joreteg.comthe tumblog of Henrik Joreteg RSS

Feb
11th
2010
Thu
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Google chart API simple and sweet

So, in my humble opinion Google’s chart api is genius. I know some of this has been around for a while. But I’ve never really looked at it till now.

You just pass in paramaters and Google draws and serves up your charts super fast. In it’s most basic form, all you gotta do is put the paramaters in your image tag.

Here’s a couple of simple examples:

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=250x100
&chd=t:60,20,20&cht=p3&chl=Pure|Genius|Yo"/>

Awesome Chart API

<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=bvs&chco=4D89F9,C6D9FD
&chd=t:10,50,60,80,40|50,60,100,40,20&chds=0,160&chs=200"/>

Another awesome chart

There’s a lot more too it. Just read the chart docs API.

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We web developers are doing an amazingly lousy job right now. We have to start serious mobile testing instead of just playing around with our iPhone for a few minutes before declaring our site fit for mobile.

Supporting all browsers is the whole f*ing point of being a good web developer, and I’m going to force you to do it even if I have to personally swear at each of you individually.

—

This is from an article on QuirksMode about how we developers are treating the iPhone web browser much like IE6 when it first came out. We can’t treat it like it’s the only compatibility check necessary. It’s something I’m personally a bit guilty of. Let’s not go down that road again, the web is open by nature. Let’s not pigeonhole ourselves by overly emphasizing one browser.

The full article is here (lots of less-than-clean language, but he’s making a solid point): http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/02/the_iphone_obse.html

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Jan
26th
2010
Tue
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Dear Google, please add the web-app meta tag to mobile apps

Google just built a sweet mobile version of Google voice for iPhone.

Google Voice Mobile WebApp

I have but one complaint about all the awesome HTML5 mobile webapps that Google has been releasing lately.

They open in Safari on my iPhone

That means that each time I want to access it even if I save a shortcut to my homescreen on the iPhone it opens in a new window in Safari. This gets annoying in a hurry and actually stops me from using the other mobile web apps like Gmail from my phone (I use the built in mail program instead).

The silly thing is this is sooooo easy to fix!

All they would have to do is add the following meta tag to their mobile apps:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />

Problem solved, now if I saved it to my homescreen it would open as if it were a stand-alone application. Why Google, why?

There must be a reason, but it makes no sense to me.

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Jan
24th
2010
Sun
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Awesome stop-motion video

I was really blown away by the creativity of this video. Very cool.

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Jan
11th
2010
Mon
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New Years Resolutions

Definitely a bit late, but nonetheless, here’s a few resolutions for 2010

  • Get 100 churches signed up for my new BulletinApp.com service.
  • Make 50% of my household income from passive (or at least semi-passive) sources.
  • Do 100 pushups in a row.
  • Learn how to hold a hand-stand for more than 1 minute.
  • Take my home office as close to paperless as possible. (Evernote rocks!)
  • Buy a house.

It’s a start… I may add to this list, but I’m not gonna take anything off!

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Dec
17th
2009
Thu
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A Webapp for Building iPhone Apps

Normally having a custom iPhone or Android app is something that is out of reach for smaller organizations. Also, as you may have heard the Apple’s app approval process is quite a headache. Several of my friends and co-workers have written iPhone apps and the truth is, that it’s a very real possibility that your app won’t be accepted and all your work will have been wasted.

When I saw David Kaneda’s amazing jQTouch project, it made me realize that you could actually build “navtive-feeling” applications using nothing but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So I started playing with it.

But the beauty of the web, is that it’s dynamic. That’s when I had a bit of an epiphany: I realized that it’s possible to build tools that will let people build their own custom iPhone app and completely circumvent the App Store. Check out this little demo that I built. It’s still needs a bunch of styling and other work but I thought it was interesting nonetheless.

I’d recommend watching the HD version just to see things more clearly.

A Webapp for Building an iPhone Apps from Henrik Joreteg on Vimeo.

Let me know what you think.

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