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Articles Tips

Tip: Multi-step form handling

First of all, sorry for my long absence! I haven’t abandoned this blog, I was just really, really busy. I’m still busy, and this probably won’t change soon. However, I will still blog when I get too fed up with work or studying (this is one of these moments…). Now, let’s get to the meat.

The situation

In most web applications, even the simplest ones, the need for form handling will arise. There will be forms that need to be submitted, checked, processed or returned to the user informing them about any errors. A good empirical rule I try to follow is “Try not to produce URLs that don’t have a meaning if accessed directly”. It sounds simple and common-sense, doesn’t it? However, as Francois Voltaire said, “common sense is not so common”. I’ve seen variations of the following scenario several times, in several websites or even commercial web application software:

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Rants Thoughts

9 reasons why I prefer MySQL to MS SQL Server

In the past, I used MySQL for any of my DBMS needs. It wasn’t really an informed decision based on solid facts, actually I had never really given it any thought. It was what most developers used, it was what vBulletin used (one of the main projects of my company is based on vBulletin), it was what most hosts had pre-installed, in other words, it was the popular choice and I went with the crowd.

Unlike most decisions taken that way, this one turned out to be correct (so far at least). In the university where I study (yeah, I do that too occasionally 😛 ), there is a great and extremely useful class on Database Systems offered in my semester. The only drawback is that it’s done on MS SQL Server. Consequently, I had to work with it quite a lot, and my conclusion was that MySQL is far superior (mostly syntax-wise as I don’t have the deep knowledge required to judge them fairly for other things, so don’t expect a deep analysis about performance or security – as far as I’m concerned, they are equally good at those).

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Articles

Creating the perfect slider

I’ve previously discussed many times the color picker I have to create, and blogged about my findings on the way. An essential component of most color pickers is a slider control.

I won’t go through much techincal details or JavaScript code in this article (after all the usability guidelines presented don’t only apply to JavaScript applications, and this is why I used Adobe Kuler as a good or bad example for some of them), it’s been done numerous times before and I prefer being a bit original than duplicating web content. You can google it and various implementations will come up if you need a starting point.

Some might argue that I suffer from NIH syndrome, but I prefer to code things my way when I think I can do something even a bit better. After all, if nobody ever tries to reinvent the wheel, the wheel stands no chances of improvement. In this case, I wanted to build the most usable slider ever (at least for color picking uses), or -from an arguably more conservative point of view- something significantly more usable than the rest (if you think about it, the two statements are equivalent, the first one just sounds more arrogant 😛 ).

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Apps & scripts Original

Cross-browser imageless linear gradients v2

A while ago, I posted a script of mine for creating 2-color cross-browser imageless linear gradients. As I stated there, I needed them for a color picker I have to create. And even though 2-color gradients are sufficient for most components, in most color spaces, I had forgotten an important one: Hue. You can’t represent Hue with a 2-color gradient! So, I had to revise the script, and make it able to produce linear gradients of more than 2 colors. Furthermore, I needed to be able to specify a fully transparent color as one of the gradient colors, in order to create the photoshop-like 2d plane used by the picker (and no, a static image background like the one used in most JS color pickers wouldn’t suffice, for reasons irrelevant with this post). I hereby present you Cross-browser, imageless, linear gradients v2!

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Original

Java pretty dates

First of all, sorry for not posting as frequently as before. I’m feverishly working on a new project with a really tight deadline and I don’t have as much time as I previously did.

For reasons that are irrelevant to this post, I have to write lots of Java code. So, sorry if I disappoint my fellow readers, but this post isn’t about JavaScript or CSS, it’s about Java. I wanted to display “pretty dates” (a bit like Twitter’s, for example “yesterday”, “5 minutes ago”, “last year” and so on) in a few places and I couldn’t find a Java implementation, so I decided to code my own.

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Articles Original

Better usability in 5 minutes

In this post I’m going to share some tips to increase a site’s usability that are very quick to implement. Not all of them are cross-browser, but they are the icing on the cake anyway, nobody would mind without them.

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Personal

Help me: take the color survey

If you are a creative professional, or just passionate about colors, please take my survey:

http://bit.ly/colorsurvey

It will greatly help me to make a future project of our company more usable (some of its features at least) and it only takes a few minutes (it contains 10-19 questions, depending on your responses).

Any suggestions, corrections, questions etc are of course welcome.

Thanks a lot in advance to everyone that takes the survey! 😀

Of course, when it ends and I find the time to analyze the results, I’ll post them here for anyone interested. (Hint: That means that if you are interested in the results, you can promote the survey yourself as well, since more responses = more accurate results)

Categories
Rants

Advocacy of JavaScript

I frequently meet these “hardcore” developers that deep (or not so deep) inside them, tend to underestimate JavaScript developers and boast about their own superiority. I’m sure that if you spent an important percentage of your career working with JavaScript and are even barely social, you definitely know what I’m talking about. It’s those desktop application programmers or these back-end developers that tend to consider JavaScript a toy, and try to convince you to engage in “more serious stuff” (if they appreciate you even a little; if they don’t they just mock you endlessly and/or look down on you).

Funnily enough, when most of these people are required to write JavaScript for some reason, one of the following happens:

  1. They write 2000-style code, which is usually the reason that most of them underestimate JavaScript so much: They think that everybody codes in JavaScript like themselves.
  2. They desperately look for “a good library” because “it’s not worth wasting my time to learn that stuff”.
  3. They actually learn the darn language and the relevant browser quirks and change their attitude towards JavaScript developers.

Douglas Crockford did it much better than me, but I would like to take my turn in arguing against their most frequent claims, if I may.

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Tips

Extend Math.log to allow for bases != e

As Math.log currently stands, it’s a bit useless. It only calculates natural logarithms (base e).  We can easily modify it however, to calculate logarithms of any base:

Math.log = (function() {
	var log = Math.log;
	return function(n, a) {
		return log(n)/(a? log(a) : 1);
	}
})();

We can now specify the base as a second parameter, or still use the default one (Math.E) if we don’t specify one, so older scripts won’t break or if we want a shortcut to the natural logarithm. 😉

Categories
Rants

100% Cyan in CMYK is NOT rgb(0,255,255)!!

As I mentioned in an earlier post of mine, I have to create a color picker, so I’ve already started to write the code for the Color class it’s going to use. I need it to natively support RGB, HSL, Lab and CMYK. And the latter part is causing unexpected trouble.

It seems that there is the notion out there that conversion from CMYK to RGB is easy. Newsflash: It’s not. As every graphic designer knows, the CMYK color gamut is smaller than the the RGB color gamut (even the sRGB color gamut). You can’t take a CMYK color and convert it to an out-of-CMYK-gamut RGB color! That’s nonsense! And it’s precisely what most conversion algorithms and color pickers out there do! Even Adobe Kuler!!!

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