Mediascend's Weblog – Musings, ramblings and observations regarding video on the web
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Future of Web Apps Miami 2010 Highlights
Friday, March 12th, 2010
We volunteered to shoot and produce footage for 2010 Future of Web Apps (FOWA) in Miami. Carsonified did a great job putting on the event. There were some serious heavy hitters – Alex Payne, Fred Wilson, Gary Vaynerchuk, John Resig, Molly Holzschlag, Steve Huffman, Tara Hunt, and plenty others. We put together this highlight piece that pretty much sums up the event. We had a blast and we’re looking forward to the next one.
Future of Web Apps – Miami 2010 (FOWA)
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
We’re super-excited to announce we’ll be covering the Future of Web Apps – Miami 2010 (FOWA) on the February 22nd-24th.
Like previous years, this year’s line up is incredible with speakers like Alex Payne, Fred Wilson, Gary Vaynerchuk, John Resig, Molly Holzschlag, Steve Huffman and Tara Hunt from companies including Twitter, Reddit, Mint.com, jQuery, Palm Pre, FreshBooks, Opera and PayPal.
If you’re in technology and have the means to make it down you owe it to yourself to attend.
And if you see 2 dorks with HD video cameras and boom mics, feel free to say hi.
More info here: (http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2010/miami)
Books! Books! Books! – Code Camp Book Swap!
Tuesday, February 16th, 2010
“Here’s a chance to relieve your bookshelves (or desktops) of books you no longer need. We’re having a Book Swap at the South Florida Code Camp (02/27/2010: http://www.fladotnet.com/codecamp/).”
We’re attending/sponsoring so stop by and say hi.
Takeoff – Our First Web App!
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
We are spending nights and weekends (and stealing some hours during weekdays…don’t tell my boss) building a web app. It’s called Takeoff and will be available in the not too distant future at takeoffvideo.com (don’t bother going there yet). It will be aimed at video producers.
We have a busy video production department that does lots of projects, typically with clients in other states or countries. So collaboration must be done remotely. We relied on email & ftp in the beginning and it was a mess. Imagine getting 20 emails from a client with lines like “Around 56 seconds I can’t see behind the thing”, or “I couldn’t open the video. What’s wrong?” So we looked around for better tools and couldn’t find anything we were jazzed about. So we made our own. And being the nerds we are, we thought that others might like our solution.
With some market research and software development, we think we’re onto something. We still have plenty of stuff to figure out, such as the pricing model we’ll pick. I’m going to elaborate further, but there are many interesting options for pricing: freemium, pay-as-you-go (utility), totally free, etc. Plus we have lots of UI to iron out before we’ll consider it ready.
One thing we all agree on here is that changes and features will be almost entirely customer driven. It’s called “Customer Development“. Basically, you get something out there that focuses on the crucial thing(s) and let your customers determine what comes next. Survey them, stay in touch, don’t predict much, and they’ll tell you what to do. See how it’s done. The result is more loyal users, faster releases, and a more useful product. It’s pretty much a no-brainer if you think about it.
Anyway, we want it to be a game changer. Next week we are having a “Takeoff retreat”, where we’ll sit around for a few days and come up with the final plan. After that it’s a sprint to release. We’re psyched. We’ll keep you posted. For those who have been in this situation, any advice would be appreciated.
Adobe Flash and its HTML 5/Canvas Collision Course
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Jonathon Snook bumped one of his old posts recently (http://snook.ca/archives/opinion/adobe-html5-canvas) and suggests Adobe leverage Flash to allow users to create animations with the canvas tag in HTML 5. It’s something I think Adobe should strongly consider.
Let’s face it, Flash’s unique selling points are dwindling as javascript frameworks eat away at Flash’s animation offerings, and HTML 5 is on the horizon and most browsers (if not already supporting) are planning support for the canvas tag. This tag, in addition to allowing developers to animate images with javascript, will support the playing of video. Thus knocking another leg out from under Flash’s table of uniqueness.
Where does this leave Flash?
As Jonathon Snook pointed out, Flash is in an advantageous spot to allow average Joe Flash developer to jump right into canvas animations by leveraging a familiar UI and workflow. While the learning curve for canvas animations isn’t prohibitively steep, the lion’s share of web designers and developers will take their time learning a new animation/programming technique. There’s an opening for Flash.
One could counter and say that Adobe would be signing the death warrant of Flash as we know it today, but that death warrant may have already been signed by the web standards movement.
So what will Adobe do? Well we’ll obviously have to wait and see because there will be some time before the gorilla in the room, Internet Explorer, fully supports the canvas tag and HTML 5.
How do you think Adobe should handle Flash’s future?
jQuery 1.4.1 Released
Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
From the blog:
jQuery 1.4.1 is now out! This is the first bug fix release on top of jQuery 1.4, fixing some outstanding bugs from the 1.4 release and touching up some gaps in the API.
Download jQuery 1.4.1 now if you’re currently using 1.4.0.
jQuery .removeClass() and the Mysterious Extra Space
Friday, January 22nd, 2010
Recently I needed to execute a set of tabs based on an unordered list (ul). Being tabs, they’d need (at the minimum) an off and on state.
As I mentioned, the markup for this tabbed set would be an unordered list:
This post will mainly cover behavior. There are many great tutorials on how to style a tabbed system using the sliding doors technique. I suggest A List Apart’s excellent post: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors2/.
Anyhoo, the logic for this is fairly simple. On page load the first tab (li) would have a class of “current”. On click of any of the tabs, remove the class from all tabs, then apply class=”current” to the item being clicked (this).
So far so good. Now to prevent multiple clicks on the same tab, we’ll need to add a conditional statement (if) to only execute the logic if the tab being clicked is not the currently-selected tab.
So simply ensure that the currently-clicked tab’s class is NOT “current”. Easy, right?
Not so much. Being me and having my luck, it didn’t work right out of the box.
The issue stemmed from my use of jQuery .addClass() and .removeClass() to inject the “current” class onto and from the appropriate tabs. For reasons I don’t understand, .removeClass() does indeed remove the class, but it also leaves behind a space (class=” “).
So as you can imagine this unexpected behavior could be an if-statement-buster if you’re not careful, as I wasn’t.
The way around it is simply to use jQuery’s .attr() method and manually set and remove the class attribute value. ($(this.attr(“class”,”current”);). This way you know exactly what values are potentially injected and can prepare you conditional statements accordingly.
So, does anyone know why .removeClass() leaves a space?
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