For my collection of testcases of web technologies (check it online at ariya.github.com), I added a simple example demonstrating the use of HTML5 Geolocation feature. It should run without any problem on a web browser which has such support, including on several mobile devices which I have tested.

Kindle Fire is in da house! This $199 Android-based tablet from Amazon was pretty much the gadget of the week. There are multiple reviews already, among others from Ars Technica, The Verge, Engadget, Sencha, and many others. I have taken a first look at its Silk browser, expect to see my detailed re...

At the palindrom date 11/11/11, WebKit project hit its monumental 100,000-th check in. Now, what happened from the moment it was born till this time? The following chart shows the source code revision (vertical) as the function of time (horizontal). Some icons are there to represent few products ass...

When you write a tokenizer, for example for a math expression evaluator, then it is unavoidable to find the category of a single character, whether it’s a number, an operator, etc. While the most logical way is to use regular expression, what if you would like to do it without one?

Mountain View Public Library often holds special events such as regular book sales *. While combing the huge selection for some affordable treasures, I picked up few past best-sellers fictions which I always wanted to enjoy but never had the time to do so. Bracing for the flight to Austin, randomly ...

Republic Wireless caught some attention because of its hybrid calling concept, where the call is routed to use WiFi network whenever it’s possible to do so. Due to this strategy, the plan costs only $19/month and this is without any long-term contract. There is only one smartphone offered so far, th...

Something that I’ve been working on as a side project is CSS Beautify, an open-source project from Sencha Labs. It has a simple purpose: reformat styles written in CSS to a certain guideline, primarily to make it easier to read.

Syntactic analyzer, often referred as parser, is either written by hand or generated from the syntax declaration (grammar). While working on a certain parser project, I realize that sometimes the difference between these two strategies becomes rather blurry. For example, consider a typical math expr...

Regardless whether you love or hate Dart, I think it is a good move from Google to make Dart Editor available as early as possible. The editor is based on Eclipse (evidenced from the look-and-feel), the download is only around 36 MB. It requires Java, which is usually available in modern desktop sys...

Barely recovering from the shock of the loss of Dennis Ritchie, few days ago we had to say good bye to John McCarthy. He created Lisp programming language, undoubtedly very influential in the development of various languages for the last few decades. Not only that, he was also the pioneer in the fie...

With Halloween around the corner, it seems to be a good time to mention some interesting projects related to PhantomJS, the headless WebKit tool I have started some time ago.

The latest version of PhantomJS has added the support for initialization callback, which allows you to modify the global objects which will be seen by the client code. The example I previously shown was changing the behavior of Math.random to return a constant.

Google announced Ice Cream Sandwich, officially known as Android 4.0. This version brings all the improvements from Honeycomb (Android 3.0) into the smartphone form factor, plus some more goodies. At the same time, Samsung demonstrated the premier phone featuring Ice Cream Sandwich, Galaxy Nexus. Wi...

You want to build JSLint-based syntax checking into your continuous integration workflow? What about its variant JSHint? Perhaps even including the automatic minification for the deployed build? Look no more, just use EightPack, a convenience hassle-free collection of several command-line tools desi...

In the specification of DeviceOrientation Event, it was mentioned that:

At the last Sencha Conference 2010, one of my presentations was JavaScript: Under the Hood. Much to my surprise, the video (also see below) and the slides become very popular after they are published. In fact, if you see the list of most popular Sencha’s SlideShare, it’s right there at #2 (as of now...

It’s another sad week. The computing world lost a great pioneer and a true visionary, the legendary one-and-only Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. If all he did was only to invent C, we still owed him a lot. But he also cocreated Unix! Imagine if C and Unix weren’t born, our life could have been completel...

After looking at some complex hybrid examples such as folder visualization and code editor, it’s time to take a step back and review some basic concept.

The launch of Apple iPhone few years ago popularizes the use of flick list, a touch-friendly list interface with a bit of physics when hitting the edge and scrolling. This effect is often known as momentum scrolling (although personally I prefer the more romantic term, kinetic scrolling).

Just released last week, Sencha Animator is a tool to create CSS3-based animation. The application itself is written in JavaScript (using ExtJS), though it runs as a normal desktop application (with native menu, file dialog, etc). The trick is simple: wrap the application using WebKit and create a h...

For fans of id Software, post-apocalyptic RAGE was finally out, check out the official site rage.com and also the new TV spot (with a perfectly suited background music!). The engine behind this game is very capable, with lots of crazy visual effects. Will RAGE define a new era just like its predeces...

Web technologies are not too much different than durian: either you love it or you hate it.

Time for another example of mixing web technologies inside a native application (as I promised before). As usual, we start with a screenshot:

Next week, Intel will host AppUp Elements in Bellevue, WA. There will be a lot of presentations covering AppUp introduction, technologies you can use to build your apps, and finally how to leverage the market and become successful on the business side.