For the past several months I have been working on a new Adobe Illustrator extension to make the functionality of IconJar available as a panel. In order to manipulate the IconJar data – which is stored in JSON, I needed to create “Plain Old JavaScript Objects” (POJsO?) with getters and setters. Rather than type out the same lines of code over-and-over, I decided to create a command-line utility to quickly create the JavaScript classes for me.
Continue readingUser Experience
Adobe Illustrator Contact Sheet JSX Plugin
I don’t like performing tedious, time-consuming tasks, especially when those tasks are non-revenue generating, which means they take time away from things I could be doing to increase revenue. The most time-consuming and tedious task I have to perform over-and-over is creating contacts sheet previews of my icons. The problem is that every marketplace has different requirements for preview image sizes and so a new contact sheet has to be created for each marketplace.
Continue reading
Change Disqus Comment Count Text
I recently implemented the Disqus comment system on this and another of my blogs. I am really pleased with the service. It works extremely well, allows me to moderate all of the comments on my multiple blogs and my online conversations in one location, and the user interface is seriously kick-ass. My only complaint was that there is no way to change the look of the Comments and Reactions count. Or so I thought. Thanks to Ryan at Disqus, I learned there is a very simple, but admittedly unknown, way to do this. Continue reading
Remove an Element from an HTML String with jQuery
While working on a project for work today, I encountered a problem that I apparently have never encountered before. What I thought was a very simple function call in jQuery turned out to be a bit more complicated. I needed to removed an HTML element from a string representation of an HTML snippet. jQuery doesn’t quite behave the way I expected and I had trouble finding a solution.
Continue readingjQuery Plugin to Toggle Default Field Value on Focus and Blur
I can’t begin to count the number of times I have coded the same search field with the default value “Search…” in it and so that when the field receives focus, the text is cleared but magically reappears when the field blurs. Every time I code it I know I should save that snippet of code somewhere but it is always faster to just write it anew each time. Well, no more. I finally got around to writing jQuery plugin to allow me to add the focus/blur default value toggle to any field. I have very creatively named the plugin ‘Defaultify’.
Continue readingShould I Use a CSS Framework?
I recently had a conversation with a colleague about whether or not it would be beneficial to use a CSS framework on some of the enterprise web sites we build. His response was that he had experimented with them but he isn’t a fan of them. His reasons are consistent with the arguments I have read posted on various places on the world wide web. I, on the other hand, am not convinced by the arguments against using them. Continue reading
CSS Framework Comparison
Simple jQuery Plugin Example
Trigger Custom Events with jQuery
Things have come a long way since the early days of the web and standard JavaScript window.onload and element.onclick event handling. Even using JavaScript on your web page was risky business in the early days because the availability and acceptance of JavaScript was so unpredictable.
Continue readingPluggable jQuery Application
A couple of years ago, while integrating the WYMeditor Semantic HTML editor into SkyBlueCanvas lightweight CMS, I experimented with different ways to simplify adding custom buttons and fuctionality to WYMeditor.
Continue reading