Category: Software Development

jQuery Color Animations: Adding RGBA alpha channel support

I like using CSS rgba colors — it's freaking awesome to be able to use alpha channels directly with a given color, without having to mess with the CSS opacity settings. I also make heave use of jQuery's pretty sufficient out-of-the-box support for CSS-based animations and transitions. Using John Resig's jQuery plugin for Color Animations, the same good old $.animate() calls can be made to work seamlessly with CSS color properties such as backgroundColor, borderColor, outlineColor, color etc. The catch: RGBA colors are ignored. I tried using the colorBlend fading plugin but found two drawbacks: it had its own $.colorBlend() method rather than working seamlessly with $.animate() — which I didn't particularly mind — but it also caused sustained flickerings in my test cases (yes, even though the change log reported that many flickering bugs had been eliminated) and it doesn't technically work with an RGBA alpha channel but uses CSS opacity properties behind the scenes, which was not what I wanted.

roxbase: Lisp Web Templating

roxbase is a minimal and very simple Template System for Lisp. It isn't yet feature-complete and first and foremost intended for my own use. I have only 'tested' (used) it under SBCL.^[1]

The GUI-Usability-Fallacy

In my previous post I linked to that "Framework Studio" which I read about in the German dot.net magazin a while ago.

Ah, the joys of reuse... but beware of productization

After I have decided to go for the localization tool (I find it difficult to blog about it without having a proper name for it first—usually, apart from my dubious company name, naming is not one of my weaknesses), I moved a great deal of the codebase of my other product development into a separate DLL for reuse. That class library, dubbed AuthorBase, now provides a pretty complete framework to easily and quickly create the scaffolding for an application that has some or all of the following requirements: