There are literally thousands of sliders currently developed for you to pick from, but there are two things these sliders do very very badly. The first is that they rarely are use-able for a fullscreen website or gallery. Secondly they always, always handle the loading of those large background images badly. All examples I could find of fullscreen jQuery sliders or galleries loaded the imagery at the beginning when the slider loads. This is a terrible outcome for the user, they have to sit there staring at a blank screen while the app loads. Mobile was even worse. Also when the user clicks through the image slides they get black screens. It’s terrible UI experience and that is where this slider comes in.
Fullscreen background slider is a slider yes, but it is also far more than that, it is a way of using large beautiful background imagery, while maintaining a fluid and simple user experience, which should always be paramount!
Best way to see it in a action is to check out this demo.
Demo
I have a love hate relationship with Plupload, if you are unsure what Plupload is, it’s a jQuery script that gives your users the ability to upload files. Very useful, but oh so difficult to implement, hence why we use Plup.
The issue is, Plup if it were a political leader is a Facist, it has a certain way it wants you to do things, and you will not differ from the assignment. The plugin is rigidly attracted to it’s own stupid plupload interface. Now if you are an interface developer like me and you work on different applications you will know the interface for a plugin gets thrown out on day one, it’s the actual API and functions you are interested in. You want your site to look uniform and there are client expectations to meet. Sadly Facism does not fit this model which is why Plup sucks so badly as soon as you want to roll a custom uploader, I mean it doesn’t even have a reset method, NO SERIOUSLY, you can’t reset the plugin via the API.
Keep reading and I will show you guys a bunch of ways to beat Plup into submission for your custom uploaders.
Ran into this little problem the other day when using someone else’s specific syntax. Returning a complex object using a notation that puts objects brackets onto new lines was throwing an error. I sat there staring at it for maybe like 20 minutes wondering what the hell I’d been drinking recently and why I couldn’t trace the error.
Turns out it was a very simple syntax pit fall I hadn’t come across before, because I’m a Person A in the example below with regards to formatting my scripts.
// Person A's format
function() {
// function bracket on same line as declaration
}
// Person B's format
function()
{
// function bracket on new line
}
You can argue which is better all you want but likely you will run into both forms as a developer, both have their merits, and neither saves compile time.
So if you are a person B or just forced to use that format when defining objects, there is a catch you should know about.
Speed up JavaScript by making it execute exceedingly fast with these Google certified techniques
Ok everyone’s good friend David Walsh over at davidwalsh.name posted a link to a Google Talks presentation – Javascript and speed from back in 2009 in which they discuss some simple yet amazingly important JavaScript optimisation techniques. Ranging from Dom interaction and Scope , all the way through to Reflow. Now if your not sure what Reflow is I will explain that below, but put simple it is the name given when the browser has to redraw the page because user interaction or JavaScript has changed its geometry.
So here is what I’m going to cover in this post for you optimisation fanatics, with code examples of the good, the bad and the ugly!
- Scope Management
- Data Access
- Loops
- The DOM
