Author: Tom (Page 365 of 427)

Ending Development on Slide Note

November 30, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

In late 2010, I released a small jQuery plugin called Slide Note that made it easy to add sliding notifications to your website or web application. It included a variety of features such as the ability to control where it was displayed on the page, custom callbacks, and Ajax integration.

Eventually, I built a small WordPress plugin around but retired it shortly after the time required to maintain and support it exceeded the amount of time I had and, honestly, the amount of joy I was getting out of the plugin.

Anyway, I continued to maintain the jQuery plugin for sometime, but it’s time to retire that plugin, too.

An Improved JavaScript Alert with Alertify.js

November 29, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Finding JavaScript resources is almost too easy – aside from a quick Google search or looking through some of the stuff that’s available on GitHub, you can find practically almost anything you need.

But finding something that has a nice API, is lightweight, and doesn’t require any third-party library is becoming a bit rare. Continue reading

Talking About WordPress in High School

November 29, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

This past year, I’ve participated in a number of different meetups and speaking engagements all of which are oriented around blogging, WordPress, development, or something similar.

Generally speaking, I’ve enjoyed the events that I’ve attended. I always try to keep it really laid back (I make a lot of my presentations in Paper, even), and do what I can to make the events more of a discussion rather than a lecture.

For the most part, it goes well, but yesterday was a bit of a different audience: high school students.

Object Oriented and Procedural Code in WordPress Plugin Programming

November 28, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

One of the things that makes developing for WordPress so fun is the nature of its extensibility through plugins. When it comes to WordPress plugin programming, there are actually two ways that you can write your plugins:

Object-Oriented Programming
Procedural Programming

In the lastest series running on Envato, Stephen Harris and I provide an in-depth discussion on both of these strategies.

Everything’s An App (Even If We Don’t Know It)

November 27, 2012 / Tom / 0 Comments

Ever since smartphones have become mainstream, there are apps for almost everything. Prior to this revolution (if that’s what you’d like to call it), we had phones that a had a few [weak] tools on them, but most of our work was done on a computer.

And the computer had software, or computer programs, or applications – whatever you’d like to call them – and that’s how we got work done.

This is likely going to make me sound a bit weird, but for the past few months I’ve been periodically asking people how they define an app. Of course, I don’t ask it like that. Instead, it’s goes something more like:

So, hey, what’s an app?

And nine times out of 10, I end up getting the same response:

A little program (or icon, even!) on a phone.

Some people have responded that it’s also something on their tablet. Fair enough.

I definitely attribute this change in vernacular to Apple. After all, they’re the one’s who started the App Store with the vision that people could create an app for anything.

But what is an app?

From a problem-solving standpoint – not even a computing standpoint – I have this idea that almost everything is an app.