Fade and Destroy Elements

Posted by Sean on Sep 30, 2009 under

One of my favorite methods that I use constantly in various interfaces combines fading and removing of an element. It could be a table row, or list item, or a div, but often times when I wanted to remove something, I'd like it to remove with a fade. And not always wanting to write to listen for the complete event and then remove the element. So I'll show the original I use in Prototype, and then a port to MooTools.

Exploring Javascript Date Math

Posted by Sean on Sep 22, 2009 under

 

Dates are a peculiar type of data that we have to work with. In some sense, they aren't a number, but instead are a combination of month, day, and year. But at the same time, in most programming languages, they are fundamentally a number: the number of seconds since the Unix epoch.

In our heads, it's quite easy to do Date math. Moving forward a week requires just adding 7 days. How would you do that with a Javascript Date? Programming languages usually try to make working with Dates as logical as it is to do in our heads. So I a little surprised at an irregularity in using Dates in my math.

 

Week Period of a Given Date

Posted by Sean on Sep 17, 2009 under

As I work on an internal time tracker for our company, I needed to show all the TimeEntries for a specified week. To specify which week, it made sense to simply select 1 day in the week, since that's the easiest default control in Flex.  This let's me get Sunday and Saturday, the start and end of the week, so I can build a query that grabs entries between those 2 dates.

You Don't Always Need Identity Operators

Posted by Sean on Sep 10, 2009 under ,

In two languages that I use often (PHP and Javascript), there's 2 different equality operators when comparing values. It's become quite common to see places expressly tell you that you should only ever use one of them. That the other is evil. People see this, and then point fingers whenever you use 2 equal signs instead of 3. Here's perfectly valid reasons to use equal operator (==) instead of identity(===).

Protected Methods in MooTools Classes

Posted by Sean on Sep 04, 2009 under

I've talked previously about getting private variables and methods in your classes , but doing so was always kind of hacky.  In Javascript, elements don't have a native way to hide properties.  So we have to come up with creative ways like using closures .  In MooTools 1.2.3, we have a way to protect class methods.