Since the arrival of HTML5 and with it the increasing number of applications built for mobile, more and more JavaScript APIs have surfaced to meet the demand; one of these APIs is the Vibration API. As the name suggests, the Vibration API allows you to control the vibration of a device, by setting it to vibrate for a certain length of time, or within a pre-defined pattern. Browser support ... Firstly, this is a mobile technology. Don't try and make your iMac vibrate, it won't work. For mobile browsers, the...
Browser tabs have revolutionized the way we browse the Web, but they've given us an tricky problem: developers can't tell if the tab their site is displayed in is being viewed. To solve that problem we have the Visibility API, which allows us to test whether the browser content can be seen, and respond accordingly. It's ideal for sites that play music for example, to pause the playback whilst the user is away. The Page Visibility API comes with several properties: document.hidden: This property returns...
In the first part of this mini-series we requested an for an API key from Tumblr, then we used it to retrieve data and the avatar for a blog. In this concluding part, we’ll retrieve some posts that are a little more complex. Getting posts ... So far our calls have been simple, because there was no json to interate through. But now, because we’re looking for a single post from multiple posts, we need to do a little more to arrive at our data. Our first step is to determine our URL (replace your-api-key with...
Every well known service on the Web has an API we can play with to get its data feed and Tumblr is no exception; the popular blogging platform has a really intuitive API that we can use to get anything from avatars to posts with links and images. In this article I’ll give you a feel for this API and teach you how to make some simple requests. Getting an API key ... If you’re familiar with working with this kind of API, you’ll know that we usually need to create and application and request an API key in order...
In this post, we are going to explore open source fonts and CSS pre-processing. I am going to give you an easy way to add web fonts to any website in just a few lines of code. What are Google Fonts? ... Google Fonts makes it quick and easy for everyone to use web fonts. Google Fonts is a collection of open source fonts that are hosted on Google's servers and with their API, it is easy for anyone to integrate their fonts into any web project. Best of all, it's free. (To learn more and explore the hundreds of fonts available,...
One of the things we struggle everyday as programmers is productivity; we want to do things better and at the same time faster, everyday. This is something we can’t control, we now have more to do: more scripts to download, to install, and even more frameworks to work with. In every project we end up downloading at least one jQuery plugin and even jQuery itself; every time this happens we need to go the plugin’s website, download it, or link to it. Even though we’re used to this, and it doesn’t even...
Color pickers are everywhere on the Web today, we see them in a lot in forms and in customization tools. Even though it’s possible to create this with HTML, JavaScript is a better solution because it provides greater support. Today, we’ll use picker.js to create a simple color picker that you can use in your applications. The first step towards creating this simple interface is to have our HTML ready, in this case I simply created a button and a span in which we will present the color to the user: <button...
Google Chrome is the most widely used browser, and for good reason: it’s fast, reliable, has a great set of developer tools and to top it all off, it has literally hundreds of extensions in the Google Store you can take advantage of. The other amazing thing is that you can build your own extensions using just HTML, CSS and JavaScript, so it’s not like you need to even learn any new languages. You already know this, you only need to figure out how to apply it to Chrome. There are times you need something specific...