We've seen some neat interactive HTML5 infographics before -- but the periodic table, for example, doesn't really care that much about time.Visual representation of time introduces numerous complications. Traditional ways of representing time visually were, roughly speaking, translations of dimension-type, from temporal to spatial; the mapping selected would depend on what kind of temporal relation was meaningful for the particular application. For example, circles represent cyclical behavior; lines represent development; trees represent evolutionary history; and so forth. New media change the...

It’s no surprise they call them trends, become they come and go. Maybe you don’t want to take them with the constant changes in web design you sure don’t want to be left behind, do you?Nobody can predict the future of web design, but we’re already seeing small changes to the newer designs and I bet we all want to be part of the movement. Most of the changes in web design are subtle so we need to focus mainly on the concept behind each trend.We will exemplify every design trend so you can determine for yourself if your designs would benefit from these changes.Typogra...

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections.In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that ‘does the greatest good for the greatest number.’ Many times, sacrifices in performance are made...

The proliferation of multicore CPUs and the inability of our learned CPU vendors to squeeze many more GHz into their designs means that often the only way to get additional performance is by writing clever parallel software. One problem we were having is that some of our batch processing jobs were taking too long to run. In order to speed the processing, we tried to split the processing file into half, and let a separate PHP process run each job. Given that we were using a dual core server, each process would be able to run close to full speed (subject to I/O constraints).Here is our technique...

I believe that unless your application meets one of these native application criteria, you should not create a native application, but should instead focus on building a mobile web application. Like I said before, I’m a big fan of native applications and I feel that there are a lot of great innovative and market opportunities here, but mobile web apps are the only long-term viable platform for mobile content, services, and applications.Native applications don’t service the user better in any significant way; they only add cost to your project, decrease your distribution channels,...

I’ve been on a web tweaking kick lately: how to speed up your javascript, gzip files with your server, and now how to set up caching. But the reason is simple: site performance is a feature.For web sites, speed may be feature #1. Users hate waiting, we get frustrated by buffering videos and pages that pop together as images slowly load. It’s a jarring (aka bad) user experience. Time invested in site optimization is well worth it, so let’s dive in.What is Caching?Caching is a great example of the ubiquitous time-space tradeoff in programming. You can save time by using sp...

While profiling our application I came across a a rather strange memory usage by the ob_start() function. We do use ob_start() quite a bit to defer output of data, which is a common thing in many applications. What was unusual is that 16 calls to ob_start() up chewing through almost 700kb of memory, given that the data being buffered rarely exceeds 1-2kb, this was quite unusual.I started looking at the C code of the ob_start() function and found this interesting bit of code inside php_start_ob_buffer()initial_size = 40*1024;block_size = 10*1024;Which directs PHP to pre-allocate 40kb of data fo...

So you’re still not using HTML5, huh? I guess you probably have your reasons; it’s not fully adopted yet, it doesn’t work in IE, you don’t like users, you’re out of touch or you are just passionately in love with writing strict XHTML code. HTML5 is the revolution that the web needed and the fact is, it is the future whether you like it or not — suck it up and deal. HTML5 isn’t hard to use or understand and even though it’s not fully adopted yet, there are still plenty of reasons to start using it right now — like right after you ge...