Ever wanted to remotely access the DOM of a mobile device so you could make changes, test ideas and generally just have a bit of fun. I know I have and I’ve been hacking to create a proof of concept piggy backed on the development of two great projects. The first is Remy Sharps awesome little jsconsole web app that lets you do a bunch of cool stuff using a simple yet elegant interface. The second is a Firefox plugin that allows Firefox to act as a WebSocket server and receive and delegate messages sent from a client. Continue reading
The trusty console.log() method serves a great functional purpose to write messages to the developer console. But did you know the console object has around twenty other methods you can use? I rarely see developers tapping into the extra power the console provides other than using it as a non-blocking alert. Let’s change that. Continue reading
Filesystem access has been a pipe dream for web developers for many years. With the ever evolving complexity of web apps and their need to potentially process large amounts of data, filesystem access is the next evolutionary step in order to push web apps to the next level. Thankfully, smart people have been thinking about these issues and defining new and useful specifications that fill those gaps. Eric Uhrhane of Google has been working on the working draft of the File API: Directories and System specification which defines a set of APIs to create a sandboxed filesystem where a web app can read and write data to. Continue reading
Recently I wrote an article for A List Apart about Forward thinking form validation and I introduced a script I wrote that emulates some of the new HTML Forms chapter functionality in older browsers, allowing a developer to use all these new features and have it work the same across the board. Continue reading
Google in their quest to keep me busy in trying to figure out how they do their innovative features in Gmail are at it again. First it was drag and drop uploading which used a clever trick to make it work in Chrome which currently doesn’t support the FileReader in their stable release. Now they’ve added the ability to drag out attachments to your file system, allowing you to bypass the usual method of the save dialog. Continue reading
Recently Gmail pushed out an update that allowed users to drag and drop files from desktop to Gmail and have them automatically uploaded. Being the web geek I am I had to figure out how it functioned. Firefox was easy and I have covered drag and drop uploading already. They also mentioned in their post that Chrome was supported but I know Chrome is yet to implement the File API. Most intriguing was that it doesn’t work in Safari? Continue reading
Why yes it is…
I’ve been sitting on this little idea for a while and as a bit of fun I finally got around to putting it together and properly testing it. Basically on an iPhone with geolocation support (3.0+), I have set up a little web app that will get the speed from the GPS and move the speedometer needle according to your current speed in kilometres. Continue reading
Web Notifications allows users to get updates on a webpage even if they’re not looking at it, shown to them through small notification boxes, think growl. This opens up some great potential for the current web apps out there. When you get a new email it could popup a little notification much like our desktop email clients do now or your twitter page could let you know when new @replies have come in, the possibilities are endless. Continue reading
Recently I have been touting how awesome and revolutionary the File API is through a few demo’s. After some feedback on webapps mailing list there have been some major changes to the API and how it works. Continue reading
After playing with the new file API draft spec available in Firefox 3.6 with my drag and drop upload article. I had another idea when I was playing with custom fonts, @font-face, in the browser. What if you could drag an drop a font file (otf, ttf, svg, woff) from your desktop into the browser and have text rendered on the fly using any available valid font. Continue reading