Hacker News is a fantastic source for up-to-the-minute happenings in the nerd world. It's highly dynamic - like a calm river of nerditry, in which items of interest ebb and flow unceasingly over the front page. Unfortunately it is also addictive - and the highly procrastinative or inquisitive (or worse still, both) individual can become snared like a reed, prevented from floating productively down the working day.
So here's a bookmarklet that aims to make things both better and worse. It assumes (naturally) that you leave Hacker News open in a tab, on the front page, all day. Naturally. It automatically updates the page whenever you return to the tab. All of the changes are (fairly subtly) highlighted, so it requires but a quick glance to see if you've missed something important.
Read on for more »
Here's today's fun-with-mobiles tidbit of pain. The extremely entertaining Geolocation API (entertaining to use, not to read) provides the current timestamp in DOMTimeStamp format along with geoposition responses. But it seems browsers and devices aren't 100% in agreement on either what a DOMTimeStamp is, or what it is when it comes back from a geolocation request.
Take for example, this DOMTimeStamp test case. In Firefox 4, I receive:
Read on for more »
Update: problem solved(ish)! See below...
Not again you Apple monsters! Last time it was multi touch that you decided to take from us, this time it's geolocation. Upgrading my iPhone 3GS to iOS4.3 caused a mobile web app I'm working on to start throwing errors. Danged if I can figure out why. Here's what I know so far...
Calling navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition in mobile safari works fine - returning a normal position object. However, when added to the home screen and run as fullscreen app (using the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag) it would not ask for permission to access geo features, but immediately fail returning the error:
Permission error; The operation couldn't be completed. (kCLErrorDomain error 1.)
Looks like a permission error to my professional eye. But why? Dunno. I made this test app, called "Geoful". If you could have a go and report back I'd be most grateful.
Read on for more »
www.color.com was released yesterday to great fan-fare: primarily thanks to the news they had secured 41 million dollars in funding (not a typo) for an app that let's you take and share photos with other poeple (a typo) in the nearby area.
The idea is, you're at a party and take a photo - and everyone there "gets it" - so it's like a photo album of the event without having to do any manual sharing or organising.
I like the concept, but mostly because I thought of it. Ok, no, I didn't think of it: but some time ago I spent a bit of effort trying to convince some fellow nerds to implement something similar. Sure, it was focused on chat instead of photos - but had a photo-sharing aspect. Like a geo-located chat room: a real life Habbo where you could extend or shrink the circle you were interested in, "elastically".
Read on for more »
While doing a little refreshing around these parts I noticed that the "fading bubbles" that I have were chewing up a ridiculous amount of CPU when the page loaded. I had 15 or so bubbles rigged to fade in verrrrrry slowly - over 20 seconds - after window.onload fired. I thought I must have had some crazy infinite loop or some such, but no... after whittling things down I ended up creating this test page:
jQuery long fade test
If you open up Activity Monitor and click the "big fade" button, the screen will slowly fade in (to background colour #bada55, naturally) and your CPU will say bye-bye. Similarly, if you fade in a bunch of items over a long time you'll see a pretty serious drain too.
I haven't gone looking over on the mailing lists to see if this is a "known issue", or started digging into the source, 'cause I'm a lil' pressed for time at the moment - but if you found this page while googlin' to fix your fading woes, I feel your pain and will tell you to do what I shoulda done: use CSS transitions!
Finally, while checking I used the correct spelling of "whittling" I found this statement on the official whittling website:
Welcome to the world of whittling, a hobby for some, an obsession for others, a joy for all.
I'm a fan of whittling and all, but that just seems like a logical fallacy to me.
Here's one from the "hey-how-did-I-do-that?"department. I'm not sure what version of iOS this feature was introduced, but I accidentally discovered that on standard apps you can swipe left or right on a list item to reveal a "delete" button.