Archives for "Beyond HTML"

Posted by robhyland on 30th July 2010
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Gmail’s Paging Buttons

I like Gmail, especially the interface. I feel like every time I use it I discover a slick new aspect to the interface. One thing I don’t like is the paging buttons, to move back and forth between older and newer messages. Almost every time I need to move back a screen I end up scrolling the ad that is right above my messages. I think that a little more separation would be good, or somehow calling more attention to the paging buttons, rather than the ad scroller.

Posted by robhyland on 26th March 2010
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ESPN.com on 34th Street

I don’t have a TV in my house, so I have to watch all of the NCAA tournament games on my computer. Originally I was navigating to the games through cbssports.com, the official site of the games. I was checking something on ESPN and I noticed that they also link to the games – and it is easier for me to navigate. Maybe it is because I am more used to it. I also think that they have a simpler, more clear, layout.

It is not very often that a web site like ESPN’s will drive traffic to another web site. It is working, at least for me. I am on ESPN.com a lot more now than cbssports.com.

Posted by robhyland on 17th February 2010
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jQuery UI Accordion Issues in Internet Explorer 6

I really like jQuery UI, but I was having some issues with the accordion in IE6. It was hiding some of the content after I expanded a section. The content it was hiding was in a table, but in fiddling with the code it turns out that it was hiding random things in the div, not just the table.

I fixed the issue by setting ‘animated:false’ when I called the accordion. I actually used cgi.http_user_agent to sniff out the browser and if it is IE 6 I call the file with the animation disabled. Otherwise I call the original file.

Posted by robhyland on 16th February 2010
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Internet Explorer Caches Ajax Requests

Last night I was putting some final touches on an app I am developing and I ran into some issues in IE8. When I used jQuery’s $.get() to pull some content off the server it triggered the success function without ever requesting the page from the server. I was a little confused at first, but after I used the right keywords I was able to figure out that IE8, and probably IE7, cache ‘get’ requests. It seems like there are two workarounds that are pretty common: switch to post, this is what I did, or add a random number as a URL variable. I didn’t care if my request was get or post, so I just made the switch.

After that all was good, again.

Posted by robhyland on 14th January 2010
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jQuery 1.4

jQuery1.4 has now been released. I just recently started using jQuery and have used it for a few projects. Now I am not sure how much testing I need to do before I upgrade my code or if I should even bother. I think for the time being I will keep my old projects at their current level and upgrade as I build new apps.

Posted by robhyland on 6th January 2010
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jQuery in a CMS

I have used jQuery twice in the past month to get some custom behavior from a CMS. In the first instance I used it to re-URL a site for Xavier, and in the second instance I used it for some custom menu options that weren’t available in WordPress. I like the results it produces, but I always worry a little bit about JavaScript as a solution. I would much rather keep things server-side, but sometimes client-side is just easier (and almost as reliable).

Posted by robhyland on 20th November 2009
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Flex vs Flash

Yesterday I attended a free Flex training session that was put on by Adobe. The training covered how to integrate Flex with ColdFusion. I know a fair amount about ColdFusion, but hardly anything about Flex. I learned a lot, but I have a lot more to learn about Flex.

One issue I pondered during the training was the difference between Flash and Flex. I think the difference comes from how the apps are built. Yesterday we worked on our projects using Flex Builder and the interface was one that I am very comfortable with. I opened Adobe Flash CS3 today and it looked a lot more like PhotoShop, and less like something I would use comfortably. In the end they both produce apps that run on the Flash platform, and I think they can fun on the AIR platform as well.

I did some looking around and found this article about the differences: The Difference Between Flex and Flash.