Web Development In 2011 Part 2: Are We Getting Dumber?

April 28th, 2011
Web Development In 2011 Part 2: Are We Getting Dumber?

Still more no charge awesomeness

Before I start my small discussion on “Are We Getting Dumber”, let me just say that there is yet even more kick ass things that have come out since I wrote the first part of this little series. Sass 3.1.0 came out, and is going by the name of Brainy Betty. It added some neat stuff to its already great ability, like getting the inverse of a color, Sass based functions, keyword arguments, and more. Granted I probably won’t use a lot of it, but it is still cool that it has been updated. You can read about the improvements it received on Sass’ changelog. Just to note as well, Haml and Sass have been separated into two different gems, so you can install them independently now.

Compass received an update as well, going to version 0.11.1. Some things have changed in this new version which might force you to go back and rewrite some things if you update, but I’ll let you know about that when I upgrade this week. I read the change log and a couple of things stand out. First, is that the linear and radial gradient mixins have been deprecated. We’ll use the background-image mixin instead, and pass it a gradient function. Here is an example of the old way (from my site):

#myDiv {
@include linear-gradient(color-stops($orange, darken($orange, 25%)), left); 
}

And what it will look like now:

#myDiv {
@include background-image(linear-gradient(left, $orange, darken($orange, 25%))); }
}

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Tutorial On Using setInterval To Make A jQuery Rotator

April 21st, 2011
Tutorial On Using setInterval To Make A jQuery Rotator

A combination of things

I was tasked last week with building…well, I don’t know what the hell to call it, but at work we named it “the wheel.” Basically, it is a circle with a bunch of gray icons around it. I needed to get them to change to blue, show a larger graphic with additional content, and change to the next icon after a certain amount of time. When one of the icons is clicked though, the animation has to stop, and show whatever content goes with that icon. I used setInterval to accomplish the rotation through the icons, and pretty much the same jQuery I used on the Portfolio Content Gallery I wrote about. You’ll get a better idea of what I am talking about if you see it. I sped up the rotation so you don’t have to wait as long.

View Demo

I’m still learning Javascript/jQuery, and I have never used setInterval before, so this was a lesson for me as well. Turns out it is actually pretty easy, but I thought I would show you how to accomplish this so you don’t have to do any ridiculous searches like I did.

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Web Development In 2011 Part 1: There Is No Charge For Awesomeness

April 19th, 2011
Web Development In 2011 Part 1: There Is No Charge For Awesomeness

Better than I expected

We are coming up on May, and I started thinking about what is going on in web development in the past few months. It occurred to me that things are actually better than I thought in terms of what is evolving and being created/used. This could be because of a shift in what I actually read now compared to the last year or two. I am way less worried about trends and what the new flavor of Javascript library is. Which is good. Don’t get me wrong, I read about those things still, but I judge more on how useful they are to me rather than “Everyone is using it, so it must be awesome!” I have noticed a change though on what people are discussing. It seemed like last year it was about cool CSS3 buttons and how to make ridiculous crap with all the new CSS properties, but only worked in one or two browsers. There is still some of that, but the amount of articles about it seems greatly reduced.

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Compass Gets An App – No Command Line Needed

April 8th, 2011
Compass Gets An App – No Command Line Needed

Another post on what you think about Compass?

Oh shut up. If it wasn’t as bad ass as it is, I wouldn’t write about it. This isn’t really about Compass though. Well…it is, but more about the app that was built for it, so that users don’t have to use the command line. Honestly, if I can figure out how to at least make Compass compile my Sass through the command line, then anyone can. BUT…this makes the whole process of a hell of a lot easier.

Compass made easier

At first, I thought, the command line really isn’t that hard because you only need to know a few commands, why do I need an app to do this? Then I tried Compass.app by Handlino. After trying it out, there is only one reason why I can see someone not wanting to use this product (which only costs $7 by the way), but I’ll talk about that last.

After you have unzipped the file, and opened the app up, all that happens is that a gray version of the Compass logo appears in your task bar. When you click the icon, you get several things you can do, depending on where you are in your project. If you are starting a new one, you have a bunch of different Compass project options you can install. I went with the HTML5 Boilerplate option, since I love using it. The others are: Blueprint, basic Compass Projects, 960gs, or HTML5 Boilerplate. You can see what I’m talking about in the image below.

Compass.app project creation

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My Love For SCSS And Sass Grows

April 7th, 2011
My Love For SCSS And Sass Grows

As does my stupidity

I’ve been continuing on with my site redesign, which means I continue to use Sass. I’m dead serious with the title of this post, too. Not just Sass, but Compass as well. Sass would be good by itself, but the stuff that Compass puts in, especially it’s CSS3 module. I have used the border-radius and box-shadow includes enough now, that writing them in regular CSS seems an incredible chore.

I only have to write this:

@include border-radius(10px 0px 0px 10px);

To achieve this:

-moz-border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;
-webkit-border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;
-o-border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;
-ms-border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;
-khtml-border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;
border-radius:10px 0px 0px 10px;

You can see why this is awesome. If you can’t, you should stop reading. No, seriously though, how many of you actually write all of those in CSS? I don’t. I write the one for -moz, -webkit, and the last one. Compass is covering ALL of them, so in effect, it is doing more than I originally would have, and I’m writing less. So how did my stupidity grow? Good question.

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