Author Archives: Zach Leatherman

Deferreds and a Better Geolocation API

By Zach Leatherman | Published: November 7, 2011
Warning, this article is intended for Deferred unbelievers to convince them that Deferred objects are both easy and useful. If you’re already a Deferred object expert, you might want to skip this one. Earlier this year I was given the opportunity to attend the jQuery Conference in San Francisco. I was delighted to go, able [...]
Posted in JavaScript |

A Mobile Web Divided

By Zach Leatherman | Published: August 8, 2011
Unless you’ve been living comfortably under an elaborate dwelling constructed entirely out of rock, you’re aware of the growing popularity of smartphones and other mobile devices. With that growth we’ve witnessed a bumper crop of component libraries and frameworks to enable us to create mobile web sites and applications. One Web, Two Web Primer There [...]
Posted in Application Design |

FitText + BigText: A Tale of Two Plugins

By Zach Leatherman | Published: May 12, 2011
Earlier this week, @TrentWalton tweeted: We at @paravelinc happily present to you FitText—a jQuery plugin for inflating web type: http://t.co/1NuQg5z Naturally, I wondered how it compared to BigText, a plugin of my own creation to Make Text Big. Trent continued: It’s in the GitHub readme, but I want to recognize BigText from @zachleat as another [...]
Posted in JavaScript |

Pragmatic Progressive Enhancement

By Zach Leatherman | Published: May 9, 2011
A few weeks ago at the jQuery Conference (San Francisco 2011), Nicholas Zakas delivered a wildly entertaining presentation entitled “Progressive Enhancement 2.0″ (slides 65-79 are especially great), updating the basic rules of PE for a modern age. While prior Progressive Enhancement techniques included layering content, presentation, and behavior (conveniently represented as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). [...]
Posted in Application Design, Opinion |

HTML5 vs. Native Applications, The Presentation

By Zach Leatherman | Published: March 5, 2011
This slide deck was prepared for my guest lecture at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s spring course on Mobile Application Development (BSAD 8916-005). The course was developed in partnership with Google’s University Relations program and included a variety of business and management students with limited programming experience. My lecture was approximately six weeks into the course, [...]
Posted in Presentations | Tagged , , , , , |

Raging Netflix Queue, a Google Chrome Extension

By Zach Leatherman | Published: February 21, 2011
The premise is simple. When attempting to find movies to watch in my local theater, I often stumble upon titles that I feel to be more rental quality than theater quality. So I wanted an easier way to add those movies to my Netflix queue. I created a Google Chrome extension to accomplish just that. [...]
Posted in Projects, Web Browsers | Tagged , , , |

The JavaScript Testing Challenge Winner

By Zach Leatherman | Published: February 14, 2011
Congratulations to Steve Love, who was the first to complete The JavaScript Testing Challenge. He wins a copy of Christian Johansen‘s book, Test-Driven JavaScript Development. If you code for a living, testing will make your life easier. Even though the contest is over, I encourage you to go through the steps and complete the original [...]
Posted in Contests, JavaScript | Tagged , |

Et tu, X-UA-Compatible?

By Zach Leatherman | Published: February 6, 2011
Or, the story of how I learned that the X-UA-Compatible header/meta tag is NOT the same as the Internet Explorer 8+ Compatibility View button. Please note that the following information may be common knowledge, as this behavior is as described in the pre-requisite Microsoft documentation on the subject. However, I feel this behavior to be [...]
Posted in JavaScript, Web Browsers | Tagged , |