Archive for March, 2010

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide…and why it rocks

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide coverSo, I just bought two books through Amazon. jQuery 1.4 Reference Guide, and Learning jQuery 1.3. Both are authored by Jonathan Chaffer and Karl Swedberg. I know what you are going to say…why not Learning jQuery 1.4?? Because it is not out yet.

But, really I just want to talk about the Reference Guide. Why did I by this book? Because I love Bible books. They are awesome reference, and usually way better than any program help and it usually has the stuff that I need. jQuery’s documentation is adequate, and googling turns up a ton of stuff, but most of the times I just need to look up a method and jQ’s documentation is a pain in the ass for me. I just don’t like it.

The Reference Guide though, rocks! It is exactly what I was looking for. Each page is one item…a method for example, like toggle(), and has: a description, an example, what it returns, parameters. It gets to the point. I want to find the thing I’m looking for, see what it does, how they use, and what I can do with it. That’s it. I don’t want a tutorial, just give me a small paragraph about what it does. And this book is exactly that.

If you are looking for code examples on how to do a drop down menu, or a slider, this book won’t have it. It is literally a better documentation of jQuery. That’s it. And it does it perfectly.

jQuery tip…Back to Top

Monday, March 29th, 2010

Ever have to do a page that has a lot of back to top links? Say, a staff page with a lot of bios and photos, and after each one you have a link that says Back to top. Well, this made my life much easier.

$('#top').click(function() {
    $(document).scrollTop(0);
});

The 0 could obviously be any value you need it to be, but this little bit of jQuery can come in handy.

Snippely – a little Air program for snippets

Friday, March 26th, 2010

Snippely - Snippet notepadI can’t remember where I go the link from the other day, but here is where you can get Snippely. As to what it is…well…not much. If you are not using Evernote, and you should if you are not, then I guess Snippely would be better than saving notes from notepad. Only slightly though.

I know this is not starting off well, but for some reason I had much higher expectations. A dumbed down version of Evernote. What is it though? Literally a notepad that saves all your notes in one place. There only 4 buttons: + (add a group), – (delete a group), Add code, and Add note. No copy buttons, or tags….nothing. But again, if you have nothing else, this would do the trick. Just don’t look for any bells and whistles.

Smashing Mag, NetBeans IDE 6.8, and a VERY cool jQuery slider

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

Got a bunch of stuff here, so I’m combining it into one post.

First, Smashing Mag, if you weren’t on there on Monday…I believe, you might not know. Apparently they are in some financial trouble and were asking their readership to help them out by purchasing an e-book. I’m guessing they took on more than they could chew, but who really knows. What I do know, is that the e-book contains like 10 articles…8 of which have already been published, and two new exclusive items. For $10. Not a lot really, but for content that most of us who go there have seen? Bah. Better if they asked to buy their print book for $30.

NetBeans IDESecond, NetBeans IDE 6.8. I know there are a ton of IDE’s out there, and most people I know use Aptana. I always thought it was too bloated. I don’t use half the crap it comes with, and just a little too confusing to get things going. If you think its easy and awesome, that is fine. It IS good. But a co-worker of mine downloaded NetBeans and showed it to me. And it is exactly what I want. Nice and simple, supports Zen Coding (though not as much as I would like), subversion, ftp, and a great little Navigator Panel. It also has some damn awesome javascript features. I only saw that what it does with the Ext library, but I am going to assume it does the same for jQuery.

Lastly, I just saw an amazing looking jQuery slider done by Gilbert Pellegrom of Scotland. Here is a link to the Nivo slider.

FireShot screen grabber for Firefox

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

I had been a big fan of the Screengrab! plugin for Firefox, but for some reason it will not take screen shots of the sites we create for my work. Must be something we do with our template/cms stuff that conflicts…I don’t know. So I needed a new solution, and I found one. Here is a link to the Fireshot plugin. I have the latest FF version (3.6.2), and I haven’t had any issues. Here is an image of what it puts on the bottom of your browser window:

Fireshot plugin tools

Allows you to do a lot of things…edit the shot, upload it, copy only a selection, copy entire page or window, print…lots of good stuff. Great little plugin if you ever need to do screen shots of your sites.