Versioning Language Features in JScript

Differences in JavaScript implementation between IE8-as-IE8 and IE8-as-IE7.

IE, JavaScript | Permalink

Die kleine Browserbastelecke (Browser News)

Overview of recent browser articles.

lang="de" but most links are English.

Browsers | Permalink

BONDI "specification"

The BONDI specification attempts to define a generic JavaScript API that can be used to access mobile phone features such as the camera, geolocation, contacts, etc.

This is obviously an excellent idea.

The problem is that currently the specification is being written by people who've obviously never written JavaScript. Although this page does lead to other pages which eventually lead to actual JavaScript code examples, the whole thing is set up in an impossible-to-read Java format that has nothing to do with JavaScript and is very hard to interpret.

Still, it's the best we have right now.

I hope a future version of the specification will be written by someone with actual web development and JavaScript knowledge.

Mobile | Permalink

don’t use @import

Steve Souders explains why you should not use @import.

Performance | Permalink

EcmaScript Edition 5, formerly known as 3.1: Getting a new JavaScript

Ajaxian gives a useful overview of where we stand with regard to ECMAScript 5.

Core, Standards/W3C | Permalink

Beware of Android bearing gifts

Why Android may not work so well for mobile phone vendors.

Android has been designed exceptionally well for 3rd party developers; the programming paradigm of Intents and Java-SE environment make programming apps a breeze.

However, when designing Android, the Google team had PC developers in mind. And in the mobile industry, it’s not 3rd party developers who create phones. It’s OEMs and their partners (so-called 2nd party developers). And the needs & wants of 2nd party developers are very different to those of 3rd parties.

OEMs care not just about speed of app development, but the speed of variant management; i.e. how quickly can you take one Android phone and create a second one that looks very different in a fraction of the time. Android is poorly designed in going from n to n+1 variant. You need to be re-customising the Java code for each app separately, playing with XML templates and inheritance operators alone will not help.

There's lots of other interesting stuff here, too.

Android | Permalink

what's the web look like?

Visualisation of the browser market over the last fourteen years. It turns out that Firefox didn't so much win market share from IE, but rather captured all of the new market share.

History | Permalink

Findings from the A LIST APART Survey, 2008

As it says.

Surveys | Permalink

App Stores for mobile software - comparison

Quick comparison between the Google, Apple, Windows Mobile and Blackberry app stores. To me the Google one looks best.

Mobile | Permalink

Detecting event support without browser sniffing

Kangax explains how to detect whether browsers support events.

The trick is that, say, document.onclick exists as a property even if no event handler is set (except in Mozilla). Read out whether the property exists, and you know if a browser supports an event. (It's slightly more complicated than that, but not much.)

Events | Permalink

Introducing the Palm Mojo SDK early access program.

Palm now allows you to apply for a beta version of the webOS SDK, which includs the Mojo library. Maybe interesting; currently I'm wondering if I should sign up. (I wouldn't have the time to create a full app anyway, and I'm wondering what the SDK is worth without access to an actual Palm Pre.)

Anyway, I continue to be mildly impressed by Palm's wholesale gamble on the world of web development.

Libraries, Palm | Permalink

Overloading operators in JavaScript

Peter Nederlof points out an interesting trick: you can overload the + operator all by yourself by messing with toString(). Peter uses the trick to add vectors using just a +.

Interesting trick.

Core | Permalink