February 26, 2014 in Learn
Uploading Files with AJAX
The introduction of AJAX marked a huge leap forward in the history of the web. The ability to communicate with a web server without reloading the page has revolutionised how web applications are built. The primary technology that enables AJAX…
February 21, 2014 in Learn
Registering Protocol Handlers for Your Web Applications
Protocol handlers allow you to inform the browser that your web app is capable of handling links and URLs with certain schemes. Using the registerProtocolHandler method you are able to register your web app as a handler for schemes like…
February 4, 2014 in Learn
Getting Started with the Speech Synthesis API
With the introduction of products like Siri and Google Now, speech technology has really taken off in the past few years. Various organisations have been working on speech recognition and synthesis for decades, but it seems like only recently that…
January 29, 2014 in Learn
Why jQuery is the Most Popular JavaScript Library
John Resig released jQuery on August 26th, 2006 and changed the front-end development landscape forever. jQuery quickly arose to be the go to JavaScript framework. A number of other libraries came out around the same time such as MooTools and…
January 21, 2014 in Learn
Exploring the Battery Status API
With the rise in popularity of mobile web apps there’s been a big push to develop device APIs that allow web developers to reach out of the browser and access the underlying device hardware. We’ve seen the introduction of getUserMedia,…
January 16, 2014 in Learn
Accepting Voice Input in HTML5 Forms
The way that we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the past decade. Touch-screen devices and laptop trackpads have enabled a much more intuitive form of interaction than is achievable using a traditional mouse. These changes haven’t been limited…
January 16, 2014 in Learn
What is Unobtrusive JavaScript and Why it’s Important?
Unobtrusive JavaScript is a best practice methodology for attaching JavaScript to the front-end of a website. It’s an ideal to strive toward and something we should bear in mind whenever we’re adding JavaScript to a site. It is the separation…
January 3, 2014 in Learn
Improving Your Development Workflow with Yeoman
With so many great tools available to front-end web developers these days it can sometimes be difficult to understand how they all fit together. Deciding on a workflow that you’re happy with is often a very personal endeavour, but getting…
December 30, 2013 in Learn
Getting Started with Bower
There are now more libraries and frameworks available for front-end development than ever before. It’s not uncommon to have five or more of these libraries involved in a single project. But keeping track of all these libraries and making sure…
December 26, 2013 in Learn
Creating Immersive Experiences with the FullScreen API
Having the ability to take elements, or even entire pages fullscreen allows developers to create fully immersive experiences for the user. You can remove the distractions from other apps and help the user to focus on the task at hand….
December 23, 2013 in Learn
Building Multi-Touch Web Applications
With mobile web browsing now accounting for 15% of all global internet traffic building web applications targeted at mobile has become more important than ever. Building for mobile is very different to creating web applications targeted at the desktop environment….
December 19, 2013 in Learn
Timing JavaScript Code with High Resolution Timestamps
As the browser has evolved the possibilities of what can be achieved on the web have greatly increased. Technologies like Flash have given way to newcomers like Canvas and WebGL. But as we create more complex applications for the web…