I've been heavy into some research lately, trying to become more familiar with some advanced concepts. Part of such research has been to learn more about Progressive Enhancement. I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert on the topic, but essentially it's a shift in mindsight from what I've gotten used to with Ajax development over the last year.
Ajax can be a double-edged sword of sorts. If properly done our users should really have little or no clue that any 'magic' has happened. If overdone (or implemented needlessly - a phenomenon I like to call 'Because I Can...' or 'BIC') our users can be overwhelmed, and/or confused. One of the end goals of implementing an Ajax solution is to give our users an enhanced experience with our application - or at the very least keep them from being annoyed by the experience.
I've finally put together some proper documentation for my cfImageCropper custom tag. You can get the latest release here which includes the documentation and a few minor code tweaks. If you're not familiar with the tag see this post
I'm also cooking up some other very cool client side image stuff in the labs, so stay tuned.
I've always thought one of the cooler features on dzone was how they paged through the entries as you scroll down the list. This seems a ton more user friendly then the traditional 'next/previous' links.
I decided to see how easy it would be to recreate this functionality using ColdFusion 8 and as usual the answer was 'pretty easy'. There is a bit of JavaScript, but it's nothing too difficult to wrap your head around.
Yesterday I decided to change my headshot on GMail and noticed that when I uploaded my new image there was a slick little tool to crop my headshot. Obviously Google is using some sort of client side JS to do the cropping and then doing the actual image resize on the server (so I assume). I was pretty impressed by this and it got me thinking how simple it would be to throw something together like this for use with the new imageCrop function in ColdFusion 8 (or any image manipulation package for that matter).
If you do much work with JavaScript you've probably found yourself desiring some additional control over dates at some point. Enter the DP_DateExtensions Library, a library of functions for working with JS dates. There are some handy functions like dateFormat(), compare(), add(). Check it out.
