Andy Edinborough

Still seeking forgiveness for being a ColdFusion developer at one point

Duck-Punching the jQuery UI Datepicker into a Date/Time Picker

Posted on June 23, 2010 in Code    Tagged datetimepicker datepicker jquery Tweet This

There are a TON of awful date pickers out there.  For a who’s who of the worst, check out Date Time Picker Competive Analysis.

jQuery UI’s Datepicker control is by far the best looking and most intuitive picker.  In light of maintaining a uniform UI, I wanted a date time picker that played on that control.  I found two:

  1. http://blog.w3visions.com/2009/04/date-time-picker-with-jquery-ui-datepicker/ – Integrates with Datepicker, but the UI is completely disjoined.
  2. http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/4/jquery-date-and-time-pickers – The first one listed here is the one I had been using.  It integrated nicely with Datetpicker, but the author’s website is down now, and I found it was quite bulky and that it limited how you could use Datepicker—no inlining, no animation, etc.

So I created a duck-punched DateTimepicker that simply manipulates the Datepicker DOM element and functions to add the missing functionality:image

As you can see, I also added the ability to specify custom buttons… Read More →

Beautiful PNG Wait Indicator with Raphaël and jQuery

Posted on April 16, 2010 in Code    Tagged raphael jquery svg png Tweet This

UPDATE:  Please don’t read this post… It’s actually kind stupid.  :/  Now that IE supports 2D CSS tranforms, there are betters ways of handling this.

 

Can you believe that in 2010 we are still stuck  with using animated gif’s?  They support transparency, but not the alpha-channel.  So when you need to create a wait indicator that won’t have a specific background, you’re stuck with a pixelated look.

Recently, I wanted to create a beautiful wait-indicator to display while AJAX was loading.  I wanted to use PNG, but animated PNG’s don’t have wide support yet. Furthermore, PNG’s are fairly large, so an animated one would be orders of multitude larger.  I thought, “This is silly.  This is the image I want. ROTATE IT!”.  Seriously, what year is this?  1996?!

Enter Raphaël:

Raphaël is a small JavaScript library that should simplify your work with vector graphics on the web. If… Read More →

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