Anyway, here it is:

It’s a little rough still, but it’s just an idea, tell me what you think :)

Learning jQuery, Third Edition, written by Jonathan Chaffer, Karl Swedberg, is revised and updated for version 1.6 of jQuery. Readers will learn the basics of jQuery for adding interactions and animations to their pages. Even if previous attempts at writing JavaScript have left one baffled, this book will guide them past the pitfalls associated with AJAX, events, effects, and advanced JavaScript language features.

“jQuery is one of the topics Packt remains committed to publishing on, offering more interesting books that will help the diverse needs of jQuery users. The set of jQuery related books we’ve recently published shows our continued commitment to the topic area, and we intend to publish important jQuery books, such as the Learning jQuery, Third Edition, for a long time to come.”Packt Open Source publisher Doug Paterson

For more information on jQuery October and the discounts being offered throughout October, please visit: – www.packtpub.com/news/jquery-month ]]> http://www.danwellman.co.uk/packt-celebrates-jquery-in-october-with-exclusive-book-offer/feed/ 0 http://www.danwellman.co.uk/ssd-vs-raid0/ http://www.danwellman.co.uk/ssd-vs-raid0/#comments Fri, 07 Oct 2011 22:49:48 +0000 Dan Wellman http://www.danwellman.co.uk/?p=381 Ok, so I just installed a pair of brand new 10′000 RPM Velociraptors in a RAID0 configuration to replace my Kingston V series SSD drive.

There was nothing actually wrong with the SSD, but I got sent the raptors as a warranty replacement for a pair of older drives and I wanted to see how they compared to the SSD. Before removing the SSD I ran Passmark on the drive and recorded the scores. I’ve just finished installing Windows and all my other gubbins on the raptors and have run Passmark again with somewhat surprising results.

Here are the results:

So there we have it – the raptors are significantly faster on all operations, with an overall score over 4 times greater than the SSD. The SSD was installed in the BIOS as a standard IDE drive. I’m not sure if a change in the BIOS configuration could improve the SSD’s performance, it probably could yield some gains, but could it be tweaked to improve its performance by a factor of 4? I’m not sure, but I am surprised that the raptors are that much faster.

** Update **
I reconnected the SSD as an additional drive and ran Passmark again, the SSD still came in way, way (way) lower than the RAID. This time the drives were all set to SATA, there doesn’t seem to be a setting in the BIOS to configure the drive mode on a per-drive basis, unless it’s tucked away in the BIOS somewhere non-obvious, but the mode is now set to SATA instead of IDE.

• 7″ wide screen (480 x 234 resolution)
• 1Gb internal memory
• SD card slot
• Downstream/upstream USB sockets

The menu system is quite intuitive and easy to use and there are no advanced settings or configuration/setup. Once connected to your PC it comes up in Windows Explorer like a flash drive and you can just drag your photos over, it’s so easy. Once photos have been loaded on you can start a slideshow which cycles through each image.

The quality of the images is quite good and the transitions between the images are nice. The device itself looks quite nice and comes in several different colours. The only downside is that it is not wall-mountable due to the shape of the back, which bulges out quite a bit.

At £60 (~$90) It’s quite reasonably priced, and it got a great review on testfreaks.com.

The thing in question was an animated hero panel, with navigation buttons along the side, which enabled the visitor to see different panels of content by clicking the buttons. Pretty standard stuff, nothing funky, nothing crazy, just bread ‘n’ butter jQuery, so you can imagine my surprise when it didn’t work on the iPad.

What was actually happening was that a single click was being treated as a hover, and so the active style was being applied to the navigation buttons when one of them was pressed a single time. If then pressed a second time, the animation/content change was being applied. Interesting.

Fixing the issue turned out to be surprisingly easy, we just need to sniff the userAgent string and look for iPad. Yes, I just said sniff the userAgent. I know, right?! We stopped doing userAgent-based browser detection years ago. But that indeed was the advice I found while browsing the developer docs over at apple.com, and it worked, which is of course the main thing.

The code turned out to be as simple as this:

var ua = navigator.userAgent,
    event = (ua.match(/iPad/i)) ? "touchstart" : "click";

$("theElement").bind(event, function(e) {
    //do shit here
}

We just try to find the string iPad in the userAgent string (specifying the case-insensitive flag), and set the event to touchstart if it is found, or click if it isn’t. We then just pass the event variable to the jQuery bind() method and supply an anonymous function as we normally would.

Changing the code to the above from what it was originally, $(theElement).click(function() { });, fixed the problem entirely, and the intended behaviour of triggering the animation/content change with a single click (or touch) was restored.

Examples

Ok, so I finally had time to put an example page together. I’ll try and get some additional ones up soon, and keep it updated inline with the plugin…

Download

• Legacy version [1.4k]
• Version 1.0.2 unminified [2.21k]
• Version 1.0.2 minified [1.07k]

Usage

The plugin is designed to be used with navigation menus, where each menu item is made from an anchor element within a list-item element. You can apply the effect to different collections of elements by supplying new trigger and faderTemplate options (see the Configurable Options section below).

1. First you should set up standard CSS hover states from the elements you want to add the effect to. This should be done using a class name on the container of the fading elements. This is so that basic CSS hovers are still used if JS is disabled on the client.
2. Add selectors that show the same background image as the CSS hovers using a different class name. This different class name will be applied to the container and the CSS class name will be removed.
3. Link to the plugin file from (ideally) the bottom of the page, after linking first to jQuery
4. Call the plugin method on the same element that the CSS class was added to. if you use the default class names used by the plugin, and call the plugin on a standard list of links the plugin should just work.

There are 9 user-configurable options that can be set, which are listed in the next section

Configurable Options

The latest version of hoverFade has the following configuration options:

• newClass: the new class to add, defaults to “hover-anims”
• classToRemove: the existing class to remove, defaults to “hover-css”
• onClass: class name to add to show a link as on, defaults to “on”
• trigger: the target element that will trigger the animation, defaults to “a”
• faderTemplate: the element to be used to show the animation, defaults to “<span />”
• animSpeed NEW!: the speed of the animation, defaults to “normal”
• exclude NEW!: a jQuery selector that should not have an animation state added to it, deaults to “”
• ignoreSiblings NEW!: a jQuery selector that should not be animated, defaults to “”
• retainHoverOn NEW!: a class name for elements that should not fade out on mouseleave, defaults to “”

Notes

The exclude is very similar to the on option except that the element with the on class name will have the animated state on show permanently, while any elements exluded from the animations with exclude will not have the animated state shown ever.

The ignoreSiblings option is useful for when the element that will have the animations applied to already has a <span> element within it.

The retainHoverOn is useful for when you have another element inside the trigger element that causes something else to happen, a popup to appear for example, and you’d like the animated hover state to remain on even when the pointer moves into the other element

So…I’m not entirely sure how I managed to knuckle in with the rest of the heavyweights, but nevertheless, it’ll soon be time to judge lest me not be judged, init? But before the judging can begin, you guys need to vote on who you think deserves to win in each of the 16 categories. The categories are as follow:

• Design agency of the year
• Interactive site of the year
• Blog of the year
• Mobile site of the year
• Mobile app of the year
• Innovation of the year
• Web personality of the year
• Redesign of the year
• Podcast of the year
• Video podcast of the year
• Web app of the year
• Open source app of the year
• Standards champion
• Best API use
• Community site of the year
• Viral campaign of the year

The shortlist of winners will be announced on 12th October, at which point the hugely talented, influential and awesome judges, as well as myself, will pick the winners from the shortlist. The actual winners will be announced at the Ministry of Sound awards party in London on 19th November, which as a judge, I will be attending. Get in!

The 5th annual Open Source Awards from Packt are now open! There are six different ‘best of the year’ categories to vote in, which consist of:

• Open Source CMS
• Hall of fame CMS
• Most promising Open Source Project
• Open Source E-commerce Application
• Open Source JavaScript Library
• Open Source Graphics Software

Here’s a link to the main nominations page.

This is the first year that the awards have been opened up from just CMSs, as it was in previous years, so it will be interesting to see which JavaScript library in particular will take the prize.

The winner of each category will receive a prize donation of $2500, with second and third places taking $1000 and $500 respectively, so make sure you vote for the project you feel deserves to win.

You aren’t required to nominate in all sections and the only personal details you need to provide are your name and email address, so voting is easy.

I voted in 2 categories this year, Umbraco for Open Source CMS of the year, and jQuery for Open Source JavaScript library of the year. I voted Umbraco because we started using it at work this year and it has literally changed the way we put sites together. It’s easy to use, quick to set up and hugely configurable. I think it deserves the recognition that this award would give it.

It was a tough choice between jQuery and the YUI for me, as I think both libraries are fantastic, but in the end I went with jQuery because I simply use it, and rely on it, a lot more.

let me know how you plan to vote in the comments!

The first chapter served as a very good general introduction to jQuery and what the library is capable of. The whole chapter is dedicated to an interactive example that uses a wide variety of different jQuery methods and functionality, and the accompanying text gradually picks apart all of the code to show what it does. The example is excellent for those new to jQuery and was a very good way to start the book.

After the initial example-based chapter the book switches tone to more of a reference style guide; chapter 2 is a very detailed, quite lengthy chapter that covers all of the different types of selectors that can be used to select elements from the DOM. Many different selectors, including advanced ones like the different types of attribute selectors are covered.

Remaining chapters look at the different types of methods that are exposed by the library; there is a chapter dedicated to DOM traversal methods, another that looks at AJAX-related methods, etc. Helpfully, the book is structured similarly to the online documentation so readers should be able to easily find the method they require information about without too much difficulty.

Towards the end of the book there are chapters that look at the miscellaneous methods such as .grep(), .unique(), etc which don’t fit neatly into any of the other categories, and the different properties of the jQuery object that can give us extra information about the environment that the library is executing in such as the .browser properties. These last chapters will be of huge importance to many developers that are familiar with some of the more common methods, but less familiar with some of these lesser-used methods and properties.

There is also a chapter dedicated to the construction of jQuery plugins; the authors didn’t have to include an entire chapter on this topic as it is sometimes seen as beyond the scope of general jQuery usage. They could have just included some basic information under the miscellaneous chapter perhaps, but they didn’t, they provided a whole chapter to it because the topic deserves a whole chapter. It’s a relatively short chapter, and the example plugins are very light, but it covers all of the essentials for plugin development such as the standard conventions, the object method and global functions, so this chapter adds a lot of value.

The book also features some potentially very useful appendices including lists of useful tools for JS developers such as code minifiers and browser development tools, information about where to find useful JavaScript, (X)HTML and CSS references as well as a complete alphabetical listing of every jQuery method and property.

Overall, I found this an excellent reference book for developers of all levels and would recommend it to anyone that was serious about jQuery development. Bear in mind that it is a reference manual opposed to a recipe-style example-based book, so the style is very concise and sometimes dry. Personally I think this was a good thing as it allowed the book to remain focused on the core topics without going off on a tangent about implementational specifics that the reader may never encounter. It’s highly accessible, very information-heavy and literally covers every single method and property found in the library. This book will stay on my desktop (my real, actual desk) for some time to come and will remain my first point of contact from now on when looking up any method of the library.

My one complaint is that some of the appendix items from previous versions of the book seem to have been removed; for example, there is an information box in one chapter which states ‘An in-depth discussion of closures can be found in Appendix C of the book Learning jQuery 1.3.’ I’m sure many people buying the 1.4 version of the book won’t already have the previous edition so this is not helpful in any way. Leaving this non-essential but related information in the book would have been far better. Sometimes however, due to the limits that are placed on page count by publishers, old, less-related information has to be removed. It’s not a massive complaint, and I can understand why the authors may have had to remove these extras to make room for information relating to all the cool new functionality of jQuery, but I think the book would have benefited from retaining this information if at all possible.

Buy the book!

I thought it high time that I rolled out a fresh new theme for my site and decided to completely change the look and feel of it while migrating to a new platform for easier updating.

The new theme features several images that were obtained, with gratitude, from NASA. This site, and myself, have nothing to do with NASA and we’re affiliated in no way whatsoever. I just happen to like space, and all Nasa images are in the public domain and therefore free ;) Extra points to anyone that can name the nebulae that are featured.

I’ll be posting links to articles that I write, sites I build and projects I undertake, as well as personal views, thoughts and general observations. jQuery and jQuery UI will feature heavily.

Thanks for visiting, happy reading, and I hope you enjoy the new site :D