The recent mailer from the U.S. Census Bureau struck a chord with two of my hobbies: information design and open government. Today I’ll be redesigning a piece of paper that looks mundane but has an astonishing impact on the amount of money our country is spending to conduct the 2010 Census. Sometimes good design can …
If you don’t know about Raphaël, you’d better ask somebody. It provides a vector drawing API that works in all major browsers (by abstracting between SVG and VML).
I’ve been working on a JavaScript charting library called Krang. Krang is designed to take a data set and produce any chart (line chart, pie chart, bar chart) …
Today I’m going to be talking about Object.extend without much introduction or context. Bear with me. This is a prerequisite blog post for something I’ll be talking about in a few days.
Extending objects in JavaScript
Prototype has a function named Object.extend. It takes two objects and copies all properties from the second object onto the first. This is …
Here’s the short version: I made a site called Filibusted that just won Sunlight Labs’ “Apps for America” contest.
I started to write out the long version, but I don’t have Ken Burns or a bunch of old-timey photographs. I’ll split the difference.
The Soapbox
As some of you already know, yelling at Congress (or at coverage of Congress) …
Jason Scott rips into Joe Clark. I have learned a number of things from Joe Clark, and I still find reason to link someone to i let u b u at least once per quarter. But I can’t find much fault with this assessment of his words and his worldview.
A sizable slice of technology experts are …
Here’s a lovely pagination control I looked at on PSDTUTS today. Actually, first I used it; when it took me to a page I was not expecting, I hit the Back button and looked at it.
It’s a testament to both my arrogance and my compulsiveness that I found five things I could “fix” about this …
One major goal of frameworks is to minimize the amount of code branching an individual developer has to do. Usually that means the framework does the branching itself, then builds around it an API that will work in all major browsers. By that metric, support for custom events in Prototype 1.6 might be our biggest …
The American Heritage Dictionary, in a usage note below the definition of the word shall, uses more words than I’ve ever used to describe anything. I’m reprinting them here because I find this fascinating, in an odd mystery-solving sort of way. I’m a linguistic Jessica Fletcher.
The traditional rules for using shall and will prescribe a …
Max Carlson (of OpenLaszlo) recently wrote about his toolkit’s approach to browser quirks, reminding me of a great Dev.Opera article on capability detection.
Both argue for an approach that relies on the individual capabilities and quirks of a browser, rather than one that relies on sniffing as a first option. This is a noble idea and …
Gamefly, the Netflix of video games, does a nice thing when you try to rent your first game on a new system:
Much better than being forced to go to an options page.
However, the “GameQ” page — where you can specify the order in which you want your games delivered — needs a little work:
If ever there were a better use …
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