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In addition to our client services we also have a few products in the works. Our office is always filled with chatter and this blog is an outlet for our creative energy, rants and ideas.

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Category: web development

May21

3rd Thursday HTML5 Presentation & Links

Thanks to all of those who attended the Imulus 3rd Thursday presentation on HTML5 last night. We had some great discussion and topic review. Today we’ve placed the presentation website live at http://html5.imulus.com.

html5

Here are the additional links that got mentioned during the meetup.

This should be everything that was covered, however, if you find something missing feel free to add a comment with a link. We’ll jump on it ASAP.

Updates: A few more HTML5 resources in the list.

Mar5

I’m not so sure about this ‘Coda’ revolution.

coda-devNote: I wrote this post on a personal blog a few years ago, but I think it still pertains to developers using Coda or any all-in-one application.

…Panic software (the makers of Transmit FTP) have released a new “all in one” web site management application called Coda. The basic goal of this app is to take a bunch of things needed to build websites and place them all together in one application. Now, pardon my skepticism and negativity, but the best part about using an operating system, particularly one like Mac OS X, is that I can easily use multiple simple or complex applications in a quick fashion to complete projects. And to put it in short, I just don’t get the point of putting everything together in one app, even if it is developed by some of the best software makers around.

In fact, the whole idea seems to go against all the benefits of running OS X, much less running multiple applications targeted to exactly what I need. Granted, some apps get a little intense and do more than I may need. For example, I can’t say I use scripting in many apps that support it, but that’s because I don’t have to. An application like TextMate gives me the opportunity to pick and choose exactly what I want from a text editor. It isn’t trying to do too much, particularly because if it did it would interrupt the way I work. The things I don’t use don’t get in my way, and the things I do use are easy to get to. Sure, there are applications out there .. iTunes .. hut…hum.. that do handle tons of tasks all under one umbrella. But guess what, advanced music creators probably don’t use iTunes to do the majority of their composing, editing, and refining. Even though it may have the capability to do some of these tasks. This is why Apple created iWeb for novice web builders, because it allows them to do what they need without getting drug into the depths of web development. The problem is, Coda is iWeb for pros, which is a paradox in and of itself.

Here’s the gist of what I am getting at — the ideal application should be great at handling everything you need to do and shouldn’t get in the way if you don’t use every feature it offers.

Coda, to me, doesn’t seem to follow this line of logic. Rather, it forces the developer to use everything it provides and it doesn’t give much leeway in one direction or the other. For instance, Coda comes with Transmit FTP built in. Which sounds great until you want to connect to a client’s site to update one tiny PDF file. Suddenly you find yourself launching the entire client web project just to make one tiny update, an update that won’t even require 80% of the tools that Coda brings up. It’s like using photoshop to casually view pictures, no one wants to do it! Having an application that does too much is like having a beautiful piece of jewelry that weighs too much to wear. It may look great but dealing with it first hand just seems like a waste of time and comfort.

Sep29

Stacks

stacks-1Those of you familiar with Imulus know we’ve been working on a Group Task Management application for sometime now. It’s called Stacks

We developed Stacks out of necessity. It was once an Excel spreadsheet three years ago. It has morphed into an online application which we can’t live without, so we’ve decided to put it out there for others to enjoy. In the last few weeks we’ve made great progress on getting the internal beta application ready for beta testers.

Our goal is to open it up for testing before the end of October, but that’s only if client work doesn’t seriously push us off course.

Over the next few weeks we’ll be rolling out screen captures and hints to Stack’s functionality. Please stay tuned or apply to become a beta tester!

Jul22

The Process

Our “Process” is under attack; by us.

Recently, if you’ve bugged our office you’d be hearing the word “Process” tossed around with great frequency. This sounds ironic coming from a company which disdains corporate red-tape and culture. Yet I feel that Process has gotten a bad rap over the years. It’s been associated with words like ridged, out-dated, creativity-killer, soul-crusher… you get the point. In fact, I believe the opposite is true.

A great process is like having a common language between your entire team. Anyone new, coming into that team should be able to learn the language and immediately contribute. Similar to a language; processes need to be malleable and grow organically over the years. We’ve looked at ourselves in the mirror and determined that much of our success is dependent upon our chemistry and culture. While these things work well at first, they don’t allow your company to grow. They really fail once someone leaves either on vacation or permanently. Events like that will clearly cause havoc in a company which is glued together by chemistry.

Documenting Process allows us to quickly pick-up where another has left off. When a failure happens along the course of a project, it is the process that can be refined. Teams which clearly understand and execute an effective process will spend less time thinking about how to do something and more time can be dedicated to execution and creativity.

Jun6

How to set up a sexy jQuery TextMate bundle

Here at Imulus we’re massive fans of jQuery. We use it on a lot of our projects. We’re also fans of TextMate, an awesome text editor produced by the folks at MacroMates. Over the last few years we’ve refined our TextMate bundles (code highlighting and language recognition packages) to work ideally within the Imulus process.

So, during my recent love affair with jQuery I’ve heavily relied on their documentation section to look up specific functions and commands. And while their documentation is awesome, it’s still a slow process. Luckily, an awesome guy named Karl Swedberg has put together a beautiful jQuery bundle for TextMate that has tons of snippets for common jQuery tasks. And, it’s free!

Installation

Head over to GitHub and grab the lastest version of the bundle. When you download it you’ll get a weird filename like this:

kswedberg-jquery-tmbundle-b0622e4f889112c37e03400a6a3e63241ab29c31.zip

Unzip the file and change the folder name (which is the same as above) to:

jquery.tmbundle

Open up TextMate and then double click the jQuery bundle file you’ve just created. Boom! The bundle is installed.

Making it work within HTML documents

By default the jQuery bundle is set to only work within .js files. However, if you’re planning on using it within HTML pages you’ll need to do another few steps of work. First, copy the following code to your clipboard:

{    name = 'source.js.jquery.embedded.html';
            begin = '(?:^\s+)?(<)((?i:script))\b(?![^>]*/>)';
            end = '(?<=</(script|SCRIPT))(>)(?:\s*\n)?';
            beginCaptures = {
                1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; };
                2 = { name = 'entity.name.tag.script.html'; };
            };
            endCaptures = { 2 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; }; };
            patterns = (
                {    include = '#tag-stuff'; },
                {    begin = '(?<!</(?:script|SCRIPT))(>)';
                    end = '(</)((?i:script))';
                    captures = {
                        1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.tag.html'; };
                        2 = { name = 'entity.name.tag.script.html'; };
                    };
                    patterns = (
                        {    name = 'comment.line.double-slash.js';
                            match = '(//).*?((?=</script)|$\n?)';
                            captures = { 1 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.comment.js'; }; };
                        },
                        {    name = 'comment.block.js';
                            begin = '/\*';
                            end = '\*/|(?=</script)';
                            captures = { 0 = { name = 'punctuation.definition.comment.js'; }; };
                        },
                        {    include = '#php'; },
                        {    include = 'source.js'; },
                    );
                },
            );
        },

Then open up the TextMate bundle editor and drop down the HTML arrow.

html-selection

You should now see a huge list of snippets, commands, and preferences. Located in this list is an HTML language icon, it looks like this html-icon. Once this is selected you should see a large amount of code to the right. Paste the above code directly in the following position after patterns = (

patterns-paste

That’s it, you’re done. How you can access tons of jQuery snippets and code examples directly inside TextMate.