Development Archives

  1. Chrome’s Incognito Mode

    I’m finding that the Incognito windows in Google Chrome (I actually us Chromium) are becoming a daily tool in my standard browsing and development toolset. When I first heard about the concept of private browsing I had a more narrow view of it’s usefulness; but I’m finding lots of legitimate uses for it. A few…

  2. Introducing Carrington Build

    Over the last few years I’ve loved building a team and creating great things for our clients, but I’ve missed building products. A little more than a year ago, we started work on a system that I’ve had in the back of my mind for (quite literally) years. This work has resulted our first commercial…

  3. HTML5 Tip: input type=”date” and Webkit

    If you’re using HTML5 (like we are on the Crowd Favorite website), you may run into an issue of forms not submitting in Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome). If the form is failing silently with no JavaScript errors and you have an <input type=”date” /> in the form, that may be the issue. It appears that…

  4. Twitter Tools and OAuth Continued

    I didn’t post many details in my previous update, and I’d like to visit some of them now. At the time that post was written, it looked like the user experience for Twitter Tools was going to look something like this: Download, install and activate Twitter Tools. Click a link to twitter.com where you would…

  5. Retina Changes iPhone Development

    I believe the super-dense pixels in the Retina display of the forthcoming iPhone are going to have an interesting effect on iPhone developers. While most are probably chomping at the bit to get new hardware anyway, we’re back to the landscape of the original iPhone release: if you want to see how your app really…

  6. Shaped by Our Tools

    One of the things I’ve enjoyed as the team has grown at Crowd Favorite is seeing how different developers utilize different tools to accomplish similar things. I’m an old-school BBEdit user but just about everyone else on the team is a TextMate enthusiast. I have favorable impressions of TextMate and own a license for it,…

  7. Wrong Approach

    I spent an hour this evening circling some code while trying to write an abstracted base class. I was taking the wrong approach. Even though I need the base class, trying to start by creating it before creating a simple working prototype is a recipe for going in circles and fumbling about. Build a simple,…

  8. More GameTonight Metros

    I’ve added a few more metro areas that were requested for GameTonight: Chicago Cincinnati (also available at /cincy) Los Angeles (also available at /la) Washington DC (also available at /dc) I hadn’t added Chicago initially because the venues for the various teams are not as close to each other as they are in Denver, Minneapolis,…

  9. Team WordPress 3.0 Code Review

    Today we did our first team WordPress code review. Even though we build on WordPress MU as much or more than we have with single user WordPress, we all wanted to get a better sense of how that functionality had been merged into 3.0. It went pretty well I think. We met at the office,…

  10. Salting Passwords in DB or Across the Wire?

    One of the sessions at SxSW talked about the importance of salting passwords in the database in case an attacker gains database access. The assertion is that hashing in the database is not enough, that the hash needs to be combined with salt. This got folks (including me) thinking and talking about this again, which…

  11. NDAs

    I thought about writing a post on NDAs, but luckily the internets have already done it for me. Read these: NDAs are unnecessary because ideas are worthless — Less Everything Blog It’s worthless because ideas in general are worthless. Anyone can have a good idea, and they do. What has value is execution. The ability…

  12. Mercurial or Git?

    (cross-posted to Twitter to ensure a fragmented conversation) We’re likely to make the move from SVN to Mercurial or Git in the next few months, for at least a segment of our development at Crowd Favorite. I’ve been doing a bit of reading on pros and cons, but would appreciate real-world experience from folks that…