Text editors again

I found my new house, really. I have been using e-text-editor on windows and Textmate on OSX for nearly 3 years and never really saw any contender to them. I tried aptana 3, too slow, no textmate bundle, buggy jquery snippets, in the end I still went back. My 2 favorites both support tm bundles, there fast, E had split view and some nice features like command lines via cygwin.. But where is my textmate 2? Nobody knows, I heard the author went to work on the Espresso editor, it did not impress me, but fortunately now Sublime 2 is here to take the place of Textmate 2.

Sublime text 2, the new holy grail of editing

Okay, I know VIM is powerful (hello sys admins )…

Going to war, web developer style

There is bad customer services everywhere, but nothing quite compares to The Brick for me. Here in Quebec we get raped by Telecom companies on cellphone plans and internet, we pay much more for less, and yet, today I am really more pissed off at The Brick.

I am going to spare you the details of my adventure with them, you can find all the details here. Let’s just say that I bought some furniture and I am really not happy with it.

War, guerrilla style!

I was so pissed off about my discussion with their customer support that I decided to create a website to tell everyone about how shitty The Brick is, and I did it in little more than 4 hours. First thing first, I…

The jQuery Boston conference or how to write jQuery professionally.

I wanted to round up a bit my thoughts about this year Boston jQuery conference. If you had a look at the talks descriptions you certainly saw that there were a lot of talks about code organization, unit testing, templating and etc. It seems this year has really been the year where experienced jQuery developers wanted to evolve outside the DOM that jQuery is so good at abstracting.

It certainly feels weird, when you think about it, that this year conference was all about adding complexity to your code when the most probable reason why jQuery as so much market share is because of its simplicity.

In the keynote, John Resig said that jQuery constantly gaining share momentum and was something like on 30% of overall websites,…

Moving from website services to web applications

I am happy to announce that I willl be soon joining the Cakemail development team and leaving my current front-end developer position at w.illi.am/. After more than 5 years of being in the website service business, this will be a welcomed change.

There is just a couple of itchy things about the website gig that I wanted to take the time to talk about today. It’s probably going to sound negative a bit, but no job is perfect and I certainly enjoyed, for the most of it, my work in this area.

Everyone has a cms

In every company I worked, everyone had a custom CMS, some better than others. But in almost every company I worked for, the boss wanted to “monetize” there investment in the development…

Overtime and web developers

I was reading an article from Ben Yoskovitz (Started Standout jobs) about why you should hire workaholics or not and it got me thinking.. Why it is expected that web developers do overtime? Most of the time for free? From a startup perspective, the fact that you will be tackling interesting problems and doing more R&D should be enough that you want to put extra effort for free every week.

I always had a odd feeling about overtime since I started to work professionally as a front-end developer. Doing overtime for free has never been something I was really good with, and I am a workaholic! but for me, not for someone else’s company or project.

It’s not like your going to have a company share that…

Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9? Really?

I was pretty surprised to read this week an article on Webmonkey that was saying that Microsoft would certainly double down in IE9 on HTML5 and CSS3. I suggest you read it yourself, but basically it was saying that Microsoft would go on the offensive at the upcoming MIX2010 presenting IE9.

Silverlight…

I do not see Microsoft go on the offensive, I am pretty sure in fact that it will not implement any ‘Multimedia’ feature like Audio, Video and Canvas any time soon, and certainly not before it is kind of obligated because Youtube, for example, switched to html5. Why? Silverlight… This technology is a competitor to all these technologies. If you are not really into extranet and intranet development, you might not even know what Silverlight is, well…

The mobile webkit fixed position problem

If there is one thing you will be missing while developing your mobile web application for Webkit, it is the CSS fixed position. You cannot effectively fix an element on the iPhone, and mobile device are no powerhouse to emulate it with javascript. The problem is simple, yet there is no perfect solution to it.

On a mobile device you scroll a window, not the site

When you scroll on a mobile device, you are not really scrolling the site, in fact if you zoom out completely you will see the entire page, you are only scrolling your “window” around the site. When you understand this, your fixed footer dream really shatter, unless you are willing to use complex methods..

iScroll

And there start your quest, on your…

The next generation of web developers and designers

I recently did a round table with other graduates from my college to first years students in the Multimedia Integration program. It was fascinating to see the actual next generation that would work on the web, and what was their inspiration as new students in a 3 year program were they would learn all about design, front-end development (HTML, CSS, Javascript and a bit of PHP), flash, video and 3d.

First thing I saw was that I was becoming old, with 5 years working as a front-end developer, I already lost some hairs and could have been a teacher. The students looked a bit like kids that liked to play video games a lot, which in fact when I think about it, was not very different…

Best front-end workflow within a production team

Optimizing front-end teams’ workflow is hard, there is always something that comes in the way, but it is important to at least try to optimize the front-end work. It could save your team considerable time over a project. Front-enders could work more efficiently together and within the production team.

Let’s take a look at front-enders’ typical relationship within a production team: (take it lightly)

First, you got designers that, generally, do not really like front-end developers because they do not render exactly there graphic design, and you got front-enders that “hate” designers because they are doing complicated design, costing too much money and time to render to HTML.

Back-end developers also have a general tendency to be a bit careless with HTML, which, not visible at first…

5 most important things I learned in 5 years of front-end development

I have been doing websites professionally for roughly 5 years now. I think I learned quite a few important things down the road. This article is more intended for beginners but I would love to hear what others front-enders think.       

Indent and wrap your CSS

Update: Reading the comments, I will not recommend to indent your CSS anymore, but please make easy and readable CSS.

I started indenting CSS 3 years ago and for me this is now a life breaker. I can never go back to the old and boring CSS style on one line. Indenting makes your CSS less confusing, when you look at indented CSS you understand visually your html structure. Yes, Firebug will tell you the line where there is a bug. Indenting will tell…