Tools
Last week, I released https://fretboard.buzz, a free online tool that helps luthiers design fretboards for guitar, bass, mandolin, ukulele, and more. I’ve been playing guitar since I was a teenager in the late 80s, and got the bug for building guitars circa 2018. A chance encounter with
Tools
I’ve been wanting to revamp pdfobject.com to make it more modern and easier to read. This type of revamp is also a great way to stay up to date on the latest trends, like static site generators. After surveying the field, I decided to play with some Vue-based
Tips and Tricks
When developing web pages, I use MAMP.app or my Mac’s built-in Apache. Viewing the page means using an address such as http://localhost/mypage.html. If you use custom host names (especially easy with the excellent VirtualHostX.app), you may wind up with a localhost address such as
ramblings
I received a question from Bob (no, really), who wrote: I have a question about the newest version of Flash and its HTML publishing option using CreateJS. What do you think of that approach going forward? I started to write an email response but figured I should probably post it
ramblings
Back in 2011, I mentioned that Microsoft was about to halt development of the Silverlight plugin, that Flash mobile was being discontinued, and that Adobe recommended HTML5 for enterprise RIA development instead of Flex, which was being open-sourced. My post was a little long-winded, but the short version was: whoa,
web design and development
This is a journey into the madness of Internet Explorer. Yes, there is a happy ending. Jump to the end of the post if you just want the solution and don’t care about how we got there. The Scenario You want to embed a Flash SWF into your HTML
How-to
I’ve been reviewing bug submissions for the SWFObject project and was reminded of a big problem with SWFObject 2.2: the JavaScript technique it uses for detecting Internet Explorer does not work in Internet Explorer 9. SWFObject 2.2 currently uses an IE detection technique proposed by Andrea Giammarchi
JavaScript
PDFObject is a JavaScript utility I created in 2008 to embed PDFs in HTML documents. It was modeled on SWFObject. Three years have passed since PDFObject 1.0 was released, and the browser landscape has changed dramatically. I figured it’s time to dust off PDFObject and see if it
Project Updates
In 2008 I posted a quick writeup on how I dealt with cross-domain security issues for some of my e-learning courseware. Since then, I’ve had a lot of people contact me with various questions and requests for a working example. Tonight I decided to revisit the topic and whip
How-to
Here’s a handy way to determine if two JavaScript objects are identical without using a framework like jQuery or MooTools: var compare_objects = function (obj1, obj2) { var parameter_name; var compare = function (objA, objB, param) { var param_objA = objA[param], param_objB = typeof objB[param] === "undefined" ? false
accessibility
Introducing EasyCaptions: A simple system for adding captions and an interactive transcript to online videos. EasyCaptions uses progressive enhancement to provide the best possible experience for all visitors, regardless of their browser’s JavaScript, HTML5 or Flash support. Demonstration Background I don’t produce much video these days, but as
How-to
I’ve had to create a slew of forms over the last few months, and have become fond of textareas that auto-expand when they become filled. There are a number of MooTools scripts on the interwebs that can handle this task, but none of them suited me, and I generally