Dart, my first steps

A couple of weeks ago I jumped in to Dart with a little project to learn the language; to convert my canvas-astar.js project. I'm glad to say that what Google claims is true, since Dart borrows syntax from some common languages, it's very easy for the seasoned developer to learn. It took me around an hour of studying and then an hour of porting to get it in the state that it is.

JavaScript → Dart

Much of the JavaScript actually turned out to be valid Dart as well, this makes porting a JavaScript application to Dart dead simple. I went the statically-typed route which took a little longer but it was a very quick and easy process.

Using relative directions in content on the web

You've all seen it before, you hit a webpage with a menu on the left and somewhere in the main section it says something like "for more look at the left menu".

Sure it's fine for the majority of us, but it is pretty bad practice for a couple of accessibility reasons. Firstly there is no concept of left and right for people using assistive technologies like JAWS to read the page for them. Secondly what if your website is responsive in some way or your content appears in different forms like an app or mobile site, you need to ask yourself if it is really left or right in all these cases.

sticky-header.js

I wrote up a little JavaScript plugin over the weekend that has a <table>'s header scroll with the page. What sparked this little endeavour was a question asking for this functionality on Stack Overflow. Since it was fun answering the question, I thought I'd go ahead and make a more general plugin type solution that worked for multiple tables.

Similar to my sortable-table.js plugin, simply add the sticky-header class to a <table> and the functionality will be enabled.

<table class="sticky-header">
  ....
</table>

I've tested it in all the latest browsers and seems to work fine; Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE10, IE9 and IE8. No IE7 because it doesn't implement querySelectorAll, the code would be a bit more icky if I used some other method, and you know, it's IE7.

Here is a demonstration on GitHub HTML preview, and be sure to check it out on GitHub!

Korean Vocab Widget

I released my first app on Google Play yesterday!

As some of you may know, I'm learning Korean in my spare time. Being a software developer I'm always thinking about how I use computers to increase my productivity, and that's exactly what happened. I was looking at my phone and thought about how many times a day do I look at this thing. What if I was also doing something productive when I checked to see if I have any emails or what the time is?

So it hit me, a lock screen widget to supplement my Korean vocabulary study. I went searching for something fitting my needs on the Play Store and found very little, so I decided to make one!

It's a customisable widget that shows Korean words and English translations. There are only just over 100 words right now, but that number should increase pretty soon. Especially considering it's built for me! It's up for free (and ad-free) on Google Play.

Easy sortable HTML tables using jQuery

I made a little jQuery script that makes it really easy to enable sorting on a HTML table.

Features

• Really easy to set up
• Can sort on load if a header is specified otherwise assumes that the first column is already sorted
• Keyboard accessible
• Adds title attributes automatically to each th
• CSS arrow to signify ascending or descending