Archive: Dev

TextMate has become an essential part of my development arsenal over the last few years.

When you first open up the application, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about- at first glance it looks like any other text editor.

The true beauty of TextMate is the plethora of bundles, add-ons, keyboard shortcuts and tab triggers available.

I’m going to go through some of my top tips on how to get the most from TextMate and increase your development productivity.

Tip 1: Find Your Perfect Theme

Getting yourself hooked up with the right theme is essential to a good days development. There is a huge amount out there catering for virtually every taste, so make sure to hunt around for one that’s right for you. Personally I have two themes that really hit the right spot for me:

• Clouds & Clouds Midnight – Two delightful themes especially good for the PHP developer inside you. It comes in two flavors – dark and light, both with strong bold colors that help you work on without getting dreary eyed.
• IR Black & IR White – This is my go too when I’m cracking on with some Ruby work. Again in dark and light versions with fantastic syntax colors. You’ll also find a nice terminal modification for the theme around too.

Theme choice is very much down to preference and what you’ve been used to before, so when you find the right one for you you’ll know. Make sure to search around and give a few a go, but these two are in my mind a great place to start! (more…)

In this video Jim looks at some of the tools that are essential in any JavaScript programmer’s toolkit. We also introduce some of the basic types in JavaScript, and how to create them.

For more videos be sure to check out Think Vitamin Membership, new video tutorials are added daily.

If you’d like to learn advanced HTML and CSS, then you’re going to love our HTML & CSS Online Conference.

Speakers

• Faruk Ateş (Modernizr)
• Aaron Gustafson (Easy Designs)
• Nathan Smith (SonSpring)

What You’ll Learn

1. Highly Maintainable, Efficient and Optimised CSS
   In this session, we’ll go over the key elements that make it easier for a team to work on a project’s CSS together, also important for freelancers handing markup and CSS back to their clients. We’ll also cover how to streamline and optimise your CSS to help reduce unnecessary repetition and improve page performance.
2. PIMP Web Design: Progressively Impressive
   Today’s web design and development process involves catering to an increasingly large number of browsers, and with mobile added into the mix the number of permutations and configurations we have to understand and support is staggering. With PIMP Web Design, you learn how to make sites that are Progressively IMPressive, offering better and more exciting experiences the more capable the user’s browser is, while making your work easy to maintain and flexible enough to handle all kinds of resolutions and devices.
3. The Why, How, and When of CSS Frameworks
   CSS frameworks can help expedite a site building project. But they certainly aren’t a one-size-fits-all solution. No technology is a magic bullet. CSS, like any other code language, must be wielded appropriately in order to be effective. This talk will explain some of the things to consider when choosing a CSS framework: “Should I use a framework? If so, which one? How do I use it? How I make my own?”
4. Progressive Enhancement with ARIA
   Designing and developing with accessibility in mind has numerous benefits: it makes your website usable by everyone, it makes your content inherently more search engine friendly, and it makes providing context-sensitive interfaces (e.g. mobile) even easier. In this session, Aaron Gustafson will provide you with a quick refresher on progressive enhancement and show you where the Web Accessibility Initiative’s Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) spec fits into it all. Throughout the talk, Aaron will provide numerous examples of how to weave ARIA into your projects and how to use ARIA, in concert with JavaScript, to dramatically enhance the usability of client-side widgets.

Buy your ticket here.

Here’s some of the comments people have kindly left about our previous online conferences :

Matthew Callier

@carsonified Great work on the HTML5 Conference. It was really enjoyable and informative.

Lynn Wallenstein

Had an awesome time and learned a lot at the #html5conf … thanks to @adactio @rem @brucel @petterlubbers and @ryancarson. Very inspired.

Brandon Setter

Thanks for a FANTASTIC conference today! I can’t wait to start implementing some of this cool stuff! #html5conf

Find out for yourself – book a ticket now!

Why Attend?

1. Re-watch the presentations after the conference as many times as you like
2. Ask the speakers your questions – live!
3. No travel costs
4. No time out of the office
5. Simply login with your browser

When

• San Francisco: 9am – 1:30pm
• London: 5pm – 9:30pm
• Sydney: 4am – 8:30am (Tuesday August 31st)