Posts Tagged: js

Most cases where you find String.substr() in the wild are to check if a given string begins with a certain other string. Be it checking for a prefix or sorting out zipcodes that begin with certain numbers. And because code readability is a good thing (really, it is important), it would be nice to have a String.beginsWith() method. Or, because of dojo love, a dojo.string.beginsWith() method.

Consider the following code:

var nearbyZipcodes = dojo.filter(givenZipcodes,function(zipcode){
    return dojo.string.beginsWith(zipcode,'12');
});

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Though many people would disagree, I for one like to use fieldsets to structure complex forms. Even better do I like fieldsets that are collapsible.

As there is no such fieldset with dojo, I decided to write my own widget. While doing so, I learnt an interesting lesson…

First, I wrote it pretty simple, inheriting the widget from dijit._Widget and dijit._Templated. It had a toggle button next to its legend, which could be clicked. The toggle was a simple display none/block change.
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There is still some traffic coming in from people who are searching for how to deal with the safari popup blocker. So I thought it might be nice to also tell what you can do about it – as most people want solutions, not backgrounds…

So, here you go:

It’s pretty simple, really. What to do? Well, call window.open() while the popup blocker still allows it, and store a reference to the window object. Then, later, do with it what you want. That is, changing the location in most cases.
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Screenshot

One of the things that fascinated me most about computers since I was a teen, was their ability to simulate a three-dimensional space where one could move around in.

That’s why I was so intrigued when I read Jacob Seidelin’s post about “Creating pseudo 3D Games“. I had to play around with it, as I wanted to have mouse control in it, but performance was so bad that it was impossible. So I laid aside that idea. Eventually, he continued this project and used it for something pretty awesome called “WolfenFlickr“, where you can walk around and look at Flickr photos, attached to walls. As I said, pretty awesome.

Anyway, what I wanted was mouse navigation and strafe keys, as you have it in shooters – this kind of moving around always gives me the feeling of being “free“ in a way. Experiencing that freedom in a web page (w/o flash, of course) was still on my mind.

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Safari console screenshot

Update: If you are interested in how to make window.open work you might want to also read the follow-up: Safari and window.open – How to do it

Working on a project these days, I noticed that the only call to window.open in that app did not work in Safari. Looking into it, I found that it was Safari’s popup blocker that wouldn’t let that call succeed.

Usually, I don’t deal with window.open, so that behaviour was new to me, and I asked Mr. Google what he knew on this. Not much, as it turned out out – I found only two interesting notes on it. One was pretty strange and I guess it was more about a Safari 3 beta not returning a window object. The other one proposed the the window.open call had to be within the same function body as the method handling the event. The comments on that post affirmed this suspicion, but I decided to look into it myself.

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