All posts tagged ‘wiki’

File Under: Ajax
Feb
16
2010

Ajax for Beginners

By

JavaScript has had the XMLHttpRequest object for almost a decade now, but it really only started getting wide attention in 2004. All this attention was mostly due to some showoff web applications that made every developer who saw them think, “I want my site to do that!” But it also has to do with the spiffy, spiffy name given to it by the folks at AdaptivePath, who named this asynchronized application Ajax. Maybe you’ve heard of it?

A few high-profile Google applications in particular made a splash with Ajax: Maps and Gmail were first. It also powers some of the core functionality in the user interface of the ever-so-popular photo sharing site Flickr. By now, Ajax has become integral to the fabric of the web, especially in the era of real-time applications like Twitter, Buzz and Wave (all of which use Ajax extensively in their webapp front ends, for the record). Ajax may also lay claim to being the first JavaScript object with its own fan website. Date.com doesn’t count, although I did have a scintillating chat with a lady there once about the getTimeZoneoffset method.

Continue Reading “Ajax for Beginners” »
Tags: ,
File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Bit Depth

By

Bit depth describes the file size of an image by orders of magnitude.

When wrangling with file size versus image quality, it’s often important to minimize the bit depth of an image while maximizing the number of colors. To calculate the maximum number of colors for an image of a particular bit depth, remember that the number of colors is equal to two to the power of what the bit depth is. For example, a GIF can support up to eight bits per pixel, and therefore can have as a many as 256 colors, since two to the power of eight equals 256.

Tags: , ,
File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Event

By

Events are user interactions with their computer, such as a mouse click or key press.

In the good ol’ days, computers handled user interactions as input of batched data. The user fed a hunk of data in, the computer did something to that data, then produced the results. With the advent of interactive devices like the GUI interface, computers could display answers to computations onscreen. The input for these interactions are events caused by the user, which could be keystrokes, button clicks, or the position of the mouse pointer. (see Event Handler).

Tags: , ,
File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Loop

By

A loop is like a programming thought. Say you’re a police officer using a radar gun to catch speeding motorists. If the speed limit is 55 miles per hour, you might say to yourself: “If a car makes my radar gun display a higher value than 55, I’ll pull them over, but until then I will continue to take readings. And perhaps snack on this cruller.” In programming, the statement of this loop would be the action (firing up your motorcycle and chasing the speeder), and the expression would be the evaluation of whether or not the passing car made your radar gun read higher than 55. This is an example of a “while” loop: 

  while (carSpeed < 55) {

  carSpeed = readRadar();

  // note:readRadar() should return the latest carSpeed

}



pullEmOver();  // this will only execute once carSpeed is >= 55
Tags: ,
File Under: Glossary
Feb
15
2010

Outline Font

By


An outline font supplies a geometrical description of each character so that the font can be rendered in a variety of sizes. Since they are scalable, outline fonts can make the most of an output device’s resolution. The greater the resolution of the monitor, the sharper the characters will look. Popular languages for defining outline fonts are PostScript and TrueType.

Tags: , ,
« OLDER POSTS