John Cox

Blogs · @wyome

Tagged development · everything

5 Things to Consider When Designing Your Mobile App

This piece outlines five essential considerations for designing mobile applications: first deciding whether a native app or mobile website better suits your goals, then accounting for the specific contexts where users will engage with the app, designing scalable interfaces for varying screen sizes across devices, adhering to platform-specific UI conventions to ensure familiarity and consistency, and prioritizing touch-friendly design with accessible button placement and visual feedback. The guide emphasizes that mobile design differs fundamentally from web or desktop design, and successful apps require thoughtful decisions about these factors before and during development.

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25 Essential HTML5 Tutorials and Techniques | Template Monster Blog

This is a curated collection of HTML5 tutorials and learning resources covering semantic markup, APIs like canvas and offline storage, form improvements, video implementation, and CSS3 integration for modern web development. The post presents links to various guides aimed at helping developers master HTML5 features through practical techniques, from basic layout coding to advanced topics like drag-and-drop functionality and mobile app creation. Rather than providing original analysis, it serves as a directory pointing readers toward external tutorials for understanding HTML5's major new standards and capabilities.

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HTML5 Microdata: Welcome to the Machine

HTML5's Microdata specification adds five global attributes (itemscope, itemtype, itemid, itemprop, and itemref) that embed machine-readable metadata directly into existing HTML markup, allowing search engines like Google to better understand and display contextual information about people, organizations, products, reviews, and events. The author argues that Microdata is superior to competing formats like RDFa and Microformats because it's simpler to implement while maintaining the principle that the same markup should serve both human readers and machines. Though still maturing and subject to change, Microdata enables richer search results and allows applications to automatically extract and repurpose structured data without requiring separate markup or scrapers.

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Making Your First Google Chrome Extension – Tutorialzine

This tutorial walks through building a simple Google Chrome extension that displays an RSS feed preview in a popup next to the address bar. The extension uses a manifest.json configuration file, HTML5/CSS3 for the popup interface (including webkit-specific effects like box-reflect gradients), and jQuery to fetch Tutorialzine's latest posts via Yahoo's YQL API with localStorage caching to improve performance. The guide demonstrates Chrome's developer-friendly approach to extension development, where developers can load unpacked folders directly for testing before packaging into .crx files for distribution.

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Introduction to MySQL Triggers | Nettuts+

MySQL triggers are database rules that automatically execute additional operations when data is inserted, updated, or deleted, allowing developers to handle data integrity, logging, and business logic at the database layer rather than in application code. The article demonstrates three practical applications: maintaining referential integrity by automatically deleting related records, auditing changes by logging modifications to separate tables, and enforcing business rules like automatic price calculations based on cost updates. While triggers add modest performance overhead to individual queries, they reduce overall latency by eliminating multiple round trips to the database and move critical data logic away from the application layer where it's easier to enforce consistently.

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HTML5 Globals and You | Nettuts+

HTML5 introduces several new global attributes that can be applied to any element, expanding beyond the previously restricted set like id, class, and style. The piece explains practical new attributes including contenteditable (making elements directly editable in the browser), spellcheck, hidden (semantically hiding elements rather than just hiding their display), draggable, contextmenu, and the data-* catch-all attribute for storing custom application data. Browser support for these features was still inconsistent at the time of writing, but they degrade gracefully enough to begin experimenting with immediately.

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.htaccess What, Why, When and How | KomunitasWeb

No puedo escribir un resumen de estos artículos porque el contenido que compartiste es principalmente una página de índice o lista de artículos sin el texto completo de ninguno de ellos. Para crear un resumen útil, necesitaría acceso al artículo completo que guardaste, no solo los títulos, fechas y párrafos introductorios. Si puedes proporcionar el texto completo del artículo específico que deseas que resuma, estaré encantado de hacerlo.

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CSS DIY Organization

This article proposes a "hybrid" CSS organization system that balances the structure of frameworks with the flexibility of ad-hoc styling, arguing that internal developer usability deserves as much attention as user-facing design. The author recommends splitting CSS into separate files (reset, forms, global, style), using ID selectors only for unique spatial properties while reserving class selectors for reusable descriptive styles, and maintaining consistent indentation and comments that mirror the HTML hierarchy. The approach treats CSS as a cascading system rather than fighting against it, accepting minor performance costs for significantly improved maintainability when revisiting code months or years later.

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Top 50 Web Graphics, Admin Skins and Scripts to Accelerate Development | Nettuts+

This article showcases a curated selection of ready-made design assets and scripts available on Envato's marketplace sites, including admin panel templates, web graphics, error page designs, and jQuery plugins that developers can purchase and integrate into their projects. The featured items span practical tools like sticky navigation menus and image sliders to visual elements like ribbons, buttons, and 404 page templates, all created by freelance authors in the Envato community. The piece concludes by promoting the opportunity to become a marketplace author and earn passive income by selling similar design assets.

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jQuery Plugin : jConfirmAction | Webstuffshare.com - Worth Sharing Bookmarked Webstuff

This is a broad instructional guide covering foundational and intermediate web development concepts, including HTML structure, responsive design with fluid grids, hosting and domain selection, database schema design, and security considerations. It emphasizes that web development skills progress from basics like learning HTML tags to more advanced topics like frameworks and API integration, with practical advice drawn from real-world experience. The resource positions itself as evolving alongside the web itself to serve developers at various skill levels.

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Rethinking Forms in HTML5 | Nettuts+

HTML5 introduces substantial improvements to web forms through new input attributes (like autofocus, placeholder, and pattern), new input types (such as email, date, number, and range), and new form elements (including datalist, output, progress, and meter). These changes reduce reliance on JavaScript for common form tasks like validation, autocomplete, and user experience enhancements, allowing developers to build more consistent and usable forms with less code. While browser support is inconsistent at the time of writing, the new elements degrade gracefully in older browsers and are worth adopting immediately, particularly the input types that already work on mobile devices like iPhones.

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