A blog about design, code and some other stuff

Haters gonna hate but I’ve been delaying for too long to write this one. Since the jQuery team is working to get the version 2.0 out of the door and Christmas is coming it might be a good time to talk about it. Please don’t add comments like “use framework/library X instead!”, the question here is not about which framework/library is better but about things that I think could be improved.

I know that jQuery 2.0 will have the same API as 1.9, this wishlist would be for a future version of jQuery that doesn’t need to be backwards compatible (call it jQuery Harmony or jQuery 3.0 if you will).

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I started using node.js to write build scripts since last year and even wrote a post about it before. The main reason why I decided to write my build scripts in plain JS is because I want them to be flexible and easy to edit. (Use the language you and your team are familiar with).

On this post I will try to cover some issues and the main reason why I’m not using a tool like grunt, buildr.npm, smoosh and gear on my projects. I’ll focus on Grunt since it is the most popular node.js build tool out there but the issues are present on other build tools as well (written in JS or not).

A couple days ago I sent a few tweets about it:

somehow I feel that @gruntjs is making the same mistakes as Ant. I would rather call JS methods instead of setting config options…

— Miller Medeiros (@millermedeiros) August 1, 2012

it would also make more sense to just run `node grunt mytask` instead of global install, would work better on windows. /cc @gruntjs

— Miller Medeiros (@millermedeiros) August 1, 2012

now I had a “crazy” idea for a project. A node.js adapter for Ant so you can call any task as a JS method passing JSON configs. #notdoingit

— Miller Medeiros (@millermedeiros) August 1, 2012

TL;DR; Build scripts should be real scripts and not configuration files.

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On my last post I focused on issues that I’ve found a solution, this one is going to be about bugs and issues that I couldn’t find a solution and/or things that are impossible to do on the iPhone and iPad. It is important to note that I didn’t spent too much time searching or trying to find solutions for each problem but I consider most of them to be impossible to solve without a new OS release…
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Imagine you are working on a project targeted for the iPad, Chrome and Safari that should contain an interactive HTML5 video… Design and feature-wise the project seems pretty simple and since you assume that the newest Webkit browsers have a good support for CSS3/HTML5/JavaScript (and Steve Jobs says it’s “amazing”) you shouldn’t have any issues building it, especially since you have coded many video players and interactive videos using Flash before and you are pretty experienced with HTML/JS projects and have used HTML5 video and CSS transitions/animations on a couple other projects.. A couple weeks of development should be fine… – Now you have a big problem.
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So, I’ve been delaying this post for a couple weeks, I was trying to finish my first Facebook app before posting the bugs and undocumented API that I’ve found while developing a Facebook tabbed app (application that runs inside a tab) and helping some of my co-workers with another projects involving Facebook.

Let’s get started, recently many big companies started to invest a lot of money on “social media” and to use Facebook as one of their platforms to engage with consumers, and the way they usually do this is by adding new tabs to their profiles using it almost as a micro-site. Here are a few samples: GAP, Adidas, Axe and many more..

My first complain is about the way that Facebook setup tabs, why the hell a tab needs to be an application? why everything is an application even being outside Facebook (Facebook connect website) or something that you don’t want other users to install on their profile or access through a canvas page? why does the tab works completely different than a canvas page or a Facebook Connect website and have different restrictions? why is it so hard to get started and why the documentation doesn’t explain which methods are available on a tab? – many questions, no answers..
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