Detecting CSS transitions support using JavaScript

Progressive enhancement is one of the cornerstones of good web design: You build a solid foundation that supports a broad range of different browsers, and then add features either as you detect support for them or in a way that doesn’t interfere with less capable browsers.

One of the awesome new features that’s in recent versions of Safari, Safari Mobile (iPhone browser), Chrome, the Android browser, and in Palm’s webOS is CSS transitions. Transitions work by smoothly interpolating between two states of a CSS property over time. For example, using the simple style rules below, you could have a link gradually change from yellow to red when the user moves the mouse over it:

a {color: yellow; -webkit-transition: color 1s linear;}
a:hover {color: red;}

In a more complicated example, you could use CSS transitions to slide an element off-screen when a replacement element is introduced, like the way that the “pages” slide off-screen when you click through an iPhone’s contacts.

This introduces a problem: What if you’re using JavaScript to add the new element, and you want to remove the old element after it’s off screen, and you need to support multiple browsers?

You need to be able to detect that the browser supports CSS transitions so that you know not to remove the element until it’s done animating, and so that you know that it’s OK to remove the element right away for browsers that don’t support CSS transitions. Here’s how you can detect support using JavaScript:

var cssTransitionsSupported = false;
(function() {
    var div = document.createElement('div');
    div.innerHTML = '<div style="-webkit-transition:color 1s linear;-moz-transition:color 1s linear;"></div>';
    cssTransitionsSupported = (div.firstChild.style.webkitTransition !== undefined) || (div.firstChild.style.MozTransition !== undefined);
    delete div;
})();

The variable cssTransitionsSupported will be set to true when transitions are supported, or to false when transitions are not supported.

You can then either use the webkitTransitionEnd (or mozTransitionEnd) events to detect when the transition is finished, or else immediately perform the action when transitions aren’t supported.

Tags: cross browser support, css, css 3, css animation, css transitions, Javascript, progressive enhancement, WebKit

Posted in Methodology, Mobile, Technology | No Comments »

Apple iPad… iPhone with a big screen?

Tags: Amazon, apple, ebooks, ipad, iphone, kindle

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2010 is definitely the year of the app

I’ve always been a fan of applications. I remember using my early palm apps with pure joy. Even a simple app to calculate gas mileage or track rides, so happy that innovators like Palm paved the way. Handango was the first iTunes app store. With real money on the table we see folks flocking to Android, some are even fleeing iTunes for more open pastures of Android. The biggest name to flee being the developer of the iPhone Facebook application. But back to my point, it’s more exciting to think of applications everywhere.

For example, the Microsoft Sync platform in Ford cars will enable application development. Imagine an application to count how many times I hit the brake on my commute home or my favorite and application that tracks my various different routes home and tells me on average which is fastest.

Now HP have gotten into the mix with applications for your printer. One of the first being an Fandango application that lets you print your movie tickets right from your printer. If you need to print it anyway, skip the computer or portable device.

CNN had a great writeup on why it’s the year of the app. I forgot to mention what’s happening in TV’s. With Yahoo TV, a bunch of manufacturer’s are making it easy for basically Konflabulator desktop gadgets to end up on your TV. Samsung is encouraging folks to build apps into their TV’s and blu-ray players.

Posted in General | 1 Comment »

Technology Predictions for 2010

Razorfish’s Matt Johnson outlined his predictions for content management over at our CMS blog, www.cmsoutlook.com. Many of his predictions will hold true for web technology at large as well. I see traction and opportunities for:

• Cloud Options:We will see further movement towards cloud solutions, and more vendors providing SaaS alternatives to their existing technologies. It ties into the need for flexibility and agility, and the cost savings are important in the current economic climate.
• APIs and SOA:Functionality will be shared across many web properties, and the proliferation of mini apps and widgets will content. APIs are becoming a critical element of any succesful solution. This is also driven by the increased complexity of the technology platform. Solutions we now develop frequently incorporate many different technologies and vendors, ranging from targeting and personalization to social capabilities.
• Open Source:Not only in content management, but in many other areas, Open Source will start to play an important role. Examples are around search, like Solr, or targeting with OpenX. Cloud computing also further drives the expansion of Open Source. As companies are looking to leverage cloud solutions for agility, the licensing complications with commercial solutions will drive further open source usage.

What do you see as additional trends?

Tags: Cloud, Open source, SOA

Posted in Cloud computing, General, Technology | Comments Off

Another new chapter for Razorfish

As we have moved into the Publicis umbrella there have been a lot of things to be excited about. Being part of Microsoft was amazing, we grew our skills and made lasting relationships. Our strong technology agnostic skills in Java, LAMP, have grown even stronger adding depth in .Net as well.  As always we search for the right technology to solve business challenges.

In my new role as CTO of Razorfish one of our first big events is the technology summit currently planned for the first week in February 2010. Publicis is clearly excited, as are we, to bring out deep technology skills to the large client base at a company the size of Publicis. Change is always change and very exciting. Below are some of the thoughts on the technology aspects of the acquisition coming out in the press and from Publicis’s executives.

Here’s what Harley Manning from Forrester has had to say..

The firm has much stronger design capabilities, both for user experience and what we call “brand image”. Plus – and this is just my opinion because we did not evaluate them on this – it[Razorfish] has stronger technology capabilities as well.
The latter is important because there are some agencies out there with very strong tech chops, including IBM Interactive and Sapient. And it will become even more important as interactive moves to high function multi-touch mobile devices, or even stationary multi-touch devices like the way cool Coke vending machine Sapient displayed at Forrester’s recent Customer Experience Forum. Because ultimately, a great design has to actually work in order to deliver a great customer experience.

Brandweek captured some quotes from David Kenney

We got it at good terms,” said David Kenny, managing director of VivaKi, Publicis’ digital unit. They bring much more technology. I think that’s important. Their clients think very highly of them in terms of being able to technologically deliver, and that’s stronger than anything we have, including Digitas.”

In an interview with paidContent, Kenny pointed to Razorfish’s technology as well as its extensive global reach as key reasons behind the merge.

Posted in General | 2 Comments »

Keeping the cloud open

I really like Matt Asay’s article on why we need to focus on keeping the cloud open and less about keeping the operating system open. If you think of the cloud as an ‘array’ of applications and less of a hosting solution it starts to open up the aperture on it’s true potential. Imaging the ability to stitch together applications across the cloud like you can stitch together data. Basically a yahoo pipes for applications not just data.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Is Cloud Computing the Hotel California of Tech? (tech.slashdot.org)

Tags: Articles, google, Matt Asay, Microsoft, Open source, Operating system, Programming, Red Hat

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SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day 3

Day 3!  The whole reason I am at the SharePoint Conference this year is because I am helping our client present their SharePoint case study in one of today’s sessions.

I scheduled some lightweight sessions in the morning, starting with the fun Building Sharepoint Mashups With SharePoint Designer, Bing Maps and REST Services.  This session was really pretty straight forward.  Using a data view web part to retrieve data from an MSN and Twitter RSS and/or REST feeds and then using XSLT to display maps mashup data (Google or Bing).

Before lunch, I went to Best Practices for Implementing Multi-Lingual Solutions on SharePoint 2010 to see what new things has 2010 in store for Variations.  While there are big changes in store for multi-lingual solutions, they are more on the admin/UI side.  The biggest improvement is the performance gains in building the Heirarchy Creation as timer jobs.  From a UI perspective, the chrome is now also localized based on User preferred language selectable from all the language packs installed.  And as much as I shake my head when I hear this from people, SharePoint 2010 DOES NOT TRANSLATE YOUR SITE CONTENT AUTOMAGICALLY!

I met my client for lunch and we proceeded as a group to Breaker E - our session room.  We presented “Kraft: Migration of Consumer Facing Websites to SharePoint” to a roomful of people and a few came up for questions, comments and leads after the session.  We consider it a success!  That was of course the highlight of my day and everything else was just blah after that point ;p  If you missed it, or are interested in watching the video of the presentation, a copy of the deck and a video of the presentation is up and available on the SharePoint Conference site.  You would need to login with your Windows Live ID.

I spent the afternoon going to Developing Social Applications with SharePoint 2010; and Customizing the Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Deployment Process. In 2010, comments, ratings, my network, RSS feeds all come out of the box.  The social features available in SharePoint 2010 are ok but not good enough yet, IMO.  This is one area where I think the focus is still more in ECM implementations rather than the Internet.  The Manager/Employee methapor just will not work in the real world.  And though, I was told by the Product team that it could be implemented in an Internet scenario, as shown in their Adventureworks demo - I will have to form that opinion once I’ve seen their Adventureworks demo site.  Deployment has indeed been made simpler in VS2010 by being able to compile and deploy from VS2010 to a local SharePoint instance.  But for deploying between environments, and betwen farms - WSPs are still the best way to go.

This evening’s event is Ask The Expert and SharePoint Idol, a Rock Band competition.  I thought for a sec about joining a team but changed my mind.  I had fun watching them though.

Tags: conference, Content Management, deployment, enterprise, internationalization, kraft, kraftfoods, Sharepoint, social, Visual Studio

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SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day 2

The challenge I always have with these conferences is the plethora of choices available to attendees.  I already know what topics I want to focus on:  WCM; Architecting, Developing and Building public facing internet sites, and Social features in 2010.  But even so, there are still time slots where I have narrowed down the choice to 3, and then I have to make the tough decision and hope that I made the right choice.  For the most part, I decided to always go to a 300 or 400 level session, and then just watch the video and the deck online for the 200 sessions I missed.

For the 9am slot, I had to choose between Advanced Web Part Development in VS 2010 and Introduction to Service Applications and Topology.  The architect won over the developer so I went to the Service Applications session. Essentially, 2010 SSP (Shared Service Providers) is replaced by the new Service Applications architecture. You build service applications that can live in a separate Application Server, and you call it from clients, in this case a SharePoint web front end via proxies.  I’m not sure if this is a correct simile, but I kinda liken it to old DCOM architecture. This makes it easier for organizations (and frankly, ISVs) to build Service Applications that can be deployed once and then used in multiple SharePoint web apps, and more, multiple SharePoint farms.

There’s a follow-up session to this about Scaling SharePoint 2010 Topologies for Your Organization, but I skipped that in favor of Overview of SharePoint 2010 Online. SharePoint Online is another product in Microsoft’s “Software as a Service” offerings.  It is essentially a service where Microsoft hosts and manages SharePoint for your organization.  This is part of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) which also includes Exchange Online, Office Live Meeting, Office Communications Online, Dynamics CRM Online. It is good for small or medium size business but can also be considered for the enterprise in some special cases.  The important thing to note is that this does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision.  SharePoint online is supposed to complement/extend your on premises infrastructure, not necessarily replace it.

In the afternoon, I agonized over Developing SharePoint 2010 Applications with the Client Object Model, Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SharePoint but ended up going to Claims Based Identity in SharePoint 2010.  The client object model was really getting a lot of good tweets during and after the session and I see a lot of opportunities there for us to pull SharePoint information via client calls, i.e., Javascript or Silverlight.  The virtualization session focused on Hyper-V so I didn’t feel too bad about missing it. In the Claims Based Identity session, Microsoft introduced their new Identity Framework and explained how it works.  This essentially works like Kerberos where essentially SAML tokens are created.  The good news is that it supports AD, LDAP, SAML.  The bad news is that it doesn’t support OpenID and other standard internet auth schemes/standards… yet.

I wanted to know more about composites and the new Business Connectivity Services (BCS) so I went to Integrating Customer Data with SharePoint Composites, Business Connectivity Services (BCS) and Silverlight.  BCS is one other new thing with 2010 that is interesting.  Allowing SharePoint to create External Content Type that can pull data from external LOB data opens up a lot of possibilities, but most of the demos I’ve seen so far only connects to 1 table.  In the real world, we would be connecting to a more complex table, in a lot of cases - pulling heirarchical data and I wanted to see how this works - more importantly, will it support CRUDQ features.  This session finally demo’d how to connect using a LINQ data source.  Didn’t see the CRUDQ part though, because the demo was read-only data.

For the last session of the day, I chose between Securing SharePoint 2010 for Internet Deployments (400) and SharePoint 2010 Development Best Practices (300).  So of course, I chose the geekier session since security is a hot topic on public facing sites.  However, this is probably one of the more disappointing sessions for me as this was really more targeted towards SP IT Pros than developers.  It is more about hardening your servers and protecting your network.  All these considerations even come default already in Windows 2008.  I probably would have enjoyed the best practices session better even though I was afraid they will be filled with “duh” moments.  I have to check that deck out though, it produced some funny tweets.

Day 2 is also the night of the Conference Party.  This year, the theme is 80’s night at The Beach (Mandalay Bay) with Huey Lewis and the News providing music and entertainment.  Too bad I missed it.

Tags: architecture, best practices, Cloud, Development, mandalay bay, Sharepoint, training, virtualization

Posted in Cloud computing, General, Technology | 2 Comments »

SharePoint Conference 2009 - Day 1

I’m at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas this week. Registration and Exhibit Hall started Sunday night, but sessions officially started Monday. I am tweeting all day during the conference, follow me (@mmdeluna) if you are interested. You can track tweets using #spc09. I will be posting daily summaries. Stay Tuned!

Registration and Exhibit Hall

This year’s conference is SOLD OUT. Compared to last years 3,800 attendees, this year’s 7,400 attendance is a testament to how big SharePoint has been adopted in the enterprise. Registration was pretty well organized and the badges are smart cards that are being scanned (optionally) by vendors for mailing list subscriptions and contests; and are also scanned by event managers for session attendance. Most of the vendors I saw in the Exhibit Hall are from Document Management Services - scanning, annotating, encrypting, converting, etc. And then there are the normal partner vendors: ISVs, SIs, Training, Data Recovery, Content Migration and Professional Services. Having said that - the give aways were a bit lame

Keynotes

There were 2 keynotes scheduled on day one, which lasted the whole morning. You would think that it wasn’t smart to have 7,400 attendees to sit still for almost 3 hours but Kudos to the presentation team, they pulled it off. Steve Ballmer did his FIRST SharePoint Conference keynote, one of the last few things Bill used to do that he hasn’t done yet. Tony Rizzo and the others did a great job on the demos doing enough to whet the appetite of all the geeks (like me) in the room. Here are the items that “struck” me during the keynotes. I am hoping to attend some of the sessions that show these in action.

• There’s a HUGE emphasis on SharePoint and Internet facing sites. So much so that MS has renamed their products and services to emphasize this. Expect licensing prices to reflect this change
  • Intranet Products: MS Sharepoint Foundation 2010 (formerly known as WSS), MS SharePoint Server 2010, MS Fast Search Server 2010 for SharePoint
  • Internet Products: MS SharePoint Server 2010 For Internet Sites (STD, ENT editions) and MS Fast Search Server 2010 for Interet Business
• Oh yeah - Steve Ballmer features Kraftfoods.com on his keynote - Nice! I wonder if this will drive attendance on our session (Wednesday, 10/21 @ 1:15 pm)
• SharePoint 2010 goes on public beta in November - don’t forget to download
• SharePoint Online (SharePoint in the Cloud)
• SharePoint Workspaces (Groove Makeover)
• SharePoint Composites - I need to know more about this.  Interesting.
• Developer tool integration in VS 2010. One-Click build, deploy and debug >> AWESOME!
• Powershell Scripting - say goodbye to STSADM
• New External Content Type / BCS (formerly BDC) - opens up possibilities with integration to backend systems. I’m very excited about this
• SharePoint Service Applications - say goodbye to SSP
• Improved List Performance and Caching - taxonomy navigation (tags and labels)
• New and Improved Central and Site Admin UI - it’s AJAX yo!
• Built in Spell Checker - it’s the little things…
• Our PLDs and PLAs will like the improved support on standards specially WCAG
• Some Social Computing features out of the box - ratings, notes/comments, blogs, wall (My Network)
• VS 2010, SharePoint 2010 running on Windows 7 - 64 bit mobile development machine. yay!

Steve made a point by saying he didn’t think there’s any software out there that competes directly with SharePoint. Jeff Teper implies the same when he compares SharePoint to a Swiss Army Knife. Both videos are available online for viewing at the SPC09 website.

The list just goes on and on! There are way too many things to get excited about in 2010. I am hoping to get into the details of a lot of these in the upcoming sessions.

Day 1 Sessions

For the breakout sessions on day 1, I selected a couple of SharePoint overview topics.  One was SharePoint 2010 Overview and What’s New and more specifically for developers, Visual Studio 2010 SharePoint Developent Tools overview.  These sessions give me enough information on the overall features available so I can make a more informed selection in the coming days.

Tags: Cloud computing, content management server, internet, Microsoft, office business platform, Sharepoint

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Cloudfront, Amazon’s Caching Delivery Network (CDN)

It’s nice to see Amazon moving into the CDN space with their Cloudfront offering, it seems like the CDN market can definitely use some fresh look at the challenge. It looks like it builds off your usage of Amazon S3 but with an accelerator finding the closest cache server to deliver your content. With this approach it doesn’t seem like a great fit as a CDN for any architecture. The chart on the right is an interesting comparison.

I’ve been intrigued over the last couple of years with Coral Caching. Peer to peer open source caching seems like it’s ripe with opportunity, wouldn’t it be cool if my mediacenter pc, apple tv and other laptops that sit at home idle during the day could be leveraged to help offload servers. I guess it’s a balance of saving power and sleeping or turning off the box vs. using less server power.

Tags: Amazon CloudFront, Amazon S3, Content delivery network, Coral Caching, Open source, Peer-to-peer, Technology

Posted in Cloud computing, General, Technology | 2 Comments »