Category Archives: Javascript

Drag and drop with animations in jquery

Posted by Jamie on March 10, 2009 2,831 comments

Every year at Halloween, my company offers prizes to the best dressed employees.  For the past two years I have one as well as my co-worker that partakes in our crazy costumes.  You may be wondering what this has to do with drag and drop, don’t worry I’m getting there.

This years prize happened to be a monkey slingshot.  Basically you place your index and middle fingers in pockets attached to the monkey’s arms.  You then proceed to pull back and let fly.  Well, as you can imagine, we had a lot of fun with this guy, so much fun in fact we broke it :(

So one day after work I was messing around with drag and drop and some jquery animations.  I was quickly able to get a “mock slingshot” shooting at a target and this is what I want to share today. Read more »

Share

Fixing slow drag and drop with scriptaculous

Posted by Jamie on February 18, 2009 1,508 comments

Recently on a project I was working on, I was tasked with fixing drag and drop that was terribly slow.  The drag and drop was implemented with scriptaculous on a calendar system.  When you clicked an event to drag it it took about 5 seconds before the page would actually let you drag it!  This was clearly unacceptable and it has to be possible because Google Calendar is lightening fast.

 The first thing I did was download and setup jquery to see if it was related to how scriptaculous was created.  After setting up jquery, it was just as slow.  This lead me to believe that it was a fundamental problem with how the drag and drop was set up in both libraries. Read more »

Share

Why Is Internet Explorer Better?

Posted by Jamie on February 15, 2009 2,102 comments

I’m guessing I probably got your attention with this one?  I’m also guessing that you cannot scroll down fast enough to the comments box and start typing a bunch of nasty messages to me.

WAIT!  Before you do that, let me explain why. Read more »

Share

Drag and Drop with AJAX Example

Posted by Jamie on February 14, 2009 1,556 comments

At my work it’s quite clear to me that a lot of people have difficulty with both AJAX and drag and drop functionality.  In this article, I thought I would provide a realistic and simplistic example of how to accomplish both AJAX and drag and drop together.

By the end of this article you will be able to create an extremely slick content management system that works really smoothly. Read more »

Share

Firebug – A developer’s best friend

Posted by Jamie on February 11, 2009 2,357 comments

I think a good place to start is to describe one of my favorite tools.  It’s called Firebug, it’s an add-on for Mozilla browsers.

At work, if one of my co-workers comes to me in the J-Block and asks a Javascript or CSS question, before I even consider helping them I ask if they reviewed the styles or the Javascript in Firebug.  9 times out 10 if it’s a really easy answer, you’ll see it almost immediately with the help of Firebug. Read more »

Share

Buy one of my books