Every time I mention AJAX in a talk, I can’t help but stress how important it is to use an a tag, or a button. I have just read a blog post by the guys over at 456 Berea st. One thing their blog post unfortunately assumes is that you, the developer, are in fact using a tags. The problem is that in truth, there are a lot of javascript calls not on an a tag nor a button. Why is this? Sloppy coding.
Lets start by explaining what the a tag, and the buttons are meant to be used for.
With regards to the button element, the w3c specifies:
The button element represents a button. If the element is not disabled, then the user agent should allow the user to activate the button.
Now, I may be wrong, but when AJAX comes in to play, I would presume this would therefore mean that if the AJAX is doing a content call, you should use:
<a href="{url}"/>
And if the user is performing an action. You, as the developer, should use:
<button></button>
Far too many people are using a div with an event handler. Why is this a bad thing to do?
Accessibility
SEO Friendly
Now, with regards to accessibility, there is another massive mistake people make. CSS styling, in this day and age, thankfully, almost all devs use the :hover selector. But what about the :focus selector? Some people use tab to navigate a website. The mouse isn’t the only navigation method. Not all accessibility is down to javascript turned off…
I might be a little late to the game. But I had to wait to publish this blog post.
Almost a month ago now, Color, was released to the world. Along with the tech press being set on fire about it receiving $41M investment before it was even launched. For those of you living under a rock, the color app is a photo sharing app, but it only shows you photos within 100m of where you are positioned. Now there are a few other things it does which is quite clever ‘scary’. Each time you take a photo, it records your geolocation (obviously), data from the iPhone’s light sensor, a short sound recording. It uses this data to try and pair you up with someone similar, apparently.
The actual app itself, is not worth much at all. To prove this point, I myself have just launched a new location based photo sharing app (hence the delay for the post). My app is called ‘Local Eyes’. How is Local Eyes different to Color? Apparent to the user, there is little difference. I have spent a total of 12 hours on the app. Is 12 hours of my time worth $41M? I wish! (If you would like to give me $41M for 12 hours of my time, please let me know!)
The investment is not in the app, it is in the company behind it “Color Labs”. There is a lot going on in the background, not just with the ‘Color’ app, but the company itself. They are a data mining company, data is worth a heck of a lot of money.
Unfortunately, Color has had a bit of a rollercoaster ride since launch. At launch it got all the press it could have ever hoped for. This meant that thousands and thousands of people will have downloaded the app. (I don’t know the actual number). However, when people hear that an app has received that number of investment. They expect the world. Unfortunately color was a confusing app. It therefore received a lot of negative reviews. Getting back from negative reviews is very tough.
The reason why people don’t get Color, is because it only works when there are already users around you. Most users wont be the first people to share images. Not unless they know there are people there. I believe color should have launched at SXSW. That would have been a perfect launchpad for it. People would get the concept straight away. It is great for small events.
Local Eyes on the other hand, limits photos to 1 mile, and so it is more about what is going on around you, and not just the same thing you are seeing. I am about leave my full time job to concentrate more on (amongst other things) Local Eyes, and I have got lots of cool things I want to add to it, such as Instagram integration.
If you have any comments on Local Eyes, please let me know. But also, bear in mind, I have so far only spent 12 hours on it, working by myself and I dont claim it to be worth $41M ;)
I have created 4 mindmaps, 2 UML data models, and have started to write a proposal for a very exciting project (all will come clear soon)
I have properly set up dropbox to share my files on all my devices, iPad, iPhone and Android phone included.
I have had a dropbox account for quite a while, and thought it was awesome enough then. I was using it to share application files, so that all my applications across multiple devices could share data. The best use of this was for iProcrastinate, a simple todo list / GTD app.
You probably already know this but Dropbox is awesome.
I have stumped up for the paid version to give me 50GB of cloud storage across multiple devices. However, they offer a free 2GB account. I can’t praise it enough.
That is two very productive successive geeky weekends. Last weekend I launched instac.at.
Next weekend unfortunately wont be very geeky, I am going to a wedding, but saying that, I will be meeting up with one of my partners in crime, so I am sure we will be discussing some kind of idea / venture.
So, we have all heard of PhoneGap and various other tools to turn HTML5 apps into mobile apps, but what about desktop apps? What if you want to turn an HTML5 app into a mac app and submit it onto the app store?
To do this, it is actually very simple. I have found this out recently from a recent article.
Instagr.am – it’s awesome right? Well, I know Ben Parr thinks so (how is Dominate HQ by the way Ben?!) and so does Christina, although she has obviously been too busy working to update her instagr.am since being in the Hilton Austin Hotel 3 weeks ago!
I have had an excellent couple of years, surrounded by very talented people doing amazingthings. I have learnt a lot over the past couple of years. When I joined Marmalade on Toast, there were only 4 of us in the company. Today there are now 8 excellent members of the team.
However it comes with great regret (and excitement) that at the end of April I will be leaving Marmalade on Toast. I have been very comfortable at Marmalade over the past couple of years. I live 3 minutes walk away from the studio. On my way to the studio I stop of at Tom’s Deli and have a coffee. Why on earth would I want to change this? Simple, life is boring without risk.
I am at a point in my life where I can still take risks. I am yet to have any children, and I don’t plan to for a few years. I am not looking for a comfortable life, not just yet. In a few years, maybe, but not right now. I would like to wish everyone at Marmalade on Toast the best for the future, I am sure they will do very well.
For the time being I am going to be working on my own projects, and accepting freelance offers. You know those ideas we all get, and really want to work on, but never find the time to do it? I am going to actually try and do them. I have various projects up my sleeve that I would love to share with you, but only when the time is right.
On Monday 18th April, in London, there is the inaugural event for London JS, a new free monthly meetup for JavaScript developers organised by @eventhandleruk. The first one is being held at Poke London’s offices.
Peter Gasston (@stopsatgreen) is giving a talk titled “A Sensational Exposé with Bewildering Demonstrations!”
What is the Constraint Validation API? How is it connected to HTML5? And when can I begin to use it?
I am then giving a talk titled “Rewriting the history books”
Create accessible and indexable dynamic content using the HTML5 History API. Bots are people too… Alright, they are not, but they still want access.
I believe after the talks we will all be bundling into the closest pub, and there may even be pizzas and beer at the event itself :)
It is approaching the end of the spring term for my students on the DMD11 course at Winchester University. Yeah, they get an easy life, they are soon to have 4 weeks off….
While they are on their ‘break’ they have a project to complete. As you may have guessed if you have seen any of my recent slides, is that they are making mobile web apps. As they will not have any direct contact with a tutor or mentor over the 4 week break. I have decided to try and give them some help by pointing them in the right direction for anything they may need while away.
Last week it was announced that Prince William & Kate Middleton (i.e the Future King & Future Queen) have created a charitable gift fund to help celebrate their wedding.
Prince William and Miss Catherine Middleton have created a charitable gift fund to help celebrate their wedding. The fund will focus on assisting charities which support the five causes chosen by the couple. These causes are close to their hearts and reflect the experiences, passions and values of their lives so far. Having been touched by the goodwill shown to them since their engagement, they have asked that anyone wishing to send them a wedding gift consider doing so in the form of a donation to the fund.
They have had a website set up for them for this fund. On this site people can choose how much money they would like to donate, and to which charities. Disclaimer: I am in no way a royalist. I think their website is rubbish. It feels clunky. Everything about it. The company behind it, just need to spend a couple of hours, adding a few nice touches to it. It just needs a bit of love. Just like all clients, I am sure the future king, became a back seat designer / developer. However, it just needs a bit of love. Just a couple of extra hours on the css and javascript. Nothing more.
It is the future king for god’s sake. Imagine if someone churned this out for King Henry VIII. I bet if a horse breeder gave the king a horse that had three legs to go into battle, he wouldn’t be too pleased. I am sure there would be one less horse breeder. OK, maybe that is a tad extreme, and really not that relevant, but it got the point across…
FWIW I have offered some of my free time to help them give it some much needed love.
“Daily Excitement” was my attempt at tweeting once a day at around 8am. My tweet would consist of something that was happening that day that made me excited. As you can tell my the twitter stream I gave up as soon as I went skiing. Why? When I was away skiing, I didn’t really have internet access so I couldn’t really post my daily excitement.
“Daily Photo”, I really wanted to take 1 photo everyday. Just 1 photo. How hard can that be? I have no idea when I stopped that… Probably when I had to restore my iphone without backup and so probably lost all the images.
“Weekly Lesson” was my attempt at writing a weekly tutorial. This went pretty well. But then I started to get lazy, and I started to just upload my slides from my weekly lecture to slideshare, and then that was that! I then started to create a weeklyjqueryplugin. But I never wrote blog posts on them.
“Blog more!” Although I have definitely blogged more than I did last year. I still haven’t blogged as much as I would like to. It certainly feels like I am blogging less and less each week.
Looking back at my last couple of months, I have already given up on 2 of my resolutions, which leaves the other 2 resolutions only semi continued. I am starting to become lazy with blogging. I am therefore going to try and blog some more, just before I get to the lazy stage. Each of my jQuery plugins I will write a blog post for. I will also start flushing out my slideshare slides with a corresponding blog post.
Why do I like blogging? I like blogging, not because people may read my posts. Is there anyone there? But because it makes me think. It helps me to learn. It helps me to teach. It helps me to create.
In any of the digital industries, actually, any industry, if you want to be at the top of your game you have to keep learning new things. Call me ambitious, call me arrogant, call me whatever you want, but I want to keep pushing to get to the top of my game. The problem / beauty with the industries such as web design, web development, software development, digital advertising, social marketing, or whatever bracket you want to put yourself in, is that there is no “top of the game”. “The game” gets bigger and better every day.
When I blog, when I write a tutorial, when I give a talk, I try to know the most about the subject that I can at any given time. The way I do this is by reading up on the topic. I then try to put everything I know about that topic down on paper / on my blog.
This is why I love blogging.
If you would like to bring the revival of the blog. If you would like to join me, Elliot and Chris, just follow these rules:
Write a post called Ideas of March.
List some of the reasons you like blogs.
Pledge to blog more the rest of the month.
Share your thoughts on Twitter with the #ideasofmarch hashtag.
Expand the opinion and validation of your ‘important’ tweets with a short blog post.
