Cheat Sheets on Web Development are a great way to quickly look up information. I was not aware that there are many really good programming-related cheat sheets out there for many subjects in different formats. Lots of topics, from JavaScript, jQuery, CSS, and HTML to Perl, mySQL, Regex, and even more specific subjects like mod_rewrite, Google Analytics parameters, and object oriented design. In terms of format, I think PDF’s are best because they are nice to view and easy to print. Over time, I have collected some of the best Programming Cheat Sheets and the links below will take you straight to the PDF version of these awesome references:
Read more
I like Lava Lamps and today I wanted to create one using CANVAS and a bit of JavaScript. I decided to do this after watching some amazing demos from the 1k Javascript contest. It’s pretty cool what people can write in 1K or less. My lava lamp effect is also written in really tiny amount of JavaScript, just some CANVAS pixel manipulation running in a loop. Check out the demo and look at the source to see the code.
There are a number of JavaScript libraries out there that allow you to manipulate images with various filters and effects and a recent one that I have been playing around with is called Pixastic. In simple terms, Pixastic turns an image into html5 CANVAS and then it does pixel manipulation. It has good documentation and even a nice photo editor. But, I don’t want to just change an image by applying a filter, I would like to show the whole transition. For example, instead of turning an image from color to black and white, I want to show an animation of the image slowly transitioning from color to black and white. Here’s how it can be done with Pixastic.
Read more
I sometimes see latitude and longitude numbers provided in the response from API calls, and often, you want to pass this information to the user. But, it’s much nicer to convert these geo coordinates to an actual street address. This is called Reverse Geocoding and there are a number of web services that allow you to do this. For example, Google, Twitter, and Flickr all have methods in their API to reverse geocode. Let’s explore how that is done and since we are talking about the user experience, let’s also generate a static map of the geo location.
Read more
I have been using the YouTube API Video Feeds for a while and it amazes me how it allows you to search and filter your query way beyond what the YouTube website allows. For example, how do you search for most discussed videos from the comedy category on YouTube? How about, most popular comedy videos from Brazil? I love the YouTube UI but I really think that they need an advanced search function that will allow you to create any kind of query that you can easily create with their API or feeds service. The best part is that you don’t even need an API key to do this because YouTube does not require one for these calls. Let’s take a closer look.
Read more
How do you know what movies have recently been released on DVD? I assume that there are multiple sources for this information like Amazon, iTunes, or IMDB but today I have found that Rotten Tomates provides this data via their API. They also have methods to retrieve movies currently in theaters, upcoming films, movie lists and specific movie information like trailers and clips. The API is really straightforward and we can quickly leverage it to make our own page of current DVD releases.
Read more
