WebDev3000 » MIT License

Juitter

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 11:50:44 +0000

While messing with Twitter itself on a regular basis is nothing but a huge waste of time (my personal opinion, of course, you’re free to disagree with it), I have to admit that a lot of the messages sent by Twitter user may lead to useful information. Great, but how can one avoid using Twitter, yet gain access to the goodies that can be found with its help? Without too many doubts, I can say that the answer is not a single one, but Juitter can be one of the possible ones, so… let’s get to it!

Completely free to download and use (donations are welcome, anyway), Juitter is a highly customizable, lightweight and fast jQuery plugin that allows you to easily put live Twitter content on your site. According to its official page I just mentioned, Juitter is smaller and faster than other Twitter widgets, offers content filtering, allows you to show tweets from/to a user or containing a certain word, multiple user/word search is also possible, results can even be filtered based on language and, in case you were wondering, you can add your own stylesheet to make it look exactly as you wish. Not bad at all, right?

Developed by Rodrigo Fante, the Juitter jQuery plugin works with all major browsers on any platform, as long as Java is running as it should. Oh, yeah – if you want to know about its licensing model, keep in mind that Juitter comes covered by the terms of the MIT license. That’s all, folks!

… but, in case you didn’t figure that out yet, the official site of this piece of code is also its demo, since it uses it to display those live Twitter results. Bingo!

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PhotoSwipe

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 31 May 2011 16:00:41 +0000

iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry 6, even desktop computers or laptops – what do they have in common? Well, they’re all used to go online, at least once in a while, so when that does happen… I guess most users will end up facing one image gallery sooner or later – agree with that? Fortunately, it seems developers have a lot of tools at their disposal to avoid deploying different apps for each device, so today we’ll take a quick look at PhotoSwipe. Ready or not, here we go…

According to the official mumbo-jumbo, PhotoSwipe “is a FREE HTML/CSS/JavaScript based image gallery specifically targeting mobile devices” aimed at developers and designers who need to add an interactive image gallery to their mobile websites while maintaining the look and feel of a native app. Fully compatible with a wide range of devices, PhotoSwipe also works like a charm with virtually all popular development frameworks and JavaScript libraries, being available as a self contained JavaScript library or, if needed, this piece of code comes packaged with a jQuery implementation as well.

Freely available for any purposes you may have in mind, PhotoSwipe offers support for orientation, allows you to easily swipe items and, when needed, images are being resized automatically, not to mention the customization options available, such as speed control of fadeIn-fadeOut effects, image scaling methods, zoom on/off and many others. At last, I should add that PhotoSwipe has no special requirements and, in case that’s not obvious already, you should know it works with all mobile and desktop browsers. Well… I guess that’s all for today, folks!

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mobl

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 09:32:59 +0000

This entire mobile Internet revolution we’re going through seems to be moving faster than the programming/software worlds, but I am sure they’re already catching up. After all, there has been enough patching up of old stuff so far, the time has come for new languages and technologies to jump forward into the spotlight and mobl, today’s subject, is one of them.

While most of the widely used programming languages and the dev tools needed to turn them into usable code don’t come for free, it’s great to know that mobl is more than just free – this one’s an open source language and, in case the name doesn’t say it all already, you should know that its purpose is to speed up the creation of mobile Web apps.

As you can see here, mobl has a JavaScript-like syntax that’s pretty easy to learn and turns instant debugging of entire apps from dream to reality. In case you’re wondering about the IDE coming with it, you should know that mobl doesn’t come with such a thing, running as a plugin under the freely available Eclipse IDE. Excellent!

The idea behind mobl is pretty simple – its compiler converts the code into HTML5, CSS + JavaScript, delivering output that’s compatible with Webkit-based browsers like the ones available on iOS and Android, WebOS, not to mention Safari or Chrome. Unfortunately, there’s no support for Opera or Firefox for now… but everything seems great if we forget about that part, so why not take a closer look at the demos now?

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Not Just A Grid

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 11:32:24 +0000

From time to time, I discover sites with pretty good/useful content, but with layouts that make me wonder if my computer’s calendar isn’t showing a date that’s two decades ahead… Fortunately, there are plenty of tools for webmasters who want to use layouts to match the century we’re living in and enhance their user’s experience while visiting their site(s). Today, we’ll take a quick look at such a tool, namely Not Just A Grid.

Freely available under the terms of the MIT License, Not Just A Grid “is a flexible and modular css framework that is designed to assist in the rapid prototyping and development of websites.” While others still look back and wish for older technologies to hang on for a few years more, Not Just A Grid comes with support for the future, offering accommodation for larger screen sizes and use of CSS3 to progressively enhance the user experience on any device. Excellent!

Not Just A Grid offers multi-column layouts, forms, tables, typography and pagination/alert boxes, every part of the framework coming in a separate stylesheet and the resulting layout having only 1 KB in size. Even more, we’re not talking about a fluid layout here – sure, some may say this is bad, but I know quite a few people who would rather have 4 hard-coded widths at their disposal, each with support for 1 to 6 layouts. These widths are 100, 960, 1380 and 1500 pixels, but a demo is always better than a thousand words, so… click here and enjoy Not Just A Grid!

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JSHint

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:42:16 +0000

When it comes to quality control, I think humans will soon be missed in a lot of fields. With the risk of seeing the entire human race trying to be as accurate and fast as robots and losing almost everything that makes us human in the process, I think that robot-powered quality control is a great choice, at least in some fields. While programming is not one of them, tools that can find errors and most potential problems in your code sound like something pretty useful, so today I’m bringing you JSHint, such a piece of code for your JavaScript programming efforts.

An open source, community-driven and, obviously, completely free, JSHint has a lot of options available, allowing you to easily adjust it to fit any coding guidelines you may be using, as well as the environment your code is expected to be executed in. For example, the following environments are supported at this time: browser, ES5, Node.js, Rhino, as well as Yahoo! Widget. On the other side, available options allow you to allow bitwise operators/debugger/logging statements or not, check line breaks (or not), tolerate eval, as well as a few others that you can easily find on the product’s page.

Since we’re talking about a community-driven and open project, you should keep in mind that its code is available on GitHub and, in case you need a feature that’s not available yet, you can easily create a ticket to ask for it or, even better, start working on it yourself! Well, I guess that’s all for today… but in case you still don’t feel eager to give JSHint a chance, hear this: this project is a fork of Douglas Crockford’s notorious JSLint, following a different path when it comes to controlling the code. Now, that’s all of it – have a nice week, I know I will!

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jQuery 1.5

Codrut Nistor — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 16:47:22 +0000

Until now, we talked about a lot of jQuery plugins here, but never about jQuery itself. So far, so good – nothing that special, but today the day arrived, since the “write less, do more” JavaScript library almost every developer loves to hate or simply loves reached version 1.5. The official announcement came out less than a day ago on the official blog of the jQuery team – see it here.

If you hate reading too much mumbo-jumbo, here you have a few highlights of what’s new in jQuery 1.5:

- no less than 83 fixed bugs, with an impressive total of 460 closed tickets
- the 4437 tests suite passes in all the browsers that jQuery supports and then some, including Opera 11, Firefox 4, IE 6/7/8, Chrome 8/9/10
- the documentation for this release is available here
- the Ajax module in jQuery has been completely rewritten
- a new feature, Deferred Objects, has been introduced
- depending on the browser, the performance of some commonly-used traversal methods is now many times faster than before
- jQuery’s internal build system has also suffered some changes

For all the details, feel free to take a closer look at the official blog post I mentioned in the first paragraph. That’s all, folks!

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NETEYE Activity Indicator

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:25:25 +0000

Another week is reaching its end and I don’t think there’s a need for a “weekend loader indicator,” although the idea would be really nice – have a display somewhere showing how much of the weekend loaded, with the 100% mark being reached on Saturday, at 0:00 AM! I know that may sound a bit strange to most of you, so we’ll only stick to the loader part, with NETEYE’s Activity Indicator tiny piece of code…

… a really straightforward way of ending this week, I think: Activity Indicator is nothing more but, as described by its creators, “a jQuery plugin that renders a translucent activity indicator (spinner) using SVG or VML.” Just… don’t take that lightly, because this light piece of code comes with some heavy features for its size and age (6.4 KB archive, version 1.0.0), as we’re going to see right away!

Requiring jQuery v1.4.2 or later, Activity Indicator offers Alpha transparency and is completely resolution independent, not to mention that it uses no images or external CSS files! According to its official page, this plugin was tested and works well with Firefox, Safari, IE and Opera, but I am sure it won’t have any problems in Chrome, either. Hey, it doesn’t! After all, the demos are running right on the homepage, so if those work well…

… then it’s “bye-bye” and, of course, “have a nice weekend” and I guess that should be all for this week!

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streeme

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 17:56:07 +0000

I like to have my music with me almost everywhere. On the other hand, I am not crazy about keeping a server running on my computer to stream my music to various devices. After all, if it can’t handle a microSD memory card, then it’s not my thing, so this issue is solved, but what about other people? Well, they already have a bunch of alternatives at hand, and streeme is one of them…

… especially since I am sure that some of you programmers out there will also like to take this piece of code for a spin, maybe even mess with it and make it better – after all, that’s why I decided to write about it on WebDev3000 in first place: what we have here is a a free and open source application, of course!

Built using PHP and MySQL, streeme has a HTML5-based frontend and works with all modern browsers you can think of, including mobile ones. In case you were wondering, the FFMPEG library is used to transcode media. Oh, yeah – one more thing: the music collection can be retrieved from any local folder and, in case you really care about Apple’s media players, it’s good to know that streeme can also use the iTunes XML file. I hate iTunes, so I couldn’t care less about this…

… and this takes us to the last line of another WebDev3000 article. Until next time, it’s bye-bye!

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Zoomy

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 19:03:45 +0000

This week will be a cold one, at least according to most weather forecasts I checked so far. Sometimes, I even had to zoom in to be sure I’m not mistaken – 26 Celsius below 0??? Fortunately, it seems I’ll have around 10-12 below 0 – after all, this is not Siberia! Good, but what’s the catch with all this weather nonsense? Well, when I said “zoom in,” it was more about getting closer to the screen or using Ctrl++ in my browser, but today’s topic is about some real zoom…

… because Zoomy is a better way of getting the job done, at least when it comes to images. I won’t give you the whole mumbo-jumbo, since you can find it on the official page I just linked to – for now, it’s enough to say that “Zoomy is a quick and easy plugin that will zoom into a picture,” don’t you think?

While the official page mentioned above has some more or less minor English/typing problems (“Zoomy uses a three differnt CSS3 styles.” is only one of them), it’s not such a big deal understanding how this works – all it needs is a small image and a larger resolution version, then it uses the last one to zoom into the first one. Pretty easy, right?

At last, let’s state the obvious: Zoomy is a jQuery plugin with a bit of CSS styling here and there, freely available and compatible with all major browsers, at least as long as we’re not talking about the rounded zoom interface, which may have some issues working here and there. Any comments regarding the browsers you tested this on and the issues encountered? Speaking for myself, it seems to work fine in Chrome and Firefox, but not in Opera…

That’s all, folks!

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jRating

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 15:18:36 +0000

The Web would be really sad without stars, don’t you agree? No, no, this has nothing to do with NASA, people like Lady Gaga, Shakira or other star-related things. This is all about creating an Ajaxed star-based rating system, so let’s take a quick look at it, shall we?

“It” has a name, of course. If you ask me, the name is the weakest part of it all, since I’ve seen countless plugins/scripts that involve Java and have a name starting with “j” the same way as it happens with the “i” and Apple products… The name is jRating and the official mumbo-jumbo goes like this: “jRating is a complete jQuery plugin for star rating systems with complete Ajax treatment. jRating is very easy and simple to use, thanks to its many options and methods.”

When talking about the features and settings available, I think it’s enough to say you can choose the number of stars to use, their size, even replace the image files to use, while the ratings can represent decimals or not, as you see fit.

Fully compatible with any browser you can think of, as long as it has Java enabled, jRating can also be used with any scripting language you may have in mind, so don’t worry about that PHP file included in the package already. For a quick demo, just go here. That’s all, folks!

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