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...

In IE7, the JavaScript setAttribute("style","attributes") doesn't work, but it works in IE 8 and other web  browsers. To solve the STYLE problem in IE 7 we can use a workaround method.we can use element.style.cssText = 'color:#FF0000;';in IE 7 instead ofelement.setAttribute('style','color:#FF0000;');...

As a programmer I like to write comments because I know that some future person (often me) is going to need to know something about my code that won't be immediately obvious from reading it. Here's a recent example from my homebrew display's code:// protocol_init: Set up a newly powered-on string of lights.  The lights are arranged// in an array wired diagonally starting from the bottom left.  For ease of programming// it's better if they are given numbers which correspond to coordinates.  Given that// each LED has a 6 bit address it's possible to address the entire array u...

I saw a side by side comparison of a bunch of scripting languages online recently. Scripting Languages: PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby My first, and second reaction was yuck! Now I have my biases – biases which may  not be shared by others of course. But I like readable code and for me anytime I see a special character (anything not an alphanumeric) it slows me down. This got me thinking about where we are going in design of programming languages? Are we moving forward (what ever that means) or backwards or just sideways?Back when I started programming close to 40 years ago the ...

Here’s a Python script which renders some Penrose tiling. Yes, this is valid Python code:_ =\ """if! 1:"e,V=100 0,(0j-1)**-.2; v,S=.5/ V.real, [(0,0,4 *e,4*e* V)];w=1 -v"def! E(T,A, B,C):P ,Q,R=B*w+ A*v,B*w+C *v,A*w+B*v;retur n[(1,Q,C,A),(1,P ,Q,B),(0,Q,P,A)]*T+[(0,C ,R,B),(1,R,C,A...

This is — by far — my favorite aspect of working at GitHub. Everything isasynchronous.ChatGitHub didn’t have an office for the first two years. Chat rooms (in our case,Campfire) is where things got done. Today we’ve moved into oursecond office, and Campfire is still where we get things done. There’s areason for that: chat is asynchronous.Asynchronous communication means I can take a step out for lunch and catch upon transcripts when I get back. Asynchronous communication means I can ask mycoworker a question in-chat and not worry about bothering her since she...

Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote the seminal analysis of management andefficiency in 1911 with The Principles of Scientific Management. Hetook the first scientific approach towards maximizing efficiency inmanufacturing jobs. Time is money. Faster is better. More hours are better.Hours are bullshitHours are great ways to determine productivity in many industries, but notours. Working in a startup is a much different experience than working in afactory. You can’t throw more time at a problem and expect it to get solved.Code is a creative endeavor. You need to be in the right mindset to crea...

IntroductionJust few weeks ago, I have resigned as a "full on" web developer (frontend, backend, server admin and misc) and moved on to become a pure frontend developer (yay)! It is a really exciting change, as you might know frontend developer role didn't exist few years ago. Thanks to the introduction of HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript framework, frontend development has to be separated from backend due to its complexity, and I think I'm trained to fit in that gap nicely.For many years, I've equipped myself with many tools and techniques to speed up frontend development, and here I will share all...