Articles by Ross

I have recently been presented with a difficult choice to make. I have to purchase a new phone, and similar to many others out there who are experiencing the same nail biting procedure, I have to decide between the three major Operating Systems (Windows Phone 7, Android, and iOS) and their very different experiences by weighing up the benefits of each, and seeing how well they suit my lifestyle. This post could also be a considered a follow-up to last year’s article on a similar subject. I’ve done much research over the last few weeks, so read on to see my thoughts.

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Some really interesting stuff has happened this October such as Flash 11’s announcement, Opera 12’s development activity, and Google’s new programming language. I thought I’d summarize them for those who are not yet in the loop. Check out the highlights within.

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One thing that many people fail to notice about CakePHP is how FAST it makes development. The amount of time it takes to make a proof of concept is far shorter than if you were to use a configuration over convention framework like CodeIgniter. To show just how fast and simple getting an application up and running in CakePHP is, I’ve gone with the good ol’ Poll application. Read on to see the step by step process.

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So last month we dealt with the basics of animation. It generally focused on targeting single elements and having them be animated by changing their respective CSS properties over a set period of time. In this part, things will get more complicated in that we’ll be trying to target groups of elements and have each one’s behaviour be altered relative to its own situation with respect to the DOM (Document Object Model). I know it sounds intimidating, but fear not! It’s actually pretty simple, if only a little less so than what we did last time.

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I don’t know about you, but the real reason I personally got into Javascript (at least initially), was that I wanted to do animations. Animations are cool. Everyone wants to add flashy effects with the least amount of effort and with JQuery (and a number of other Javascript frameworks), it is indeed possible. Read on to see how!

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This week, I thought I’d give away some free code. I’ve had to make a number of sliders for some recent projects and I thought that it’d be a waste not to make the code available to the public, even if it isn’t the greatest :)

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Today, I’ve been having to edit a site that I made a year and a half or more ago. I’ve only been in this industry for 2 1/2 years or so, so I still have a long way to go before I can put the sad code I made back in the day behind me for good. To say the least, editing the code on this site has been a nightmare. It was like I had multiple personalities, and each one took 30 minutes to work on the site at a time before passing the reigns to another. Read on to see some of the dreadful mistakes I made.

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If you’re like me, and tend to have to be busy all the time in order to stay sane, you probably have a myriad hobbies as I do. I have always expressed an interest in development, and though not inherently gifted with a developer’s mind, I was intrigued by it to enough of an extent that I found I could muster the resolve to work hard enough to improve at it, both at work, and in my free time. There are awesome opportunities available today for developers who like to develop in their free time. Read on to see a number of such opportunities.

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Before I continue with writing this article, take note that I myself am not the most experienced or skilled of developers. I have only been doing Web development for just over two years, and as such have not been able to delve into it as much as many other veteran developers may have. However, I have always tried to make sure that I learn the best practises from the start so that I do not learn bad habits early on. As such, I have found many routines that I have either already implemented, or soon will be implementing in my development projects, and because of this, I can tell what other developers are, and are not, doing enough of. Read on to see what they are.

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As most of you already know, the browser of choice amongst Web developers is definitely Mozilla Firefox. Thus it would make sense that nearly all of us here at the office use it, and to be fair, it has served us all well, but unfortunately it’s continued to get increasingly bloated and resource-intensive in that it takes more and more time to start up, and tends to crash or stutter repeatedly. Don’t get me wrong, I love Firefox, but I couldn’t help but consider the other browsers available. Read on to find my impressions and eventual decision.

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