As promised on Facebook, I would write a post, and after so much time between posts I have accrued many thoughts and have finished a decent amount of projects. The second point being the most important. One simple website for an organization that I am involved with was created in two days, the coding for a larger project for a friend's business wrapped up, and the backed administration tools to an enterprise's various businesses were tied together. This purpose of this post is not to boast about how much I can get done, but to reflect and share what I've learned from working on these projects one after another to get them complete while I have the time to complete them.
After immersing myself in coding, in both new projects and older projects, I became better at seeing how to code. There is an older site that I created about two years ago, and I had to do some maintenance. To be honest, I will never design a site like this again. What I mean by this is, if the site were never built and I was approached by this client today to build the website, I would approach everything completely different. This is a good thing, although as an IS developer it is my goal to achieve re-usability, I have to say that it has only been in the last year that I've really approached website development from the IS perspective. Before, I approached web development as a graphic designer, which is still an important feature of why I love the web. However, now that I've learned more coding and have devoted time to more that one site within a short period of time, something in the way I approach site builds has changed for the better. It is one thing to build a site, wait for another to come along, build this one, and continue that process as I have been (unfortunately, this may be unavoidable). Having taken on more than one site at the same time has made me a better developer. Completing them in a short amount of time helped me hone my skills.
Other than developing my coding skills over this time, I have also started to build upon my coding preferences. The first language that I picked up was PHP due to its reliability. If one has read one of my last posts, then my past hatred for JavaScript is known. However, I am starting to swing toward JS. Actually, I think I'm getting pretty good at it, and hopefully will become better at using it for even more dynamic site building. The reason for my change is the way it writes like Java, more so than PHP. Actually, due to the reason that PHP does not use dot notation for object functions bugs me, and the need to use the dollar sign every time a variable needs to be used is a pain. Certainly, I cannot call myself an expert in these two languages; indeed, I am more of a learned novice. Honestly, I have taught myself everything I know about the two, minus how "C-like" language logic works.
Again, this ties into why it was so good to churn out the various projects that I did this week. After this week I have become faster at seeing what needs to be done and coding it. Not only am I getting better, I have cleaned room for the next project, which will be a design bore from the knowledge that I have honed during my break. I hope that this post will help those who read it to put their noses to the grind. Until next time, I will just have to be irritated with the fact that an XML's leaf node is the text node of a declared element and not just the value of that element!
2012-03-22Tweet
back to jDesign StudioTaking some of the same concepts before and applying them to a different application, a slide show that fades each image in and out was created. For many reasons I have been reluctant to upgrade my Internet Explorer to v9, and I think I am paying for it now, as this script does not work at all. I believe the reason is that IE seems to lump all background image styles into one line after it reads any styles; however, this does not explain why the image does not change as the CSS property to change the image is actually just shifting a sliding div just like the thumb pic slider I created. Trying not to publish anything that does not work in all major browsers is something that I am trying to avoid. Therefor, I will revisit this at a later time. To take a look, click here.
2011-08-01Tweet
back to jDesign StudioThis was supposed to be the last post, yet what started out as an explanation turned into a discussion piece. The following is a small start of a slide show or something that resembles my portfolio page except there is no interaction with the thumbs except for the movement. This took me a while to get just right, due to various reasons, not withholding IE issues as well (okay, also Firefox and Chrome to be fair). It works using a non standard DOM funciton, *.offsetWidth. However the major browsers support this function which returns the width of the element including any padding and borders.
The way it works is there is a large window that contains all the images in a single line. It is important to set this element to contain the images in one line, which proved difficult because for some unknown reason the width required was larger than the image width times the number of images, even with the padding and margin set to zero. Now that I am thinking of it, a float left might just force all the edges together. The string of images is set into another div that is set to the height of the images and set to a width that fits the layout. This window's overflow is set to hidden. Using javascript the position of the inner div is changed according to the pointer position. Fun right...Now all I need to do is figure out how to slow this down a bit, as the flow is too fast for my taste.
To see the experiment click here.
2011-07-30Tweet
back to jDesign StudioJavaScript has been one Internet technology that I have delayed experimenting with due to its reliance on the client's software. For web designers, this aspect is common knowledge and often weighs on a developer's patience. In short, what works on one browser may not work on another. In the past I have always been optimistic that all browsers would eventually conform to the W3C standardization. Indeed, right before the hand-held screen device explosion that occurred in 2007 with release of the iPhone, the most popular brands of browsers did start to come to a decent uniformity concerning rendering and execution. Certainly, there were still gaps which existed, but for all practical purposes, if a site was designed with clean code, apart form JS workarounds, would function without hiccups in any browser.
For the most part this is still the case; however, with the inundation of tablet devices, will rendering and functionality of site still be reliable? Most likely, until HTML5 truly takes over. There might not be a great connection between HTML5 and these tablet devices, but with the personal computer now taking on more forms than just desktop and laptop, the need for a standard format is imperative, or what would be the point of the World Wide Web. If Netscape and Microsoft never butted heads in the past, there might be a Microsoft Wide Web, a Netscape version, as well as an Apple and other versions. The entire Web might have turned up divided and inoperable. Large companies would salivate over such control, however the openness of the W3 is its greatest strength.
What is interesting, is that on a search for Web development positions, many of the posts require a great knowledge of HTML5. HTML5 as of today is still in a working draft stage, and even if it does become the W3C recommendation, it is not likely that it will be finalized until the next decade*. It is true that the standardization does not need to be established for HTML5 not to work, but why work with something that is half built. In running my browsers through the HTML5 browser test, the best failed to reach over 75 percent of the abilities which HTML5 is supposed to offer, with most being closer to 50 percent. On the list of other browsers the site showed, I apparently had settings on Chrome that gave me one point higher than the highest listing, which was indeed Chrome. Text and audio are both handled well throughout any browser, however it is video that is the problem. Animation and video are the two things that will define the Web as time continues. Even before today YouTube was one of the main features in Time's 2006 Person of the Year. Although it would seem that the Web and video will continue to become ever so synonymous, without a truly interoperable format, this may never happen.
Maybe the development of computer technologies is just to great to put a standardization on one such format, or perhaps it is due largely to the patents held by computer organizations on codices that hamper the adoption of a standardization. Ether way, this may be what divides the amateur from the professional. As for now I'll stick to XHTML and CSS2 for clients. Why you may ask? Try running IE8 through the CSS3 test.
2011-07-29Tweet
back to jDesign StudioWelcome everyone to the redesigned jDeisgn Studio. I have been meaning to do this for some time however, it was the look that I could not decide upon. Despite this, the change needed to be done in order to showcase all the experience and knowledge that I have gained since I published the original site in 2006. This probably will not be the last form of this site, and I hope more will be added in the near future. The first thing from this point will be to finish up my own CMS, and then mobilizing the site. I also have sites in incorporating Facebook plug-ins, but for now I at least can show off all my projects. Come back soon and check out the changes as I announce them.
2011-07-27Tweet
|
© Copyright 2011 jDesign Studio
|
Located in the Greater Baltimore, MD Area