Love Mike G

An interesting post from Dave Ward came my way today which outlines a few conditions in which the jQuery Ready event my actually increase perceived load times.

…what if $document.ready is slowing you down? In this post, I’m going show you specific instances where postponing startup code until the document’s ready event slows perceived page load time, could leave your UI needlessly unresponsive, and even causes initialization code to run slower than necessary.

While I always do make a conscious decision to separate library and application code from my initialization methods, I’m starting to wonder if I should be paying more attention to applications similar to his examples.

Dave concludes that this certainly isn’t applicable in all situations. True, in fact, I’d say it’s always the safe bet to include your init routines in a ready event. When you get to the point where performance optimization matters, these are some great points to consider.

via Don’t let jQuery’s $document.ready slow you down | Encosia.

Steven Frank has made a wonderful contribution to the open source community today by adding Markdown support for Notational Velocity.

I forked the excellent open source! Notational Velocity app, and hacked in a third pane that shows you the note you’re viewing as rendered by Markdown.

As an avid note taker and fan of Simplenote and Markdown, this is an absolutely amazing addition an already excellent piece of software. You can fork the nv Github repository to get access. I haven’t found any binaries as of yet.

Update 8/30/2010: — Binaries may be found on the nv Downloads page.

via Steven Frank – I forked the excellent open source! Notational… and Minimal Mac.

This made my Sunday: although it’s been official for almost a month, I’m just now learning that Google now supports logging in to multiple accounts simultaneously.

Now, you can visit google.com/accounts and click the link next to “Multiple sign-in.” After you sign into your first account, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts from the new accounts menu in the upper right hand corner of Gmail, then easily toggle back and forth between them. You can even open multiple Gmail tabs — one for each of your accounts.

If you’re a Google Apps customer you may have noticed that this has always been allowed so I can’t say that this is a huge surprise — though I’m quite happy to see they’ve taken the steps to improve the usability in standard google accounts by adding a menu next to your account name. According to the post, the drop-down (for something similar) will be coming to Apps customers after they roll out their new infrastructure.

Since Google Apps customers can already sign in to their accounts at the same time as their personal Google Accounts, we won’t be adding this new feature to Google Apps until the new infrastructure is in place.

via Access two Gmail accounts at once in the same browser – Official Gmail Blog.

We all know them. If you’ve ever registered a domain name before, purchased a car, or hell, watched TV for 10 minutes, then you’ve experienced a dark pattern.

Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind.

Out of all the pattern catalogs I have bookmarked, this is possibly one of the most interesting.

via Dark Patterns.

Branko Ajzele posted a really interesting post today on the Inchoo blog about extending the Magento core API. Surprisingly, it’s not as easy as one would think…

Its all about simple things, right? Well, here is one bottom line simple thing I would like to do with my Magento API. I would like to get a list of all available websites, stores and store views. Can I do that with the latest (as of this writing, 1.4.1.1) Magento? No I cannot! Can I get a list of … etc. For any serious scenario you will most likely be out of luck. What’s interesting is that rarely even a combination of several method calls will give you what you might need. Trust me on this one, I am writing Android application for Magento and its killing me.

I’ve oftentimes thought about this, but to be honest, every time I’ve had to use the core API, it’s been because the project was really, really simple or because it was my last resort (trust me, I avoid anything Soap-related like it’s the plague).

If you’re not trying to do anything complicated, the API is actually one of the more pleasant parts of Magento to work with. Unfortunately, it’s Soap-based and slow as hell, but for simple tasks it does the job well.

As Branko points out, the moment you try to do anything interesting with it (like build a mobile app), you quickly realize that it’s simplicity is actually a weakness and a point of great frustration.

The key to overcoming this limitation is to extend every core API method with your own library, made available via a plugin. When you need to add functionality, you add the method to your subclass and publish the method via the extension’s configuration.

Branko was kind enough to make his solution available on Github and he promises to document it more in the coming weeks.

via Inchoo.