Over the last year or so there have been a lot of articles all decrying the use of the hamburger icon for navigation. The icon itself isn’t a hamburger, it’s just three horizontal lines that resemble one. In the early days of the iPhone and rise of mobile sites, the hamburger icon was a popular choice for showing a menu. And depending on which sites and applications you use, it might still be.
As great as CSS is, there is one thing that it lacks and that is a parent selector. The supposed reason for its nonexistence is performance concerns. People forget that the CSS specification as it currently stands offers many selector features which when used incorrectly could be considered bad for performance. I think justifying the lack of :parent selector purely because of performance concerns is silly. It’s like Javascript lacking the native forEach method because it is less performant than a native for or while and can introduced performance issues.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a term coined for describing devices connected to the internet. Your fitness band tracker is an IoT device, your climate control system, perhaps your lights and if you’ve got an expendable income: your fridge might be as well. I have always loved tinkering with hardware since I was a kid. Pulling apart old devices, puting devices inside of devices. In my hardware hacking travels, I have been buying cheap Android powered touchscreen tablets off of eBay.
When it comes to music streaming, Spotify is the leader with over 60 million listeners, 15 million of which are paid listeners. Over the last year or so, some artists have been VERY vocal about the small amount of revenue that Spotify actually pays out per X amount of listens. It got to the point where Taylor Swift pulled her music down, refusing to put her new album 1989 up for streaming because she felt that Spotify was undervaluing music and underpaying artists, before striking up an undoubtedly profitable deal for herself with Apple for their fledgling music offering.
Today we are going to be discussing how to use the Sortable Javascript library by RubaXa in our Aurelia applications. Sortable is a highly configurable, no frills drag and drop library that has zero dependencies. So if you’re not using jQuery or just not a fan of libraries with dependencies, then this is the library for you. I also highly recommend Dragula but this article will be focusing on Sortable. Getting Started This article is going to assume you have an Aurelia application already up and running and using JSPM as your package manager. If you do not have Aurelia installed, the recommended and easiest way to get an Aurelia application up and running is to download the Skeleton Navigation application from Github here.
Cooking steak isn’t difficult and certainly isn’t rocket science. But for some reason, many people screw up cooking the perfect steak. As with anything; patience, attention and the right tools for the job are crucial. You wouldn’t trust a carpenter without a hammer to do a good job. When it comes to smoking, things are a little more involved. You’re not just grilling a steak, you’re smoking it and temperature control, as well as the right amount of coals and positioning, is crucial.
It really does feel like the Microsoft team working on the Edge browser are legitimately trying to put out a decent and truly evergreen web browser. Today is a glorious day for Edge users and developers alike. Support for the
Unknown to some is the Aurelia router supports events. Using the Event Aggregator dependency in Aurelia, we can actually listen to various events fired via the router. All events can be subscribed to using the Event Aggregator dependency and the subscribe method. It is worth noting that you don’t always need to use the Event Aggregator, sometimes a router pipeline step is all that is needed to hook into a certain aspect of the router flow and in some cases, this might be the desired choice.
Recently the makers of Webstorm, Jetbrains announced something called Jetbrains Toolbox. The site describes it as a “new licencing model” marketing speak aside, it is a subscription based model which means users will now rent their software instead of owning it. If you’re a polyglot developer, then this might appeal to you. If you’re working with C# and love ReSharper and also working with the front-end and using WebStorm, a subscription based all-you-can-eat-as-long-as-you-keep-paying model might make sense to you.
Update February 2016: A more comprehensive article on bundling and exporting Aurelia applications has been published here. This post will remain, but it is encouraged to take a look at the newer post which answers things more clearly and gives examples. If you’re using the JSPM Package Manager with Aurelia, then this post is for you. There is a lot of uncertainty about bundling an Aurelia application and what deploying to production actually looks like. Until Aurelia comes with a proper bundling solution (the Aurelia CLI has been dropped), then we’re left to scratch our heads and use snippets from blog posts. There is now an official Aurelia bundler released which means we don’t have to glue together bundling solutions anymore.