beyond applications and software

Jesse Thomas designed and animated a great video for his lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010. The state of the internet in numbers combined with nice design. Have a look. 4 minutes worth wachting.

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

Heute wollen wir Euch unsere neue iPhone App vorstellen. Im Apple App Store gibt es bereits einige Quiz zum Thema Musik, allerdings greifen sie primär auf die eigene Musiksammlung zurück und generieren daraus Fragen. Eine schöne, unterhaltsame Sache, aber was, wenn man mehr möchte? Fragen, die über den eigenen Horizont hinaus gehen; die tiefer gehen als die bekannten Standardfragen.

Mit dem Ziel ein anspruchsvolles Musikquiz zu konzipieren, haben wir uns zusammengesetzt und Music Master entwickelt. Ein Musikquiz, das auch Musikexperten ins Grübeln bringt und durch Fragen aus den Genres Pop, Rock, Hip-Hop, Klassik und Jazz eine hohe Abwechslung bietet.

Die App gibt es ab sofort für iPhone und iPod touch im App Store zum Download: Music Master (iTunes-Link)

Wir wünsche Euch viel Spaß beim Raten und sind gespannt wer als erstes die Diamantene Schallplatte gewinnt.

Doing the same work twice is never a good thing. Knowing that, a pattern called “Memoization” can help you avoid this. It’s about building functions that remember their previous outputs/return values. [Read more →]

Apple published new stats concerning the App Store (press release). The numbers are impressive: two billion apps have been downloaded in just over a year (half a billion this quarter alone) [Read more →]

Inspecting objects at runtime is what’s called “reflection”. Maybe you want to know – at runtime – what methods an object has or what type of object it is. You’ve got a couple of tools at hand to do this in JavaScript: [Read more →]

OpenSocial is becoming more and more popular and if you are thinking about building a social app yourself you should check out our OpenSocial tutorial at Think Vitamin.

JavaScript can be a very dynamic language. To prove this, today we’ll discuss two techniques: dynamic code generation in general and “branching” (a special form). [Read more →]

Actually, I planned to write an article about “Reflow” – an important performance-relevant topic in every highly interactive JavaScript application.
But, as I was doing research for the article, I noticed that there are already a handful of very good articles and resources out there. So, instead of re-describing the wheel, I highly recommend reading through these:

• http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/doc/reflow.html
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/efficient-javascript/?page=3#reflow
• http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2009/03/27/reflows-repaints-css-performance-making-your-javascript-slow/

Maintaining and keeping code clean is always a challenge. And JavaScript is not different here.

In complex applications, JavaScript combines a great deal of application logic with classic GUI concerns. Therefore, temptations are high to put things like labels/texts into code (i.e. hard-coding the values). But already the term “hard-coded” should let you think twice.

[Read more →]

In currently popular versions of JavaScript, there’s no native concept of namspaces, like in C#, Java and Co.
But namespaces are important when it comes to larger applications and/or using third party code. You risk to have conflicts with other code (being it your own code or third party code) that is named the same. Unexpected behaviour, to say it politely, can be the result (apart from polluting the global namespace with a lot of variables is just not very nice…).
So we know we need a way to simulate namespaces in JavaScript, too.

[Read more →]