January 30 2007 by
Andrew Powell
Jeff Han was recently featured in
Fast Company magazine. The stuff that he has developed will genuinely change the way we interface with computers. It's all very "Minority Report"ish, but these interfaces are reality. At first glance, it all looks a bit Star Warsy, but it really does work. In these days of today's hardware being obsolete tomorrow, very little in the tech world can really impress me. Han's creations are the first things that have really made me sit up and say "WOW" for a long time. Read the article and decide for yourself.
Read the Fast Company article.
Posted in General | 
0 comments
January 29 2007 by
Andrew Powell
Next in line in this series is the tab widget. This is pretty much interchangeable with the accordion widget, as far as the source data is concerned. All you need to do is make sure the CSS and JavaScript are pointed to the proper location of the files, the same as the accordion tag. You can customize the CSS to you liking.
I know
Ray has something like this up on
RIA Forge. This version takes a different approach to reach the same solution. I'm not saying mine is any better than his or vice versa. It's just two different ways to achieve the same solution. It is up to you, the developer, to choose the one that works best for you and your skill level.
As before, the file in in the download link below.
Posted in ColdFusion | General | Spry | XML | AJAX | 5 comments
January 29 2007 by
Andrew Powell
Russ Brown has a great article on
copying your workspace layout. This is a useful read for anyone who works on multiple projects within multiple workspaces, but wants to keep a consistant workspace layout.
Posted in General | CFEclipse | 0 comments
January 29 2007 by
Andrew Powell
First we had custom tags for the accordion widget, then the tab widget. Those were easy, in comparison to this latest one: The Spry Textfield Validation Widget. The Textfield Validation Widget allows for some pretty strong validation of different data types and formats. It also allows for some skinning via CSS, which something that can be pretty powerful.
This custom tag reminds me a lot of the client side validation generated by the CFFORM tag. The upshot is that the javascript generated here is much more lightweight than that generated by CFFORM.
The validation is made a lot prettier by some nifty CSS, but it is just as powerful. Place the JS and CSS files on your server, point the tag to them, and include the other required attributes. it's that simple.
The link is below, just like the others.
Posted in ColdFusion | General | Spry | Adobe | AJAX | 1 comments
January 29 2007 by
Andrew Powell
"A widget is a block of HTML, CSS and JavaScript that encapsulates a piece of advanced user interface." - Adobe Labs
Just when you though Spry couldn't get any easier, it did.
As a ColdFusion developer, I know, by looking at the HTML markup for a widget, that there has to be a way that I can generate that markup with CF and make it even easier to use. This has been the primary motivation behind the slew of custom tags that I have been releasing over the past couple of days. Spry widgets are now, from our perspective, a block of CFML, CSS, and Javascript that encapsulate that piece of advanced UI. (i.e. Accordions, Tabbed Panels, Menu Bars, etc.)
Read more...
Posted in ColdFusion | General | Spry | Adobe | AJAX | 0 comments