GNU Typist
I finally decided to actually learn to touch type this year. And while there are a large number of free websites that offer lessons I found this program to be the most simple and effective.
It can be installed on the Mac with Homebrew:
$ brew install gnu-typist
And run with:
$ gtypist
Now I suppose it’s just down to practice, practice, practice…
Backbone.ModelFactory
Nice caching system built on top of Backbone.Model. It ensures that your application never has more than one instantiated model with the same id at one time.
Provides a factory for generating model constructors which will never produce multiple instances of a model with the same unique identifier. It allows a developer to manage model sharing between views more easily by maintaining an internal cache of model instances based on the value of their
idAttributeproperty.
I first saw this implementation in a post about building the next Soundcloud, it’s great to see someone making it portable.
What No One Told You About Z-Index
Nice detailed description of the intricacies of z-index and how the stacking order of elements on a page are calculated.
Z-index seems so simple: elements with a higher z-index are stacked in front of elements with a lower z-index, right? Well, actually, no. This is part of the problem with z-index. It appears so simple, so most developers don’t take the time to read the rules.
It’s also worth checking out some of the other posts on this blog. There’s sone nice stuff there.
String.js
Nice set of functions for working with strings. No more, no less.
jQuery.avgrund
Slick little modal dialog that zooms the page out when the overlay appears. Could probably cause motion sickness in some people though.
ClearLess
Fantastic collection of LESS mixins created and maintained by Mark Perkins over at Clearleft. Covering everything from vendor prefixes, sprites, grid system and common utilities the collection is extremely comprehensive.
The core tenets of this mixin library are to avoid output bloat wherever possible (via duplicated properties etc) and to provide flexibile, configurable solutions to the problems that are addressed by the library (i.e. by using Modernizr classes, browser hacks or not, etc). The aim is to give the author the benefits of reusable shortcuts without obliterating personal style and generating bloated stylesheets.
The project is well documented and provides great best practice advice for working with LESS in general.
Quasi-literals: embedded DSLs in ECMAScript.next
Quasi-literals allow string interpolation and transformation. Shame about the crazy syntax as this one new language feature that could prove extremely useful.
Quasi-literals are a syntactic construct that facilitates the implementation of embedded domain-specific languages (DSLs) in JavaScript. They are currently slated for inclusion in the next version of ECMAScript. This post explains how quasi-literals work.
Seamless iframes
Great slide deck from Ben Vinegar of Disqus on seamless iframes and how to use them now. Also worth checking out is his book on Third Party JavaScript.
Third-Party JavaScript Development: The Future!
Lovely list of fancy new features in the HTML5 spec for creators of embedded applications.
There’s a great deal of browser technology on the way that will affect the way you write code. Here, I’ll focus specifically on tech that has relevance to third-party JavaScript (3PJS) developers.
The new iframe sandbox and seamless attributes are particularly interesting.