The
Palm
Civet

polyfills are slick. they might not be the sexiest of javascript libraries, but they allow you to keep moving forward, adopting new APIs and web standards as they emerge without having to come up with the ‘for dummies’ version for internet explorer 6-8.

with the increasing spread of device screen sizes and layouts, the practice of responsive web design through the use of css3 media queries is all the rage =>

@media screen and (min-width: 480px){
  // iphone and up styles go here
}

respond is a 3kb library that will read your css media query declarations and auto-generate the support for your inhibited internet explorer audience.

booooooooooiiiiiing

like the olsen twins, sometimes good things come in pairs.

first, i discovered pow - the zero-configuration rack sever for OSX from the nerd heros at 37signals. symlink a project directory once to your ~/.pow directory, and it will take care of everything for you. no need to fuddle with /etc/hosts or anything else, all apps on your machine will be runnable simultaneously through a url structure of http://{appname}.dev. and like any modern development rails set-up should, it also offers full integration with rvm and bundler.

5 minutes later i discovered powder is a gem for making pow even more convenient to use. the commands speak for themselves =>

$ powder
=> Link the current dir_name to ~/.pow/dir-name
# if the dir_name has underscores in, powder changes them to hyphens

$ powder link bacon
=> Link the current dir to ~/.pow/bacon
# If the current directory doesn't look like an app that can be powed
# by pow it will offer to download a basic config.ru for Rails 2

$ powder list
=> List all the current apps linked in ~/.pow
# aliased as powder -l

$ powder restart 
=> Restart the current app
# aliased as powder -r

$ powder open bacon
=> Opens http://bacon.dev in a browser
# if you have set up alternative top level domains in .powconfig,
# then the first listed domain will be opened.

$ powder log
=> Tails the pow log.
# Not the application log, but the pow log, available at
# ~/Library/Logs/Pow/apps/app-name

$ powder install
=> Installs pow server 
# (I know, "curl get.pow.cx | sh" isn't hard, but this is _even_ easier)

placehold.it is a quick and simple image placeholder service for you lightning fast wireframing & prototyping. simply add the dimensions, color, text and formatting into an image tag’s src attribute, i.e. =>

or if you are looking for something a little more ‘cat’ you can also try placekitten.

a very exciting project - data science toolkit is a collection of open services for the budding data scientist. currently there are 9 APIs with tools for locating/localizing and extracting/converting data. the API for /file2text, for example, will extract the plain text from an uploaded pdf, word doc, or excel file, and scanned image files.

best of all the source for setting up your own copy of this server is hosted on github. definitely looking forward to what can be done with the help of such a compilation of tools.

just a tiny method for scoring matches of javascript string objects. here are some examples to demonstrate its simplicity =>

"hello world".score("e")           //=>0.1090909090909091 (single letter match)
"hello world".score("h")           //=>0.5363636363636364 (single letter match plus bonuses for beginning of word and beginning of phrase)
"hello world".score("hello")       //=>0.6818181818181818
"hello world".score("hello world") //=> 1

// And then there is fuzziness
"hello world".score("hello wor1")  //=>0  (the "1" in place of the "l" makes a mismatch)
"hello world".score("hello wor1",0.5)  //=>0.5581818181818182 (fuzzy)

// considers string length
'He'.score('h')    //=>0.6249999999999999  (better match becaus string length is closer)

// Acronym are given a little more weight
"Hillsdale Michigan".score("HiMi") > "Hillsdale Michigan".score("Hills")
"Hillsdale Michigan".score("HiMi") < "Hillsdale Michigan".score("Hillsd")

its super tiny (443 bytes!) and framework-agnostic and might feel just at home in a custom-built autocomplete widget.

after stumbling upon a very useful suggestion on how to use dropbox as the center for your git projects, i stumbled upon this simple shell script that compacts the general idea into one solitary =>

git dropbox

this will create a bare repository in your dropbox if it doesn’t exist, and mirror your current git project to it. its probably not the best solution for groups as it seems there are a few ways you could distort the repository by pushing mirrors of out-of-sync local versions. for the lonely developer or small team though, it is definitely worth consideration.

one of the best cheap tricks for adding texture to a plain color can now be done in 2.3kb of javascript instead of opening photoshop. noisy is a jquery plugin lets you generate random noise to a given element. even comes with a cool set of options =>

$('body').noisy({
    noiseParticles: 0.9, 
    tileSize: 200, 
    backgroundColor: '#EDEBDE', 
    maxNoiseOpacity: 0.078,
    fallbackImage: 'fallback.png',
    monochromatic: false
});

demo.

a status bar overlay for iphone and ipad apps that supports touch-handling, message queuing, and animations. implementation is about as it gets for objective c =>

MTStatusBarOverlay *overlay = [MTStatusBarOverlay sharedInstance];
overlay.animation = MTStatusBarOverlayAnimationFallDown;  
overlay.detailViewMode = MTDetailViewModeHistory;
overlay.delegate = self;
[overlay postMessage:@"Following @myell0w on Twitter…"];
// ...
[overlay postMessage:@"Following myell0w on Github…" animated:NO];
// ...
[overlay postImmediateFinishMessage:@"Following was a good idea!"
  duration:2.0 animated:YES];