A Better Way

Name: Jack

Web Site: http://www.thejacklawson.com

Bio: I'm a C# developer specializing in user interface engineering using jQuery, with a ferocity for learning. When I was 11, I was determined to make Tomb Raider 3 and saved up all of my allowance money for "Learn to Program BASIC". I didn't make it in the game industry, but I did find myself drawn to web development. By the time I was 16, I achieved my goal and began working at Xponex Media as an ASP developer. Throughout my career, I moved to ColdFusion, PHP, and finally ASP.NET with C#. All along the way, I've picked up new skills and techniques, and over the last two years I've found my niche- user interface engineering. I've always had a bit of a knack for design, and being torn between design and development found me knee-deep in CSS and Javascript. It's a place where I can still impact the overall architecture and write C#, but where I can let my inner designer run free.

Posts by Jack:

Wacom Bamboo Tablet Experience

February 18th, 2010



My awesome first tablet design

(This post was started using my new tablet!)

Well, I suppose that now that I have a tablet, I oughta start practicing. You see, I’ve never been one to have exceptional handwriting skills, so it’s a good thing that I now have a computer that can understand my handwriting better than my 8th-grade Spanish teacher could. I used to get a LOT of zeros on my homework.

(At this point, I’m back to my keyboard because my hand began cramping up. I tried, at least… Typing at 90WPM  on my keyboard is superior to writing using a plastic pen on a mat.)

I’ve long dreamed of owning a graphics tablet, for quick mockups (I included my first here. Creative Commons license, feel free to derive from its awesomeness.) I picked up the Wacom Pen & Touch. Three days in, it has been fun to play with; while it hasn’t been 100% everything that I ever imagined it would be, I think that it may be more of a learning curve issue rather than an issue with the technology itself. I’m used to using a mouse that I have to throw all over a mousepad, not a pen and a tablet that maps 1:1 with my monitor (originally, it mapped to both monitors before I turned off the second monitor in the tablet settings.)

One of the troubles I was having was that it seemed somewhat laggy when I was using my pen on Windows 7 with Photoshop CS3. I noticed mostly that when I was writing, I couldn’t add small details well (look at how crazy all of the lines in my As are); it would sort of stick and think it was supposed to pull up some kind of command menu. I’d like to blame it on myself, as a user error… but it isn’t at all obvious how I fix that issue, if it is one.

Regardless, I’m going to soldier on and try a few more mockups before passing more severe judgement. There are probably some hidden settings somewhere to fix; and once I have those figured out, I’ll post a follow-up on how I did it. Hopefully I do it. Don’t crush my dreams, Wacom.




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jQuery 1.4.2 updates, and the release of jQuery UI 1.8rc2

February 16th, 2010

jQuery 1.4.2 is out- not officially on their website, but you can be sneaky and get it here:

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.js

http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js (not really “minified” as much as “closure compiled”… can we get a verb for that?) The changelog isn’t up yet, but that’s generally the last thing to go (and hey, we snuck in the back door to grab the update anyway, right?) I imagine it’ll eventually find it’s way to their API page for 1.4.2.  I ran a quick diff; here’s some changes that I found notable from jQuery 1.4.1 to 1.4.2:

• Optimizations for the body selector
• A few changes to how arrays of elements selected are built, I’ll go with my gut and say that they’re optimizations too
• Trimming whitespace from JSON data responses, for good ol’ IE
• A more few various bugfixy-looking things, mostly targeting IE
• It looks like there was a lot done to the event-adding code; I think mostly internal changes. Probably more optimizations? I’ll leave it to Resig or someone to explain whenever the changelog comes out. A few (generally pretty deep) methods had some parameters changed, or were renamed (things like “jQuery.event.special.submit.remove” becoming “jQuery.event.special.submit.teardown”)
• A smattering of changes within “live” and “die” mostly centering around the usage of namespaces
• Blackberry browser bugfix concerning converting NodeLists to arrays
• jQuery.getText changed to jQuery.text
• Changes to caching fragments to help out WebKit and IE 6

I haven’t really dug too deeply in the jQuery core before, so I’m not totally qualified to give a whole lot more detail than that. I used SourceGear Diffmerge between 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 to find out what I found out.

Also, in related (and perhaps more official news),  the jQuery UI team released jQuery UI 1.8rc2 – which includes bugfixes in the already pretty stable 1.8rc1 (changelog). You can grab it:

http://jquery-ui.googlecode.com/files/jquery-ui-1.8rc2.zip (development bundle)

http://labs.crimsondeviations.com/jquery-ui-1.8rc2-min.js (I threw it into a closure compiler, it seems the dev package doesn’t include a “minified” version.)

As of right now, I’m testing it in our application at MeM. Let’s see how things go!





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ASP.NET Controls, How I Hate Them

February 8th, 2010



Image by ttrentham via Flickr

I’ve always, for some reason, felt innately that PHP allowed me more control over my code than ASP.NET. My brain kept saying “but .NET is more organized! It compiles! It’s faster! It’s easier to write,” but my mind kept saying “PHP lets me do what I want how I want it… screw .NET!”

What I finally figured out was that I love C#, I even like the .NET framework, but I hate is, in fact, ASP.NET.

Every time I see an example of simple, elegant code, the most complex control on the page is a label or a panel. While the intentions behind FormView may be good, writing my own forms and hooking them up saves hundreds of lines (literally- I just refactored almost 800 lines of code into 150 by removing a formview) as well as reduces complexity and maintenance (now I no longer have to maintain view and edit and whatever other modes FormView has.) ASP.NET perhaps made sense in a day before OO principles and ORMs came into play; the controls were written for the same kind of people that use the drag-and-drop design mode. Easy to slap down haphazardly, not so easy to maintain.

We replaced every ASP.NET Ajax control we used anywhere (after I evangelized it, to my chagrin) with jQuery after about 6 months of use; while the controls did what we needed on the surface, underneath there was always some caveat, like the linked DropDowns needed web services, or the datepicker control had missing options… there was always something somewhere that I needed a bit of flexibility on that just wasn’t there, or was buggy. It seemed very odd for it to be out of beta in such a state. So, I ended up starting my own control library using jQuery, and now it’s easily extensible, easy to modify from the client, and I can control the markup.

Oh, and the markup… don’t get me started on the markup. Tables for everything. I can’t rearrange the otherwise useful Wizard control because it’s so static in its display.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to make is, that the longer I use .NET, the less and less I use the complex controls and the more I roll my own. Because it’s easier.
Kind of ironic.





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Neflaria V2: HTML 5, jQuery 1.4.1

January 26th, 2010

Yay! I love jQuery! I love HTML html 5! I love CSS 3!

And, I’ve decided that Neflaria, Version 2, will be my playground.

Neflaria, for the unacquainted, is the online game that my friend and I inherited a couple years ago. You make a character, you log in, and you fight monsters and chat with other players; while there’s not a whole lot to the game, it has been around for about 10 years, and as such, has a lot of character. And a lot of characters. I mean that endearingly. (Hi, Chris)

However, to a lot of the players, and definitely to me, its 2001-era look is a little stale. Its 12px Times New Roman on 100×100 pixel repeating background. Another word might be “dated.” The server-side database and file structure is a little crazy and unorganized, and it is time for an upgrade. So, here’s where Neflaria version 2 comes in.

One of the decisions we made was to move forward and to use jQuery 1.4.1, which niftily came out just as we were restarting development, to use html 5 (by including the wonderful html 5 shiv [blog post, javascript] for backwards compatibility), and do as much as we can to bring Neflaria into 2010 while at the same time making sure that the people playing the game- who are probably still on IE6- aren’t left out in the dark. Now, I’ve always railed against IE6, and I hate IE6 support more than anything… but by building on a solid base of well-structured html, css, and javascript, we can bend the styles later on to suit IE6’s needs, while maintaining future compatibility. “Graceful Degredation” is the term of the day.

We’re developing Neflaria V2 looking for the future. We’re building our javascript more like a framework and less like a loose collection of methods called “x2″ and “j5″. We’re restructuring the database (aka normalizing the heck out of it) and using JSON served piping hot via short but precise PHP pagelets. It’ll be very client-heavy, assuring server-side performance, and it’ll be extensible for future features. We’re even working on multilingual support, using jQuery to query a language-based XML file by key.

I’m pretty excited. Get a preview here (only the home, terms of service, privacy policy, and “create” and “login” buttons do anything, and it isn’t wired up to the database): http://labs.crimsondeviations.com/NeflariaV2Preview/




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A Switch to Chrome (Mostly): A Followup

January 21st, 2010



Image by nDevilTV via Flickr

A follow-up to my original post from July, a mere 6 months ago.

I have, now, totally switched to Chrome. And yes, it was exactly for the reason I fully expected to: extensions came out. Sort of like Google’s this big Overmind that watches all…

Then again, I guess it is, isn’t it.

Anyway, the performance difference between FireFox and Chrome is clear. In direct contrast to one comment left on my original post, I have as many extensions in Chrome as I do in FireFox, performing the same activities (with one caveat)- and it is noticeably faster. I load up FF when I do IE: to test the differences in rendering engines across browsers, so that I can fix the CSS and Javascript bugs. To be fair, FF has the best debugging (that version of FireBug is far superior to anything I’ve seen yet), which makes testing so much easier. But, FF is on my machine only for that. For debugging. Not for browsing.

Honestly, I see absolutely no compelling reasons to use anything but Chrome; it’s what I install on all of my relative’s computers, and it’s what I use every day at work and home.

All hail the Overmind!





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