iOS – Habit List

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 21, 2012

Habit List

Intuitive and flexible, Habit List helps you create good habits and break unhealthy ones. Stay on track, keep your to-do list uncluttered, and see big changes through little steps

The app I always wanted to write (plus a tonne of others I'm guessing) is out. I really like the features of this one. If I ever got around to writing my own I would limit the amount of habit trails to five.

I've found that the more I've wanted to do the more chance I have to get distracted. So I just focus on just doing one or two things at a time. That's it.

HN discussion

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Flotr2

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 17, 2012

Flotr2

Flotr2 is a library for drawing HTML5 charts and graphs. It is a branch of flotr which removes the Prototype dependency and includes many improvements

Graph all the things!

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LinkedIn For iPad: using local storage for snappy mobile apps

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 15, 2012

Write up by Akhilesh Gupta

We've found HTML 5 local storage to be an effective way to improve an application's performance, both in terms of time and space requirements:

  • Temporarily storing recently fetched data results in a tremendous improvement in application responsiveness. It provides the user the ability to move around the application quickly without waiting for network requests to finish for previously viewed data.
  • More than one web view in the native application can share fetched data seamlessly.
  • Memory constraints in mobile devices can be overcome by using local storage to store and populate temporary objects in memory when required.
  • Storing complicated HTML document fragments from the stream to in local storage can decrease memory footprint and rendering time while scrolling through the stream.

I'm going to give using local storage a go to speed up a web app. Caching so no request needs to be made to the server feels like a simple optimisation.

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An Introduction to Application Development with Catalyst and Perl

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 15, 2012

Henry Van Styn with a thorough introduction

Catalyst is the latest in the evolution of open-source Web development frameworks. Written in modern Perl and inspired by many of the projects that came before it, including Ruby on Rails, Catalyst is elegant, powerful and refined. It's a great choice for creating any Web-based application from the simple to the very complex.

Always good to see Perl love.

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Be Cordial or Be on Your Way

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 15, 2012

Kenneth Reitz

Every once in while, maintainers and community members will shun and insult a contributor's work. This is a perfect example of what you should never do.

Don't worry about non-constructive feedback. It serves no purpose. Realize that some people just take things way too seriously. Tell them to be on their way.

The art of criticism is an complex skill. It's not just pointing out the negatives only. It's explaining why something doesn't achieve a goal and what could be a better way of achieving it.

Learning is hard when people shut down the doors to understanding the "right" way to achieve goal.

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This is what happens when drummers write Javascript

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 15, 2012

Check out the video here

wildlifecontrol, reddit

Just to make it clear: this is not a video. Pure JavaScript, CSS, and HTML with the help of the SoundCloud API.

Think of it as a scripted visualization. Although the story is linear, certain elements are random, making each viewing unique. The scenes are rendered on a “pixel” grid of HTML divs. Every time we get a playback timing event from SoundCloud, we check if a new sixteenth note has passed, and if so, the JavaScript renders the appropriate sprites on the video frame. This keeps the action precisely timed with the audio. The sprites are JavaScript objects that specify which colors to use and how to arrange them. Since we need to keep things lightweight and efficient, the general strategy is to break the scenes down into reusable pieces and animate them on the fly using math.

Very cool.

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giving.github.com

By Joshua Lay | Published: May 15, 2012

giving.github, discussion on reddit

→ are you a charity, scientist or engineer in need of programming help?
→ are you a programmer who wants to spend just five minutes helping make the world a better place?

The giving.github.com project was inspired by an epiphany that there is more to life than work. Coders too can actively make the world a better place!

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