2meter3 » Ralf Stoltze

web developer, frontend engineer

2010-03-04 en

Learn Something Every Day – Windows Folders

Today’s Learn Something Every Day fact was a real eye-catcher and caused some lunch break experiments in the office:

You can’t name a folder ‘con’ in Microsoft Windows

You can't name a folder 'con' in Microsoft Windows

Need some background? See MSDN – Naming Files, Paths, and Namespaces:

Do not use the following reserved device names for the name of a file: CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, and LPT9. Also avoid these names followed immediately by an extension; for example, NUL.txt is not recommended.

2010-02-21 de

Yatzy Jahresstatistik 2009 – 808.896 Spiele!

Ob ich es nun will oder nicht, der Würfel-Klassiker Yatzy ist der Quotenrenner innerhalb meines beschaulichen 2meter3-Universums. Bereits seit 2001 im Netz, konnte sich das Spielchen im Laufe der Jahre ganz gut (und ohne besonderes Zutun) in den Suchmaschinen positionieren.

Zeit für ein paar bunte, rein empirische Statistiken aus dem Jahr 2009 – schließlich hat Google seine Chart API (jetzt: Google Chart Tools/Image Charts) aktualisiert und wartet darauf, ausprobiert zu werden.

Fazit: Ich mag die API nicht wirklich.

Weiterlesen Read on

2010-01-27 en

hoverFlow Plugin featured in CSS-Tricks Screencast

Wow, what a big surprise and honor!

Last Friday, Chris Coyier of the popular web design community CSS-Tricks (who states to have about 1.6 million pageviews per month, 40.000 RSS subscriptions) featured my hoverFlow plugin in a dedicated screencast. I mean, I was used to see some mentions on bookmarking sites or short reviews, but we are talking about an almost 20 (!) minute top quality video here.

Back in December, Chris already wrote an article called Fully Executing jQuery Animations Without Queuing. He tried different approaches and came up with a first solution. I replied and pointed him to my hoverFlow plugin. He seemed to like it and added a link to his article. Mission completed, I thought, and forgot about it.

And now, almost a month later, Chris covers the topic again in screencast #79: Complete/Non-Queuing Animations with jQuery.

When you use jQuery’s .animate() function with something like a hover event, those animations will “queue up”. That is, if you hover multiple times, that animation will fire multiple times. The classic method to prevent this is to throw in a .stop() before the animation, but I find this abrupt and not ideal, because it prevents the animation from completing a full cycle. In this screencast we’ll look at a few attempts at solving this and ultimately using a plugin that does a great job.

The screencast is really worth a look. Chris not only explains the problem and finally integrates hoverFlow into a demo site, he also has a lot of fun doing so. You can see him unsuccessfully pasting hex colors from Adobe’s kuler application, exclaiming a lot of “Oohs” and “Aahs” when describing the beauty of animations, and finally moaning about missing ads for his screencast.

Well done, Chris, and thank you very much!

2010-01-22 en

Browser Market Shares visualized

How I love cool visualizations! Especially when you can direcly interact with them in the browser. This one shows browser market shares for the last few years. It’s based on Flash and a framework called Axiis, but I’m sure somebody could make this with canvas, too.

Although this representation is not the best way to understand the data (you cannot compare by area, since the basic form is a circle and the area increases for every year), it’s a real eye-catcher. I mean, showing browser stats with a huge Firefox, how cool is that?