semi/signal

If you want a specify a blank string in the Column Properties table (instead of writing a query) for something like the Default Value or Binding property, enter (”)

Just having ” will not work as that will actually insert 2 apostrophes.

h/t to Dhowe from this thread on bigresource.com

Everyone’s mourning the death (perhaps prematurely) of delicious but it’s worth nothing that the search engine AltaVista is going to be shut down as well; its time has come, but it’s still somewhat sad to see it go.

Steven Vaughan-Nichols @ ZDNet echoed my sentiments perfectly,

“AltaVista was Google before there was Google.”

If you remember web search in the 90s you, of course, remember Yahoo, but Yahoo along with all of its contemporaries snubbed search in favor of navigating and drilling-down into specific categories. If what you were looking for didn’t fit nicely into a category, it was like finding a needle in a haystack, assuming you were able to find the needle at all. Another not-so-fond memory of web search in the 90s is the continual intrusion of more and more invasive ads. Yahoo was cleaner than most, but sites like Excite peppered their sites with popups and banners; I distinctly remember by system freezing simply from going to excite.com.

AltaVista was revolutionary: sleek, minimal design focusing on text input (though, there was categories at a certain point), good results, and no annoying ads.

So, goodbye AltaVista, and thanks for all the fish.

Like many (I’m guessing) I was under the assumption that processes incurred a higher cost on performance compared to threads. On Linux, at least, this appears to not be the case,

Linux uses a 1-1 threading model, with (to the kernel) no distinction between processes and threads — everything is simply a runnable task…

Local search is now available on the dotspott web client; allowing you to search for local venues and add them to your list of spotts.

The Google Maps API v3, which is used by dotspott, doesn’t really allow for local search and the Local Search API itself is deprecated (however, as per Google’s deprecation policy, it should be available until Nov. 2013). What I did was use gmaps-api-v3-googlebar, which allows adding a google-bar like control to the map.

One interesting thing I needed to do that wasn’t directly possible with gmaps-api-v3-googlebar update a few other things after one of the search results were selected. I wanted to avoid touching the gmaps-api-v3-googlebar code, so I did this by getting a reference to the existing event handler, then overwriting it with a new function, which called the previous event handler function.

Here’s an example where we grab the reference to the existing selectResult event handler (searchResultPre), overwrite with a new event handler, call the previous handler (binding to window.gbar, the instance of window.jeremy.jGoogleBar; binding is necessary b/c the event handler references this internally), then add some new functionality where we modify a paragraph element in the DOM (id = map_position) to show the position of the local marker that is selected.

oh, and yes, this is using jQuery; $(‘#map_position’) should have given it away.

I’ve always played it safe with fonts when it comes to web design, sticking to fonts commonly available across operating systems such as Verdana, Tahoma, Trebuchet MS, etc. However, I’m pretty psyched to see how well the CSS @font-face attribute is supported. Format support is somewhat of a mess: EOT for Internet Explorer and TTF/OTF for WebKit-based browsers (Chrome, Safari). However, Firefox 3.6+ supports the new Web Open Font Format, which is poised to become the new standard and will, hopefully, quickly find it’s way into the other browsers.

If your in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, here’s a font I’ve loved for a while, Titillium:

TitilliumText999wt

I’ve never really had problems finding fonts for free or even commercial use, but Font Squirrel now makes the whole search process dead simple and super easy. They also seem to have a pretty awesome converter; though I used this oft2woff converter for my little demo above.

Snapped someone’s HTML graffiti on this pole at the 7th Avenue subway in Park Slope:

Discovered wordle on someone’s twitter feed. I love this thing. Here’s the wordle of my post on Enyo:

I missed webOS Developer Day, but I took a look at the presentation of the Enyo framework (video below). I like most of the bullet points: faster performance, hardware acceleration built-in, etc. However, one point that’s troubling me is the idea of using higher-level controls instead of divs. From the bit of code presented in the final demo, it looks like layout (and pretty much all UI stuff) will be done using JavaScript widgets, which are translated at some point into the appropriate HTML constructs. Obviously, widget-centered development isn’t a new concept (MFC, WinForms, Cocoa… sproutcore and such on the web) nor is it necessarily a bad one (getting something presentable up and running is easier), but there always seems to be a very real and very large loss of flexibility.

When a widget doesn’t look or function exactly how you need it to, and it becomes necessary to make a new one, development within the widget framework can range in difficulty from trivial to near-impossible. As I mentioned when I wrote about Adobe Air, HTML/CSS isn’t perfect, but it’s the most flexible layout and styling framework I’ve come across. Abstracting away that flexibility in favor of plug-and-play widgets makes me cringe… it’s a nice idea, it’s a very (object-oriented) developer-ish idea, but it usually comes with a pretty high cost.

From working with both HTML/CSS and WinForms extensively, I’d say the widget-centered framework model used for desktop apps shouldn’t be replicated for web development. In fact, it should be the other way around: the flexibility of a HTML/CSS-esque system should be brought to the desktop.

How this will play out for Enyo, I don’t know. I’m cautiously optimistic. Being a web framework, everything still boils down to HTML and CSS, but it remains to be seen what level of manipulation will be allowed or make sense (in terms of performance, coding difficultly, etc.) at that level.

dotspott for webOS v1.3.0 should now be available in the webOS app catalog.

Primarily, there’s a new look compared to the older hotspotdot app. Not a whole lot of new features, but two noteworthy additions:

• dotspott will show your current locations and, using the Google Map API, reverse geocode the latitude, longitude pair to tell you where you are.
• Support for attaching photos to spotts

A smaller update (v1.3.1) should out in the coming week with some minor stylistic additions.

I’ve been working on a fairly major update to hotspotdot, both the web client and the webOS mobile app.

First, a new name, accompanied by a new logo.
hotspotdot is now dotspott:

This should (hopefully) put an end to any confusion that the app has anything to do with wi-fi hotspots. It also allows for a much nicer URL as I was able to get dotspott.com (much more elegant compared to the previous, my.hotspotdot.net).

There’s some minor style changes to the index page. Also, some additional code for some minor improves in user experience, such as auto-focus on input fields when a dialog comes up.

The most significant changes are to the main interface. There’s a new look and you’ll notice support for uploading photos. Also, there’s now a 2-column layout; this avoid the issue of having to keep scrolling down the page to show a new location on the map (which was at the top of the page). The map and header areas are fixed (position: fixed), so as you scroll, only the list of locations on the left will move. I debated whether to do this or to contain the list of locations in a div with overflow:auto or overflow:scroll, so the list would have its own scrollbar, and you wouldn’t scroll the entire page to move up and down the list. I have somewhat of a dislike for both solutions, although one was necessary. I opted for the position:fixed approach because manipulating scrollbars within a page is impossible on a touchscreen device (perhaps we’re at the time where we’ll see the end of overflow:auto and overflow:scroll, along with :hover)

The updated webOS app is almost done. I’m just doing some last minute testing before I put it up in the app store, so I’ll have some info and screenshots up soon.

Edit: h/t to Shifting Pixel for the cool Smart Image Resizer; I really wasn’t feeling up to writing image resizing and caching routines, and this little library was a perfect solution.