Category Archives: web development

Converting world timezones with DuckDuckGo and Wolfram Alpha from the browser address bar

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I just can’t stop loving this.

By typing !wa time of some timezone in some other place in DuckDuckGo search box you get Wolfram Alpha results what the clock will look like some other place and in your local time. Example (with DuckDuckGo browser search integration, install from their homepage):

Screen Shot 2013-03-28 at 5.03.59 PM

This is the most excellent when agreeing on international meetings. Because if you do timezones in your head you will end up getting it wrong (summer time shifts, etc.) Also I have tried every other world time tool out there, starting from bought iPad and Mac App Store apps. I tried HTML5 apps. I tried Android apps. They all sucked.

Wolfram Alpha just rocks. And DuckDuckGo makes it accessible for me literally within one second, as I have my browser running all the time when I am working. If I ever meet a person who created this I’ll buy him a beer.

Also see my earlier DuckDuckGo power user tips.

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WebGL on Android WebKit browser demoed by Sony

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This definitely looks promising.

3D accelerated effects are no longer the monopoly of desktop beta browsers (Firefox 4, Google Chrome 9… I am looking at you). Sony demoes Javascript WebGL on its Xperia handset. WebGL would be major turning point for mobile gaming, as it would lower the barrier of enty for building cross-platform mobile games.

Not just games, but the whole web user experience will be redefined when you can finally push impressive visuals to the site visitors.

I can so see the demo scene of 90s coming back soon…

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Plone vs. Drupal – Welcome to Legoland

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This is the most insightful IRC comment for a while and pretty much summarizes it all.

<lloydpearsoniv> i just appreciate the help. Plone is by the
  far the most sophisticated CMS  i have ever dealt with. I thought
  drupal was tough...lol But i need the sophistication for the project that I am attempting
<lloydpearsoniv> seriously, this makes drupal seem like lego

So this my new classification on popular CMS systems

  • Joomla!, WordPress: Lego Dublo
  • Drupal: Lego
  • Plone: Lego Technic

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domgen – Creating HTML with Javascript without DOM API

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Tired of using Javascript DOM API for generating HTML dynamically? Meet domgen. domgen is a tool for easy dynamic content generation via Javascript. It generates DOM elements from dictionary specification similar to HTML and eliminates the need for cumbersome DOM Javascript API.

domgen uses a simple specification to generate the HTML. In some cases it’s more reliable to use DOM API to generate HTML instead of using innerHTML. We have had problems especially with iPhone when using innerHTML. See for example http://pastebin.com/LLk3J0iH or google “iPhone innerHTML” for more info. In fact, innerHTML is not even part of the HTML standard even though it exists on every browser.

So if you want to add dynamic HTML properly, you should use the Javascript DOM API. Consider the following short HTML where the contents inside body had to be generated:

<body>
    <div id="mydiv">my div</div>
</body>

Using Javascript DOM API:

// Get the body tag
var body = document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
// Create 'div' element
var mydiv = document.createElement("div");
mydiv.setAttribute("id", "mydiv");
mydiv.innerText = "my div";
// Attach the div to body
body.appendChild(mydiv);

And using domgen:

var spec = [
    'div',
    {
        id : 'mydiv',
        _innerText : 'my div'
    }
];
domgen.generate( domgen.get("body")[0], spec);
// or with jQuery
domgen.generate( $("body")[0], spec);

To me, domgen seems a lot easier to read and work with. Get code and more examples here: https://bitbucket.org/mfabrik/domgen