John Resig posted today about a nifty new feature available in Firefox nightlies, browser paint events. He also posted an example script and bookmarklet called TrackPaint. He goes into greater depth in his post, so I won’t bother here.
I wanted something more “real-time” and closer to the Quartz Debug utility included with the Mac OS [...]
A few months ago I started working on a JavaScript to Objective-C bridge. We had already implemented Objective-C in JavaScript, so I figured “why not?”
Well, I never got very far, but thankfully Patrick Geiller apparently had the same idea and actually executed it: He announced JSCocoa today. It looks like it’s a solid bridge, about [...]
My friend Andrew recently posted a teaser for a new project he’s working on, but with part of the headline pixelated to obscure what the project actually is. My curiosity got the best of me and I decided to do what any self-respecting geek would do: write a program to figure out what the censored [...]
This feature of git is too cool not to blog about: git bisect, and more specifically, git bisect run.
“git bisect” is a tool that facilitates a binary search of changes to your git repository to help find where a bug was introduced. You can walk through the process manually using “git bisect {good,bad,skip}“, or if [...]
I find it incredibly annoying when an embedded YouTube video can’t be made fullscreen, and I have to switch to YouTube.com just to watch it.
So, I wrote this simple little bookmarklet which modifies the embed code for any YouTube videos to allow fullscreen. It could also easily be made into a user script for GreaseMonkey, [...]
The Google Charts API is a useful little tool for generating charts. The “API” is actually just a set of parameters you pass to a single URL endpoint: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart
It’s a very capable API, and you could write an entire framework around it (as some people have), but I don’t think it’s necessary. A few little [...]
Yesterday Facebook added the “Live Feed”, which is like the existing News Feed, but automatically updates the page without requiring the user to refresh. It simply polls Facebook’s servers every few seconds, rather than the slightly fancier “comet”-style long-polling they do for Facebook chat:
Polling is perfectly sufficient for this sort of updating (it’s not particularly [...]
AppleInsider.com posted an article today claiming the lack of SSL on MobileMe has caused “unnecessary panic” and MobileMe is in fact secure. This is 100% false.
I’m not sure what to make of the article. I feel like the author said a bunch of big words hoping that most people would assume he knew what he [...]
One of the greatest strengths of Mac OS X, for developers in particular, is that it has a very elegant and consistent graphical user interface as well as an excellent command line interface. I’m not going to cover the basics like “ls” and “cd”, but rather point out some Mac OS X specific tools that [...]
Recently I’ve been doing a lot of work in Rhino, Mozilla’s JavaScript interpreter written in Java. While it’s a bit slower than some of the other JavaScript interpreters out there it has the advantage of being able to call Java libraries. This is immensely useful since JavaScript is pretty bare-bones in terms of built-in libraries.
Anyway, [...]