I have recently been working on the mobile UI for a site I built called Sessions+. Sessions+ is a poker bankroll tracker that has a companion iPhone application for live tracking during live poker games, and now a mobile UI for Android and other HTML5 capable mobile browsers which replicates the most of the important functionality of the iPhone app.
The framework I used to build the app uses a lot of separate javascript and css files, though the entire app is housed in a single html file. So I end up with a <head> element jam packed with stuff. While this is perfect for development, it’s no good for deployment or QA.
Continue reading Introducing makejs
I just downloaded the Wired iPad application, and like most iPad applications (and most magazines for that matter), I found myself bored with it within the first 20 minutes. I’m sure the content is engaging, I’m sure the articles are worth reading – but I am stumped as to why I would chose this over the physical magazine itself, or their website for that matter. In fact, for reasons I’ll get into below, I’m starting to believe that the physical magazine’s “interface” is vastly superior to it’s iPad cousin.
However, what strikes me most about the Wired app is how amazingly similar it is to a multimedia CD-ROM from the 1990′s. This is not a compliment and actually turns out to be a fairly large problem…
Continue reading Is This Really The Future of Magazines or Why Didn’t They Just Use HTML 5?
My mom is totally going to love the shit out of this thing.
Continue reading My Mom is Going to Love the iPad
I just want to start out by stating that I, in fact, am a big fan of Slicehost and constantly recommend them to friends setting up anything more serious than blogs. They have a truly great offering and their customer service has only been rivaled, in my experience, by the support team from DataPipe – whom I whole heartedly recommend for any colo or managed hosting.
One thing that is truly great about Slicehost is that they offer an awesome API that allows you to do most everything you can do in their management console, but instead through web services. You can create new slices, reboot them, change and add DNS, as well as rebuild or destroy slices.
The only problem is that the API follows a “standard ActiveResource pattern” that comes straight from the bowels of Rails and is way too convoluted for something this simple.
Continue reading Slicehost API Notes for the Non-Rails Posse
UPDATED: Added support for expressions with variables so that you can add, multiply, divide, etc. variables when using them in the CSS. See below for more info.
Back in April of 2008, I came across a proposal by Daniel Glazman and David Hyatt for using variables in CSS stylesheets. I thought the proposal was absolutely brilliant, filling a much needed void for sites using complicated stylesheets across a variety of different pages. Another part of their proposal was being able to include/import other stylesheets. I don’t know anyone that couldn’t find this useful.
I put together a quick class for implementing most of their proposal using PHP. Nothing fancy going on here, most of it is some simple regexes.
Download the code here.
Continue reading Variables in CSS via PHP
