their use. The goal of frameworks — be they server side, JavaScript-based, or CSS-based — is to decrease development time. With server-side frameworks, I also find that they [...] [3 Nov 2008]
- JavaScript in Firefox 3.1 will be wicked fast
- John Resig of jQuery fame, has a post about a huge performance boost coming to Firefox 3.1: TraceMonkey. TraceMonkey, Resig explains, uses a computing technique known as trace trees (PDF) which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey, Firefox’s current rendering engine. What does this mean? As Resig explains: It means that JavaScript is no longer confined [...] [24 Aug 2008]