Random thoughts & observations

From the mundane to the profound and everything in between here’s what’s rocking our world

Browser data storage options for the front-end developer

Posted: Saturday 28th June, 2014 - 9:38pm
Author: James Griffiths

With universal support in modern browsers for HTML5 related technologies such as Local Storage front-end developers now have more options than ever when it comes to client-side data storage. In this article we're going to take a look at what those options are and how they stack up.

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Fixing the mobile header height in jQuery Mobile for iOS7

Posted: Tuesday 3rd June, 2014 - 9:32pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you're developing Phonegap applications with jQuery Mobile for devices running iOS7 then you're probably going to experience some issues with the placement of items within the application header. As Apple have changed how the header behaves in iOS7 you'll need to make some adjustments in your code to accommodate this.

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Resolving iOS 6 deprecation errors in cordova phonegap

Posted: Wednesday 28th May, 2014 - 9:26pm
Author: James Griffiths

Having recently upgraded to Cordova Phonegap 3.5 we started seeing the following iOS6 deprecation warnings when publishing our App for testing:

  • Deprecations: ’dismissModalViewControllerAnimated:' is deprecated: first deprecated in iOS 6.0
  • Deprecations: 'presentModalViewController:animated:' is deprecated: first deprecated in iOS 6.0

Thankfully, resolving these is a relatively simple process.

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Installing Node and SaSS behind a proxy

Posted: Saturday 24th May, 2014 - 9:22pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you find yourself working behind a corporate web proxy server chances are you'll be running into issues when trying to install SaSS and using the Node Package Manager (npm). Thankfully these issues are easy to resolve with a little command line magic.

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Growing up with the web

Posted: Thursday 22nd May, 2014 - 7:42pm
Author: James Griffiths

We got into designing for the web around the turn of the century, shortly after the bursting of the dot-com bubble. 13 years on and it's quite surprising to see the pace of change that has occurred within the industry since then and some of the major shifts in technology and approaches that have also taken place during this period.

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Popcorn JS Tutorial

Posted: Saturday 17th May, 2014 - 6:40pm
Author: James Griffiths

Mozilla's Popcorn JS library allows developers to bring richer functionality to HTML 5 video. In the following tutorial we're going to take you through developing a single page web app with Popcorn JS.

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Animating div height from bottom of container to the top instead of top to bottom

Posted: Friday 16th May, 2014 - 6:28pm
Author: James Griffiths

We came across some interesting behaviour while building a charting application with HTML, CSS and jQuery. When it came to animating the individual bars of the charts that we were generating the height would always grow downwards! As bizarre as this behaviour seemed fixing it proved to be relatively straightforward.

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Learning Underscore JS - a quick introduction

Posted: Wednesday 7th May, 2014 - 6:11pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you work with JavaScript on a regular basis there’ll be times when you find yourself wondering why certain methods aren’t built into the language as default. Whether it’s certain types of data manipulation in arrays or custom objects you’ll need specialised helper functions to accomplish these ends. Writing such functionality can be tedious, prone to cross-browser issues and quite often, frustrating.

This is where Underscore JS excels as it provides a set of built-in utilities for working with JavaScript objects (whether they be Arrays, Objects [associative arrays in JavaScript], Functions, Strings or Numbers).

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Blocking a range of IP Addresses

Posted: Wednesday 26th March, 2014 - 5:52pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you manage a website (or a number of websites) you will inevitably, at some point, experience unwanted form spamming. It's certainly not the highlight of anyone's day but sadly a persistent experience in today's connected world. If you are able to use and configure .htaccess files on your web server then you can implement IP blocking to help minimise unwanted form spam.

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Setting up SSH keys on Mac OS X for Bitbucket

Posted: Thursday 20th March, 2014 - 5:37pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you're using a Git based source control management (SCM) service you'll need to create and configure SSH keys to facilitate trusted communication between your computer and the remote SCM repository. If you're using Mac OS X (or similar unix based system) then this process turns out to be relatively simple.

In the following article we'll show you how to accomplish this so you can safely and securely connect to one such SCM service - Bitbucket.

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Adjusting transition speeds in jQuery Mobile

Posted: Wednesday 19th March, 2014 - 5:33pm
Author: James Griffiths

We've recently started developing with jQuery Mobile (jQM) and ran into an issue with the speed of page transitions taking place in our Adobe AIR application. Unlike previous complaints registered online from user's concerned about jQM running slowly we found the transitions were running too fast and needed to find a way to slow them down.

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Installing the Adobe AIR SDK on Mac OS X Mavericks

Posted: Wednesday 19th March, 2014 - 5:26pm
Author: James Griffiths

If you're looking to develop Applications for the Desktop and Mobile (iOS, Android & Blackberry) platforms then using and installing the Adobe AIR SDK (Software Development Kit) on Mac OS X is pretty straightforward.

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