Trent Richardson
Timepicker
Fetch Ideas
Impromptu
I’m excited to announce another great release of jQuery Timepicker Addon! This release brings many fixes and a new feature or two. First thank you to everyone who provided fixes, translations, and bug reports. While I can’t get to every bug report, I do value and appreciate them. With this new version we bring the following fixes and features:
- Fix: Option getter/setter
- Improvement: SliderAccess integration
- Addition: Added Norwegian translation
- Fix: Check for tp_inst in gotoToday method
- Fix: Swallowing date parsing errors
- Fix: Update Russian translation
- Fix: beforeShow now returns a value
- Fix: missing semicolons
- Fix: time parsing bug (“tt h:mm”)
- Fix: trim extra spaces after newly formatted time
- Addition: New $.datepicker.formatTime method
- Addition: Added Korean Translation
- Fix: Typo in Hebrew translation
As always you can check out the timepicker over at the timepicker documentation or get involved over at Timepicker’s Github page. Thanks Aagain!
This is HOT! You have a new website, which is a bit complex. You’re afraid your users don’t understand where all the features and functionality is located. What do you do? You give them a quick tour of the site!
Impromptu can now position itself per “state”. If you’re unfamiliar with states check out the documentation. A state is similar to a wizard step. It only makes sense that each step be able to position itself in specific locations. The result is a touring like functionality. You can still do all the fun form stuff you did before.
Per state you can now pass in a “position” option, which is a hash with the following properties:
- container: a jquery selector of the anchor element.
- x: The horizontal offset from the origin from the anchor’s position.
- y: The vertical offset from the origin from the anchor’s position.
- arrow: where to position the arrow.
Not only tours, but you can also create highly functional tooltips. Impromptu just stepped up to another level from the competition, leading the way for all tooltip, modal, and touring javascript plugins!
I’ve provided a great example in the documentation, and of course a tour of Impromptu itself, so head on over!
I was pretty amazed when I first saw Impress.js. It’s ability to take a very simple html page and use transformations to create a presentation phenomenal. This plays right in to the hands of developers who want to create something snazzy, but do not have the video experience to do so. It is also probably worth noting that it has likely been done before, but this is the first I’ve seen (I didn’t do much research on it, I was happy with what I saw).
Its process is simple, line up multiple container elements inside a container with id=”impress”, and supply those elements with a variety of data coordinates and scaling attributes, resulting in something like:
<div id="block1" class="step" data-x="1000" data-y="1500" data-rotate="90" data-scale="2">
<p>This is a test</p>
</div>
Impress will take the coordinates and scale and place them on your canvas. You can also apply 3D effects too using the z for the 3rd dimension and rotate on the x and y axis:
<div class="block2" data-x="1500" data-y="2000" data-z="-100" data-rotate-x="-40" data-rotate-y="10" data-scale="2">
<p>This is a test</p>
</div>
Thats all, just line up these different containers in order and Impress does the rest. Style them up a little and you have a snazzy presentation! I will leave you with simple demo I came up with for CarBounce.com
After some time the standard jQueryUI themes can get stale, boring, monotonous, and you need a fresh look. I’ve rounded up a couple very customized, non-”run of the mill” themes you should take a look at.
Absolution (Github) is a very clean theme with support for Uniform and Wijmo. Uniform, as its name indicates, styles form elements to have a uniform look, across all browsers. Drastically, improving the consistency of appearance. Wijmo is a snazzy widget collection providing both an “Open” (open source) and “Complete” (commercial) set of widgets. The developer has a few example widgets on their site showing off the look on all widgets. Another bonus is that development is handled with LESS, making it super easy to tweak. I will definitely keep this close by for future development!
A second theme worth a look is Aristo (Github), a port of Cappuccino. It has a bit more of an OSX look, but still a very clean, beautiful theme. An example of all widgets are included on the developer’s site.
Just looking over the Absolution I am impressed with how LESS makes this look so more portable and themable than if only the CSS were provided. I definitely need to get up to speed on using LESS and the compiler. Better keep an eye out for integration on an upcoming project ;)
Both of these themes appear to work very well with Timepicker as well as the SliderAccess plugin, and are a nice compliment to most any jQueryUI based project! I’m still on the hunt for more quality custom jQueryUI themes for projects, so if you know of any please post them!
A while back I discussed how to use the new sqlsrv extension for php to retrieve multiple result sets at a time from stored proceedures. This was indeed helpful when you need to retrieve related data and avoid multiple calls to stored proceedures. The down side is this was using a rather expensive (but good) database engine. Also, until recently, there was absolutely no support for the sqlsrv php extension on unix based servers. How can the open source world tap into such functionality?
PostgreSQL has the ability to return multiple cursors to result sets. Using this we can achieve the same effect with php with a little magic. Lets take a look at a simple function which returns three queries by way of refcursor type. Also not that I said “function”, not “procedure”, but never fear, 6 of one, half dozen of the other as far as this topic goes:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION test_get_users(userID integer) RETURNS SETOF refcursor AS $$
DECLARE
ref1 refcursor;
ref2 refcursor;
ref3 refcursor;
BEGIN
OPEN ref1 FOR
SELECT id, name, email FROM users;
RETURN NEXT ref1;
OPEN ref2 FOR
SELECT id FROM users WHERE is_active=1;
RETURN next ref2;
OPEN ref3 FOR
SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = userID;
RETURN next ref3;
RETURN;
END;
$$ LANGUAGE plpgsql;