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  One of the Best Bits of Programming Advice I ever Got

Years ago (early 1992), I attached myself to this crazy skunkworks project that was using this weird language called Smalltalk. "Object Oriented" was in its infancy as a "hot" item. High paid consultants. Lots of people laying claim to what this new object religion was all about. This was 5 years before Alan Kay would make the statement "I invented the term 'Object Oriented Programming' and this {Java and C++} is not what I had in mind."Shortly after hooking up with this whacky group with the whacky language, still confused about what the difference was between an instance variable, a class va...

3,433 0       PROGRAMMING ADVICE OOP SMALLTALK BETTER DESIGN


  The Ultimate GetElementsByClassName, Anno 2008

Two and a half years ago, I released the first version of getElementsByClassName. With how web browsers has evolved since, I thought I’d release a real ultimate version, dated 2008. Native Web Browser SupportSafari 3.1 has native getElmentsByClassName support, and upcoming Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 will have it too. It only leaves out, you’ve guessed it, Internet Explorer.The Necessity Of This ScriptLiving in a world where Microsoft is halting every possible way the web could evolve, this means that you will need a custom script for this for years to come. Also,...

1,923 0       JAVASCRIPT IMPLEMENTATION GEELEMENTSBYCLASSNAME CROSS BROWSER COMPATIBLE


  Hash Tables in Javascript

IntroductionHash tables are a permutation of associative arrays (i.e. name => value pairs). If you use PHP, then you are very familiar with this type of data structure already since all PHP arrays are associative.The Javascript language implements very loose and somewhat limited support for associative arrays. Any JavaScript array can use other objects as keys, making it a hash, but there exists no formal constructor for initializing them and it is more or less unweildy to work with. A short example of a hash in JavaScript would be as follows:var myArray = new Array();myArray['one'] = 1;myA...

4,791 0       JAVASCRIPT ARRAY IMPLEMENTATION HASHTABLE


  Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬_¬ to write up an explanation of a small F# program spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the me...

1,748 0       OOP PATTERN FUNCTIONAL PROGRAMMING F#


  UIWebView Secrets - Part1 - Memory Leaks on Xmlhttprequest

My first blog post on iphone subject reveal a big memory bug when using UIWebView component. This is the (only one) component to display some HTML content in an iphone interface. UIWebView object has a lot of differents issues and I’m going to highlight the biggest of them. Actually, all XMLHttpRequests used in javascript code are fully leaking!!! I mean when you do a request that retrieve 100ko of data, your memory used grow up for 100ko! This bug is not always active, but almost always. In fact the trigger to enable it is to simply open one link in your UIWebView. For example, clickin...

7,356 0       XMLHTTPREQUEST MEMORY LEAK MOBILE DEVICE UIWEBVIEW


  6 Tips to Help You Build a Great Web Application

Web applications are a little more challenging to design than websites. Designers need to anticipate user behavior, make users’ lives easier and make the experience as visually appealing as possible. Many designers tend to do what is easier for them than think about what’s easier for the user. The following is a small list of tips that designers often overlook in the process of designing a web application.1. The Power of a Good TooltipWhen you present your web application to a potential customer, the last thing you want to do is ruin your lovely graphic design work by plaste...

3,008 0       WEB DESIGN STYLE MOBILE DEVICE LIBRARY


  Man Survives Steve Ballmer’s Flying Chair To Build ’21st Century Linux’

Mark Lucovsky, famous for building Windows NT and watching Steve Ballmer throw a chair.Mark Lucovsky was the other man in the room when Steve Ballmer threw his chair and called Eric Schmidt a “fucking pussy.”Yes, the story is true. At least according to Lucovsky. Microsoft calls it a “gross exaggeration,” but Lucovsky says that when he walked into Ballmer’s office and told the Microsoft CEO he was leaving the company for Google, Ballmer picked up his chair and chucked it across the room. “Why does that surprise anyone?” Lucovsky tells Wired....

2,666 0       VMWARE FOUNDER MARK LUCOVSKY MICROSOFT GOOGLE CLOUD FOUNDRY


  "Simplicity" is not a simple concept

I've come to avoid using the word "Simplicity" or its variants ("Simple," &c.) It means too many different things to different people.For example, my original land-line phone was simple:It's simple by eliminating extraneous use cases. It only handles one user scenario, the one that was the most common when it was invented. If we think of the number of affordances and the number of uses, this kind of simplicity lowers the number of affordances by lowering the number of uses. I call this kind of simplicity "Economical Design."There's another kind of simple, a kind of band-aid simple. You sta...

2,764 0       SOFTWARE IPHONE SIMPLICITY USABILITY PHONE