Category: Web Development

• Meteor
• Mojito
• Derby

Here’s a nice, easy-to-follow flowchart describing how to make your website “retina-ready”.

http://f.cl.ly/items/012n0O023v2S2N1m3Q1t/How%20to%20Retinafy%20your%20Website.pdf

Lately, I’ve been in a mobile-app-development phase. I have a couple of ideas for some mobile apps and wanted the easiest way to develop them. Here are the current possibilities:

• 100% Native
  You can build a native mobile app that looks great and performs well but you have to develop in the language required by the platform. iOS uses Objective-C. Android uses Java. And Microsoft and others use other languages.
• 90% Native
  You can build mobile apps for many platforms (iOS, Android, etc) using just Javascript if you use the Appcelerator Titanium SDK.  The SDK provides a bridge to over 3000 native commands so your apps look like native apps and perform almost just as well. eBay’s mobile app uses Appcelerator Titanium and this is my preferred choice.
• 10% Native
  You can build a mobile app using HTML, CSS, and Javascript which is basically a small website. This website then gets wrapped using PhoneGap which turns it into an app. PhoneGap also provides hooks into 10 or so device features such as the accelerometer, geolocation, camera, etc. While this is probably the easiest approach, it would be difficult to make your app look like a native app and it would be even more difficult to make it perform like one.

When I first started using SSH on Windows, I used PuTTY, which seems to be the most popular. However, I noticed it was lacking in so many ways. So, my current Windows SSH client of choice is ZOC. It’s not free, but if you use SSH a lot, then it’s worth it.

I also used to use FileZilla for FTP but now I’ve found WinSCP to be better. It supports synchronized browsing, file transfer presets / masks / filters, local and remote synching of files, and much more. It’s free.

http://www.ualberta.ca/CNS/RESEARCH/LinuxClusters/pka-putty.html

http://www.dailyiteration.com/howto-passwordless-ssh-authentication-with-putty/

http://blog.shvetsov.com/2010/03/making-pageant-automatically-load-keys.html+

Note that in order for SSH authentication to work, you often need to set your .ssh folder and authorized_keys file permissions to specific values. Here are settings that I used that worked:

drwx------   2 ayahya ayahya  4096 Jul 13 14:23 .ssh
-rw-r--r--  1 ayahya ayahya 875 Jul 13 14:23 authorized_keys

Your private keys should always NOT be readable/writable by anyone but you

-rw------- 1 ayahya ayahya  951 Jul 17 14:00 id_rsa

Here are some useful Javascript libraries. I hope to update this list with time.

• jQuery
• jQuery Tools
• underscore.js
• sprite.ly
• modernizr
• jquery.transit
• Meteor

Many websites and blogs including this one contains code meant to be displayed to readers. While there are several plugins for prettifying source code for display, the best one I’ve just come across is called Google-Code-Prettify. I will soon be adding it to this blog. Learn more at

http://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/

When developing a website, you often find yourself doing a lot of the same coding. Here are two nice HTML, CSS, and Javascript framework to get your going quickly.

FOUNDATION
http://foundation.zurb.com/

BOOTSTRAP
http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/index.html

In addition, don’t forget to check out these HTML5 boilerplates which can come in pretty handy.

http://html5boilerplate.com/

http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile

Let’s say you have a form and you want to prevent the default action of submitting the form from occurring when the submit button “submit” event is triggered. After the default action is prevented, however, you want the default action to occur. You can do that as follows:

$("form").submit(function(e) {
	e.preventDefault();
	/*  do something */
	$('form').unbind('submit').submit();
});