Keyboard Face

I long thought it impossible to have a drop down fall over a flash movie as you would often want in a header of a website.

However, I just saw a website where they accomplished this. After investigating, I found a JQuery library that allows you to do this.

It involves a new way of embedding flash into pages. With just a div tag and a few lines of javascript you can easily embed flash AND have the opportunity to display drop downs over them.

Here’s the link showing it in action:
http://flowplayer.org/tools/demos/flashembed/wmode.html

If you know of any other ways, please pipe up and let us know.

Here’s another link for a great CSS drop down menu:
http://htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

Update
It turns out that it’s not the awesomeness of jquery tools that allows you to do this. It’s simply a parameter wmode=transparent that allows it. Jquery tools does look really cool, however.

Another good link for CSS menus is http://purecssmenu.com/ It is an online CSS menu generator.

Wow, Google just released an AJAX programming tool called the Google Web Toolkit.

It is a AJAX development environment that allows you to easily develop applications like Google Maps and GMail. The language is Java (not javascript), althought it ends up outputting a mixture of javascript and HTML when you “compile” it.

I don’t know much of Java, but this has peaked my interest. I’m definitely going to be playing around with this one.

Handy function:

var yourInt;
yourInt = parseInt(str);

More Info: http://www.devguru.com/Technologies/ecmascript/quickref/parseint.html

Wow! This is a great site: RegExLib (Regular Expression Library)

Excuse my exuberance, but I’ve been creating a lot of long regular expressions from scratch lately and it’s time consuming! This is a great resource for anyone wanting to use regular expressions in their code.

The javascript equivalent to vbscript’s lcase() function is .toLowerCase(). Here’s an example:

var myVar;<br />
myVar = 'HELLO';
myVar = myVar.toLowerCase();
alert(myVar);
The output is, of course, “hello”.

As you could guess, the equivalent to vbscript’s ucase() function is .toUpperCase(). Pretty self explanatory. Here’s a link to other javascript string functions.

Great piece of javascript mixed with CSS enlarges a thumbnail in response to a click. It greys out the rest of the screen and shows the whole image. Hardly any programming required too!
http://www.huddletogether.com/projects/lightbox/

It’s long been on my mind to use the Google Maps API on some of my sites, but the last hurtle has always been getting the raw longitude and latitude to satisfy the Google Maps API. Google Maps allows you to insert their maps into any web page using javascript. The only catch is you have to give it the latitude and longitude. It doesn’t take street addresses. They recommend using a free geocoder (an application that takes a street address and returns a latitude and longitude.), but they don’t give any real recommendations.

Yahoo!, however does have a free geocoder! http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

Matthew Hazlett just wrote a great tutorial on using both of these APIs to create a map application that takes a street address and turns it into a Google Map!
Here’s the link.

http://www.codeproject.com/Ajax/GeoLocation.asp

This is a brilliant idea. Take a look:

Logging Client Side JavaScript Errors to the Server – The Code Project – AJAX / Atlas

A while back I wrote a post on an inventory of existing javascript autocomplete controls. I was writing an application that required one and found most of them to be unsuitable for what I was doing. I ended up using WICK (Web Input Completion Kit) an creating my own ASP.NET user control around it.

An article just came out in CodeProject, however that claims to do everything I was looking for. I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but when I do, I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s the article: http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/AddingGoogleSuggest.asp

Is there a function in Javascript that is the same as VBScript’s instr? Yes! It’s string.indexOf

For info on how to use it, check out DevGuru’s page on IndexOf