Posts written by Robin Whittleton
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It's difficult to code without power
Posted by Robin Whittleton on August 10, 2010
I’m currently typing this post on my iPhone as the power on Guildford High Street is dead again. Being a web company has many advantages but coping with power loss isn’t one of them, as the silent (apart from the beeping UPS) testifies. Luckily our servers have enough power to shutdown gracefully and automatically, but desktop computers don’t like the lack of power and laptops and ipads lose connection when the switch goes down too.
Coping strategies so far have been an office wide spring clean, the designers hauling out the HB pencils again, and a general moaning from the developers who don’t have laptops and a current git repository clone.
Anyone got any tips on working around power loss? Ideas for web related work that can be done with a pen and paper and iPad with no net connection?
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jQuery’s conquest of the web
Posted by Robin Whittleton on April 07, 2010
We love Ruby on Rails at Kyan: it removes a lot of the complexity in setting up a web app leaving us free to build the stuff that actually matters. Take a front end development perspective though and things start to look a little … messy. Rails’ inbuilt helpers let you get client-side interaction up and running quickly, but at the cost of blocks of fairly impenetrable code that rely on the Prototype Javascript framework. Even if you don’t use the helpers, Prototype is still part of the default Rails install.
Around about the time we started concentrating more on hand-coded Javascript, we decided that coding in Prototype wasn’t for us and migrated over to jQuery instead. This is not to denigrate Prototype – it provided a very solid base for Rails with good browser compatibility – but jQuery has a much more compact syntax and a better plugin community. One way to migrate is just to remove the default Prototype links and include jQuery, but to keep the transition smooth we also used a project called jRails: a Rails plugin that rewrites the inbuilt helpers to export the jQuery syntax.
For a year or two this setup gave us the flexibility to happily hand-code our own front-end Javascript and take advantage of jQuery’s plugin ecosystem, at the expense of having to ignore various Rails plugins that expected Prototype to be available. More recently though we’ve seen signs that the rest of the Rails community might be following our move. Plugins started appearing with dual Prototype/jQuery helpers (the Textile editor we use for text entry for example). Now even entire Rails applications are dropping Prototype in favour of jQuery. We’re currently evaluating the Spree e-commerce platform which has standardised on jQuery over Prototype.
The news seems to have reached the core Rails developers: as of Rails 3 the framework is officially agnostic towards Javascript frameworks. The expected JS development methodology is now unobtrusive hooking, which is far better in terms of code re-use and lower complexity. Outside of Rails jQuery’s prospects are looking even better. Microsoft are now directly contributing code to jQuery, and ship it with Visual Studio. Some stats sites are even claiming a near 30% usage rate among top-10,000 sites which is pretty extraordinary.
Overall, we’re very happy with the choice we made. Congratulations to the jQuery team, and here’s the the next couple of years of progress!
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Kyan vs. HTML5, round 2
Posted by Robin Whittleton on February 04, 2010
Back in October I posted an article on our first steps with HTML5. Unfortunately, since then we’ve tripped over a rather large stumbling block.
That article dealt with the reworking of our intranet. Luckily for me as a front-end developer no-one in the company uses Internet Explorer; this isn’t the case in the wider world. IE has problems with the new HTML5 elements: it can’t style them at all. There is a a solution though (courtesy of Sjoerd Visscher): create each element once using Javascript and IE suddenly understands that they exist. On the whole this is a very good solution, undercut by one fatal flaw.
Print stylesheets
At Kyan we view a print stylesheet as a common courtesy to users. With it we can strip out headers and footers and just leave the page content. While printing though (for obvious reasons) Javascript isn’t executed. This breaks our html5shiv script and means that the new elements are unstylable in all current versions of IE.
The workaround is to wrap all the new elements in wrapper
<div>s and style those instead, but then you’re increasing the amount of markup compared to current HTML4 or XHTML1, and for the time being this isn’t really a tradeoff worth making. Of course, with the gradual reduction of IE in the marketplace this tradeoff is something we should keep on evaluating. -
Kyan vs. HTML5
Posted by Robin Whittleton on October 12, 2009
Here at Kyan we like to keep up to date, so new technologies regularly come under the spotlight. This week’s focus: HTML5. Jumping straight into an unknown is rarely a good idea for a client project, but with no such qualms about internal projects I elected to rework our intranet.
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Currency conversion in JS
Posted by Robin Whittleton on March 20, 2009
I recently had to make a couple of JavaScript currency conversion functions for a current project, so I thought I’d put them up here.
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New additions to the Kyan team
Posted by Robin Whittleton on February 03, 2009
Not sure how long they’ll last in the job though!
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When grids fall apart
Posted by Robin Whittleton on January 12, 2009
Around a couple of years ago the “what screen resolution should we design for?” argument had mostly become irrelevant. 640×480 was out, 800×600 was mostly out and 1024×768 was a reasonable minimum. With this step change over and new grids in place life should be easy, right?
Think again. The intervening time has seen an explosion in web use on mobile devices and the future looks to only diverge from your standard 1024×768 grid you’ve settled on. So what different screens can you reasonably expect your users to view your site on?
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Easy image rollovers
Posted by Robin Whittleton on December 10, 2008
Recently themeforest.net ran a quick tutorial on how to achieve an image slide effect similar to our homepage. I thought I’d go into some more detail about the design decisions we made.
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Unobtrusive scripting with jQuery
Posted by Robin Whittleton on September 26, 2008
Here at Kyan we love unobtrusive scripting: scripting that adds on to the top of an existing web page and extends it to add functionality and interaction niceness.
We often use a Javascript library called jQuery to help us add scripting to our sites, and it’s got a nice extension mechanism. Let’s have a look at writing a small jQuery plugin to add a simple piece of functionality to our site: a print link after a news story.
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The future of CAPTCHA
Posted by Robin Whittleton on July 23, 2008
CAPTCHA (standing for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) must have seemed like a good idea when it was first invented in 2000. Spam was beginning to become a major problem on the web and a method was needed to fight back. CAPTCHA at first glance seems ideal: a distorted image that would be instantly recognisable by humans yet incomprehensible to machines. Place some letters in the distorted image and get the user to type them back and bingo: you’ve stopped your spam problem.