Nothing Insightful

Repository Updates (iOS Theme + jQuery.Gantt + Aristo)

Hey guys, not much has happening on the design/development front while I’ve been away on leave. Today I’ve landed some fairly big pull requests and bug fixes to what are probably my three biggest repos.

jQuery.Gantt

This is the big one. I made some pretty major changes before I went away but wanted a few more people to test it before I did the writeup.

I received a fairly major (and necessary) rewrite from Leo Pfeifenberger who sped up this project like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t a simple matter of landing the pull request, as the performance changes did come at the cost of coding standards and consistency. Some parts had been buggered by what looked like Visual Studio auto formatting, but they could have been hand-coded that way too.

For future reference, here are my own personal front end dev guidelines that have been received well by the community. They’ve changed in some regards based on feedback from individuals and organisations and represent how you should aim to format your code.

• Major performance increases.
  A before and after IE9 test shows performance going from 20 seconds to 400ms.
  That’s 2% of the previous run time.
• All new click events - fired when clicking an item or when clicking the empty space. Use this to edit events or create new events at certain points.
• State persistance - requires cookie.js to work.
• Scroll to today on load
• Extensive documentation
• Defined a license (MIT)
• Removing $.ajaxSetup, which was corrupting other scripts in the page.
  According to this stackoverflow answer it was only there to ensure it worked in ASP.NET situations. If you’re using it there, consider setting $.ajaxSetup externally.

Unfortunately that means there are some new issues:

• Code standards - I spent a considerable amount of time running the code through JSHint and fixing issues. I got most, but that included setting a few ignores.
• Eval - yep, as above, you’ll notice that there’s an eval in the code. Yuck.
• Holiday and “Today” highlighting are not occurring on the cell, only the header.

Two steps forward one step back. No biggie.

iOS jQuery Mobile Theme

I realised there was a big difference between what I was seeing in Chrome, the iOS simulator and my iPhone running iOS 5.1. Turns out the iOS simulator was only running 4.3.1, so I’ve now got the 5.1 simulator and that’s helped me resolve some visual quirks.

• Fixed: header bars had black top border
• Fixed: Vertical centring of header buttons was off (related to above, layout woes)
• Fixed: Black buttons had blue text shadow
• Fixed: Footer icons had crept to the right with last update (jQuery Mobile styles took precedence)
• Pull Request: <label> styles coming from poorly scoped selector
• Pull Request: Demo page typo
• Set demo page transitions to “slide” by default
• Set all demo page toolbars to be position=”fixed” by default
• Decided on licensing (MIT)

Aristo jQuery UI Theme

• Fixed: Cross browser CSS3 animations appear to have been re-instated.
• Pull Request: Added a non-prefixed value that I missed.
• Pull Request: Widget nesting issue fixed.