Pinboard (guardiantech)

Visualizing MBTA Data >> Github

guardiantech — 2014-06-12T13:15:52+00:00

Mike Barry and Brian Card:

Boston’s Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) operates the 4th busiest subway system in the U.S. after New York, Washington, and Chicago. If you live in or around the city you have probably ridden on it. The MBTA recently began publishing substantial amount of subway data through its public APIs. They provide the full schedule in General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) format which powers Google’s transit directions. They also publish realtime train locations for the Red, Orange, and Blue lines (but no Green or Silver line until 2015). The following visualizations use data captured from these feeds for the entire month of February, 2014. Also, working with the MBTA, we were able to acquire per-minute entry and exit counts at each station measured at the turnstiles used for payment. We attempt to present this information to help people in Boston better understand the trains, how people use the trains, and how the people and trains interact with each other.

Simply fantastic visualisation; set time aside to read and play with it. Bonus: you'll learn what a Marey diagram is, if you don't already know.

parallax.js >> Github

guardiantech — 2013-08-27T06:01:12+00:00

Fun on desktop (move the mouse) or mobile (tilt the device).

Stop writing Regular Expressions. Express them with Verbal Expressions >> The Changelog

guardiantech — 2013-08-06T21:27:08+00:00

GitHub user jehna has fashioned a runaway hit with his unique way of constructing difficult regular expressions.
VerbalExpressions turns the often-obscure-and-tricky-to-type regular expression operators into descriptive, chainable functions. The result of this is quite astounding.…
This style may be off-putting to old-school regex pros, but even they would have to admit that it’s quite approachable and easy to reason about.

Nice.

Why mobile web apps are slow >> Sealed Abstract

guardiantech — 2013-07-15T21:52:32+00:00

Drew Crawford:

I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow. This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL. But sadly, the discussion has not been as… fact-based as I would like.

Everyone has been pointing to this post, with good reason: it's highly detailed and very useful.

Mobile web apps are slow >> Sealed Abstract

guardiantech — 2013-05-12T20:18:24+00:00

Drew Crawford:

Now, if what you mean by “web app” is “website with a button or two”, you can tell all the fancypants benchmarks like SunSpider to take a hike. But if you mean “light word processing, light photo editing, local storage, and animations between screens” then you don’t want to be doing that in a web app on ARM unless you have a death wish.
Sure, you can design performant mobile web apps if you have good engineers. But do you know what else you can do with good engineers? Things that are actually of value to your customers.

jQuery 2.0 released >> Official jQuery blog

guardiantech — 2013-04-21T20:57:38+00:00

You asked for it, you got it: jQuery 2.0 has arrived!
As promised, this version leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster, and can be used in JavaScript environments where the code needed for old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own.

Those two browsers still have about a 25% global share, according to StatCounter. (Thanks @vassal for the link.)

Interactive generative art >> Silk

guardiantech — 2013-02-06T22:10:01+00:00

Your timewaster for today. Has different colours, symmetry and also sound. (Implemented in Javascript.)

HTML5 Rubik's cube

guardiantech — 2012-06-03T11:16:16+00:00

Tremendous fun. Needs a "current" browser, obviously. Best thing: solves it for you once you've messed it all up.

The Teletext Museum - An Evening with Ceefax 1982 >> Mike Brown

guardiantech — 2012-04-18T20:36:41+00:00

Transport yourself back to 1982. Wow, the news was so much more bite-sized then. Not like now.

Rickshaw: A JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs

guardiantech — 2012-04-17T20:27:37+00:00

Description: Rickshaw is a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs. Looks nifty. Free, open source, MIT licence, developed at Shutterstock.com.

How we decreased sign up confirmation email bounces by 50% >> Kicksend Blog

guardiantech — 2012-03-21T07:01:41+00:00

So we recorded and setup detailed notifications for every email bounce, to make sure that we are always aware of what’s happening (thanks Mailgun!). And we soon started to see patterns. People would misspell their email addresses and be unaware of it, resulting in a delivery failure and a lost user. And it got even more interesting - most of these invalid email addresses were a result of a misspelled domain; “hotmail.con”, “gnail.com”, “yajoo.com”. A clear opportunity for improvement.

You can get the Mailcheck.js plugin at Github. Neat.

Turning off Google search results indirection >> StackExchange

guardiantech — 2011-12-30T20:58:21+00:00

"I don't really care that Google is tracking what I click, and I don't really care about the extra indirection when I click on a result (though both are concerns). But I find it annoying that I can't copy-paste a result by simply right-clicking on a link and choosing “copy link address”" The solution turns out to be quite simple.

Vector math basics to animate a bouncing ball in JavaScript >> bassistance.de

guardiantech — 2011-12-13T06:44:36+00:00

"Vector math is pretty much essential when you want to do any kind of physics simulation, be it as simple as a bouncing ball. While my goal originally was to implement a flocking simulation (like birds flying close to each other, but not too close), the lack of math skills led me to build a bouncing ball simulation first." You never know when this will come in useful.

Interactive experiments focused on HTML5 >> hakim.se

guardiantech — 2011-11-28T21:43:44+00:00

Really excellent fun. Keep and study. Obviously, you'll need an HTML5-capable browser to see them.

Tangle: a JavaScript library for reactive documents >> Bret Victor

guardiantech — 2011-11-16T06:27:27+00:00

"Tangle is a JavaScript library for creating reactive documents. Your readers can interactively explore possibilities, play with parameters, and see the document update immediately. Tangle is super-simple and easy to learn." Tangle is HTML5 goodness. Swallow it whole.

How a Javascript upgrade brought down our commenting platform >> Guardian developer blog

guardiantech — 2011-11-03T16:54:05+00:00

"It can't hurt if we put 'attr(disabled) in can it?"

Brandon Bible Forum: where's that CSS file from? Oh, I see

guardiantech — 2011-10-30T22:18:16+00:00

A fun exercise is to dig through the CSS files that Brandon has, um, linked to and figure out where the image has been added - and how Alfredapp.com avoids displaying it, since it's using the same CSS

HTML5 and CSS3 >> The Expressive Web - Beta

guardiantech — 2011-09-14T05:29:58+00:00

Just in case you needed another HTML5/CSS3 playground: "HTML5 and CSS3 bring loads of new features and functionality to the modern web. This site is a resource and showcase of some of the newest, and most expressive features being added to the web today."

However, here's what you might not expect: it's by Adobe.