Fun With the :Hover Pseudo Class and Code Samples

Posted on by Rob Larsen

This being a technology blog, with plenty of code samples being posted on a regular basis, it’s no surprise I give soem thought as to how that code is displayed. Personally I’ve gone for the old school, green on black text (using the excellent code font Consolas, where possible.) I like the way it looks.

function heckYeah() {
    check.it.out();
}

The one problem is with really long lines. Since I use a lot of real world examples and it’s code I’m caught between a desire to have one line of code=one line on the screen (easier to scan) and the readability issues that a scrolling text box creates.
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The Palm webOS SDK is Now Open To All. Get Your Mojo On!

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Announcing webOSdev

I’m very pleased to announce that effective today we are wrapping up the webOS early access program. We are doing this because today we opened up the program to everyone and released our new public developer portal at http://developer.palm.com. This is the culmination of a lot of hard work by a lot of people here at Palm, and I want to be the first to thank them for making this happen.

This is one more step in delivering webOS to all developers and providing the tools they need to build great applications for Palm phones.

Please go register and join us on the new server. For a change this significant, I’m sure there are going to be some rough edges and broken links. If you run into one, please let us know by posting on the new forums. If you have trouble registering or can’t access the forums for some reason then please email me at pdn@palm.com and I’ll work with you to resolve it.

Head on over to the Developer portal to download it. I’ll be hacking away at every spare moment, and will be posting my findings here. Fun times.

Running:

palm-emulator

Presentation Done. Thanks to all Who Attended.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

I want this sign

My presentation went well, I think. It started a little later than I would have liked, and I didn’t have any water (insane? yes.) but overall it was a lot of fun. People seemed interested, which is the important part.

The really interesting news is that the presentation was recorded, so I should be able to post a version to Youtube at some point in the future.

Thanks to the folks over at the The Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University for hosting me and working with Jason to get the camera equipment set up.

I Don’t Care About Developers. I Care About Users.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Okay, okay… I’m guilty. The title is provocative and slightly misleading. I do care about developers. Developers are my people and I want nothing but the best for them.

That said, when I’m sitting down planning a site, application or component, my first thought isn’t about making things easier for developers. It’s about making things easier for users. If I can do both, great. The world is just that much nearer to perfection. If not, whenever possible I’m going to err on the side the user by trying to make the site they see better/stronger/faster.

(well, maybe not stronger…)

That’s why I cringe when people enthuse about how easy something was to implement.

“That was great. I just had to write two lines of JavaScript and I’ve this cool Ajax component.”

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getElementsByTagNameNS. Now I Know. And Knowing is Half the Battle.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Yesterday I was wondering why obj.getElementsByTagName wasn’t working in Safari/WebKit on a tag with a namespace prefix. I wondered, aloud, whether or not it was just something I was ignorant of.

It turns out that was the case. Dom Level 2 added new namespace specific methods to search through documents or document fragments for tags of a specific NameSpace. I’d just never had to use them before. Learning that greatly simplified the hacky code I wrote yesterday. Here it is, new and improved:
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