A look we’ve seen utilized on a lot of sites recently is the sticky sidebar. That’s a sidebar that scrolls normally until it reaches the top of the screen, at which point it attaches itself to top of the viewport until you scroll back up the page. It’s an interesting piece of usability because it keeps the user in contact with a particular piece of navigation (often social media buttons). So today, we’re going to have a look at building a sticky sidebar using some simple jQuery and CSS. The HTML ......
Nowadays websites rely more and more on JavaScript to create dynamic interfaces, for some sites you may only need something like jQuery that works wonders when it comes to DOM manipulation but other times a template system may be more suitable, especially if your page will be constantly updating its data. Handlebars helps you with that by dynamically generating your HTML. It helps you get into using the View/Controller pattern while keeping your code cleaner and more maintainable. Using Handlebars...
Instagram is widely used, with literally millions of people constantly uploading pictures. It makes sense, with such a large user base, to create an API. Today we’ll be looking into how to use it. Authentication ... The first thing you need to do is to register as a developer with Instagram. You’ll need to register your application name, a description, your website and a redirect URL. After you’ve done this you’ll receive your Client ID and Client Secret, but this is where it gets a little tricky;...
In the last couple of months we’ve seen API after API being released, many of which make life easier. Today we’re going to focus on the Speech Synthesis API, which uses system libraries to speak, whatever you want, making the Web considerably more accessible. Browser support ... This API is fairly new, so not widely supported. Currently only Chrome Canary and Safari support it. (Safari supports it on desktop and mobile.) So, we can play with the API, but it’s not production ready unless we have...
With the introduction of CSS3 we’ve seen huge advancements in web technology, and the last few years have felt like golden ones for anyone working on the Web. One great addition that hasn’t been talked up enough is viewport units. They’re anew kind of CSS3 unit that allow you to size elements relative to the viewport. Browser support ... The browser support for viewport units is surprisingly good. There’s full support in all the latest desktop browsers. IE has had full support since IE9 (although...
We’re all used to browser notifications; we get them all the time on sites like Facebook and now, using the Notification API, we can actually push notifications to the desktop. Imagine a site performing a task whilst the user checks her email, she would still receive our completion notification on her desktop. Browser support ... At present, the Notification API is a working draft, so it’s not universally supported. However, it is supported by Chrome, Mozilla and Safari. Even more helpfully,...
We all know what auto complete looks like in input fields, and when we’re asking a user to enter dozens of answers, autocompleting is always a good idea. Even better than creating an autocomplete system is creating an auto-complete system that’s compatible everywhere, and that’s what lead me to stumble upon typeahead.js by Twitter. This is a fast and fully featured autocomplete library. It allows you to prefetch json files from your server, it then saves them in localStorage and when necessary...
If there is one thing a language needs to qualify as a programming language, it’s variables; they’re incredibly useful, save us a bunch of work and typing, and improve coding all-round. This is exactly what CSS didn’t have. Pre-processors like Sass and Less used them, but vanilla CSS never had variables. Until now. They’ve been on the horizon for a while, but only recently have variables started to be implemented in CSS, let’s take a look at how they work. Browser support ... Currently CSS...