Blog Archives: Page 3

  • Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back? The Page Visibility API allows developers to react to changes in page visibility via the visibilitychange document event. New document.hidden and document.visibilityChange properties are also available.

  • Application Pinning with META Tags

    If there's one thing I want you to learn from the wide range of blog posts I've written, it's that it's the small things matter when you're creating your websites. Whether it's a one-page showcase, a business website, or an enterprise web application, there are always small details you can add that will really help someone out...even if that someone is on a Windows PC. One of those small details is setting your website up for "pinning", a functionality that debuted in Windows 7. Let me show you what it is and how you can implement it on your websites!

  • Control Your Web Application’s Fluid.app Icon

    Fluid.app is an nice Mac application for creating desktop applications that wrap a web application. All you need to do is give Fluid.app a URL and a name, and the application generates a .app file within the Applications directory. One other piece of information you can give Fluid.app is the application icon; the default icon being the website's favicon. If you have a web application which could act as it's own desktop application, it's good to be aware that some users may be creating .app's of your site. Did you know that there's a way that you can tell Fluid to use an alternate icon (other than the favicon) for the generated app? It's as easy as adding an additional LINK tag:

  • Facebook Tooltip HTML and CSS

    Facebook recently implemented a new, lighter tooltip. I say the tooltip is lighter because it seems a lot quicker and more elegant than their previous effort. I took a few moments to grab the HTML structure and CSS rules to see how they did it.

  • Create Spinning Rays with CSS3: Revisited

    Last December I wrote a blog post titled Create Spinning Rays with CSS3 Animations & JavaScript where I explained how easy it was to create a spinning rays animation with a bit of CSS and JavaScript. The post became quite popular so I thought I'd take some time to look at it and improve it. It occurred to me that one solution I didn't present was a much lighter solution; a solution that required only CSS!

  • iPhone Scrollbars with iScroll

    Since we've had web browsers and JavaScript, we've been intent on replacing native browser functionalities, and for many reasons. Whether it be that the native look or functionality is ugly, doesn't work the same across browsers, or isn't as feature-rich as it should be, we've always pushed the browser's limits to do better. One functionality we've tried desperately to emulate is scrollbars. iScroll, a fairly new scrolling lib, has done an exceptional job in emulating scrolling both within desktop and mobile browsers. iScroll also allows for scrolling of elements with overflow on older versions of Mobile Safari. Let's have a look at iScroll!

  • Control Element Outline Position with outline-offset

    I was recently working on a project which featured tables that were keyboard navigable so obviously using cell outlining via traditional tabIndex=0 and element outlines was a big part of allowing the user navigate quickly and intelligently. Unfortunately I ran into a Firefox 3.6 bug where the element outline forced a horizontal scrollbar within its parent, causing the table to look....gross. After a bit of research, I discovered the outline-offset CSS property. Let me show you what it is and how it fixed the outline bug!

  • Detect Scrollbar Width with JavaScript

    I've recently been working on an advanced JavaScript-based grid solution and let me tell you: it's quite an undertaking. Making sure the grid is accessible, reactive, efficient, and cross-browser compatible is difficult, but even the minor workings of each of those are hard. One small task was detecting the width of the vertical scrollbar so that I know how wide the grid body truly was. Here's the tiny snippet to do it:

  • Fix WebKit Checkbox Overflow

    I want to share a quick tip about working with checkboxes in Chrome and Safari, the WebKit-based browsers. I was recently working with a series of checkboxes when I noticed that Safari and Chrome were doing some funky "cut off" with them:

  • Face Detection with jQuery

    I've always been intrigued by recognition software because I cannot imagine the logic that goes into all of the algorithms. Whether it's voice, face, or other types of detection, people look and sound so different, pictures are shot differently, and from different angles, I cannot fathom how it's all done. Since I already covered booby nudity detection with JavaScript, I thought it would be worth some time to explore face detection. Facebook uses it, so maybe it has application in your websites.