javascript

Tag Hierarchies

About four and a half years ago I wrote a little event tracking app that accepts a timestamp and a list of tags, and then provides a pile of ways to report on the data.  Think Twitter, except a couple years earlier, and designed for consumption by software, not people, at least at the individual [...]

jQuery's Autocomplete's Undocumented source Option

Yesterday I replaced an instance of my ComboBox widget with a jQuery Autocomplete.  A sad day it was.  However, I saved a JS file and a few K of download, so it was worth it.  Unfortunately, it's missing a fairly important bit of functionality: the ability to order the list of options.
If you're doing an [...]

The FlexChart Manifesto

The current state of web applications is a fragmented mess.  HTML is still the standard approach, but dynamic data loading with Ajax and application embedding with Flash are both incredibly popular, particularly for data-heavy applications.
HTML is great because it's easy to build and well understood by user agents, but you lack drawing capabilities.  SVG addressed [...]

FlexChart 2.0

I've released FlexChart 2.0 today.  Binary download is available here: flexchart_2-0-r4392.zip.  The demo app is still available, of course.  Backwards compatibility is not quite 100%, as I'll explain below, but the non-compatibilities only affect certain classes of charts, and they're the complex ones.  For simple stuff it should be drop-and-go.
There are no real outward changes [...]

FlexChart Update

Been a long while since I've made any updates to FlexChart, and this is only a minor one, but it's potentially important.  Since it's designed to be used in JavaScript applications, data tips and click events are all processed by JavaScript (not ActionScript).  When I'd created the data tip callbacks, I'd neglected to considered the [...]

Checkbox Range Selection Update

Just a little update to my checkbox range selection jQuery plugin to allow chaining.  I'd forgotten to return 'this' at the end of the function.  Here's the full source, including the mod:
(function($) {
$.fn.enableCheckboxRangeSelection = function() {
var lastCheckbox = null;
var $spec = this;
[...]

Prototype's Array.any/all with jQuery

I needed to convert a couple Array.any() and Array.all() calls (from Prototype) to jQuery syntax. Since jQuery doesn't extend the built-in objects with nice functionality like this, you have to fake it. Here's what I came up with. Old version ('images' is an array):
images.all(function(o){return o.status == "ready";})
and the new version:
jQuery.inArray(false,
jQuery.map(images, [...]

Prototype and jQuery

Since I discovered it a few years ago, I've been a big Prototype fan.  It's simple, and gets the job done with a minimum of fuss.  It's not without warts, of course.  I still occasionally forget to put 'new' in front of Ajax.Request, and some of the Ruby-like methods share their lineage's arcane naming.  When [...]

Ajaxian on Prototype vs JQuery

Ajaxian posted a little blurb on benchmarking Prototype and jQuery today. I've been a Prototype guy for years, but at the office we've gone from all-Prototype to all-jQuery, and performance degredation was one of the things I noticed. I never did any actual benchmarking, just went by feel, but it's interesting to see [...]

Checkbox Range Selection (a la GMail)

If any of you use GMail, you'll know that you can shift click the checkboxes on the conversation list to select a range of conversations (i.e. click the second conversation's checkbox and then shift-click the tenth conversation's checkbox). You can also deselect the same way (click the seventh, and then shift-click the fourth). [...]