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.”

Continue reading “I Don’t Care About Developers. I Care About Users.” →

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:
Continue reading “getElementsByTagNameNS. Now I Know. And Knowing is Half the Battle.” →

Of Interest- the Google Chrome Operating System

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Between Palm letting me code directly on a killer handheld device, HTML5 starting to show up in real browsers and now Google saying things like the following [my emphasis], it’s a damn fine time to be coding on the front end:

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

This is also interesting for me personally, as I’m a big fan of my Dell Mini 9 Inspiron and I’d be tempted to dual boot it- just to double my geeky pleasure.

getElementsByTagName Namespace Prefix Strangeness in Safari/Chrome/WebKit

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Is It Me or the Browser?

I had a Safari bug on a project I’m rushing to get out the door. We’re using a Flickr feed to populate a div with link+thumbnail to some flickr images. In Firefox/Internet Explorer I simply did the following to build the links:

flickr : function(obj) {

//get the full list of items
	var items = obj.getElementsByTagName("item");

//make sure it's not empty
	if (items.length > 0 ) {

//start the HTML block
		var blob = "<div id='flickrFeed'>";

//loop through the items (we only want 5) and build some links)
		for (var i = 0; i< 5 ; i++) {

//get the link 
			var flink = items[i].getElementsByTagName("link")[0].childNodes[0].nodeValue; 

//get the thumbnail
			var flurl = items[i].getElementsByTagName("media:thumbnail")[0].getAttribute("url");

//smash them into the string
			blob+="<a href='"+flink+"'><img height='75' width='75' src='"+flurl+"' /></a>";

		};

//close the div
		blob+="</div>";

//pop it onto the shelf, for later use
		$("hyperspace").innerHTML+=blob;

	} else {

//if there's somethign wrong with the feed, go to default contentk
		social.fallBack.flickr(); 

	}

}

Continue reading “getElementsByTagName Namespace Prefix Strangeness in Safari/Chrome/WebKit” →