Last week I was involved in a discussion which amongst other topics covered working with github and building javascript apps with client-side MVC frameworks such as backbone.js. Whilst I had a vague awareness of both I was unable to contribute very much to the conversation due to a lack of hands-on experience. Feeling rather frustrated by this I decided to grab the bull by the horns and jump straight into building a new backbone app and pushing the source code to github.

Last night, as a result, drinklist was born. The app itself is currently very basic and is neither intended to change the world nor make me famous. What I do however hope is that overtime it will evolve into a respectable code example which will cover some skills that I have not yet found an opportunity to implement in my current job.

The technologies involved in the app are:

• Backbone.js (MVC app framework)
• Backbone.localStorage plugin (Data storage solution)
• Underscore.js (JS templating)
• jQuery (JS library)
• Bootstrap (CSS framework)

The first version of the demo app also includes a to “Still to do…” list which outlines where I hope this learning exercise will take me.

Feedback from any more experienced backbone folk or suggested reading links would be much appreciated.

The course started, rather conveniently, from the very beginning and concisely covered the basic installation of node.js and getting up and running with node package manager.

Next we used express.js, a node web framework, to rapidly build and deploy a data-driven webapp complete with custom url routing, and EJS page templating. As if this wasn’t already enough, we then wrote another line or two of code to add a fully functional JSON API to provide access our site’s data… amazing!

For me this was the highlight of the day. The speed with which new prototypes can be built and deployed is astonishing. Express JS kind of reminded me of the CodeIgniter PHP framework except it was quicker and easier to work with in almost every respect.

After a very impressive two course lunch, complete with a salad bar (all included in the ticket price) we headed back to the classroom to learn how to create a variety of web servers to support:

• Web sockets
• Socket.IO
• Server-sent Events
• Long polling

For the lazier readers amongst you, there is a good summary of all these technologies over at the HTML5Doctor blog.

Unfortunately, due to evolution of the workshop syllabus throughout Remy’s tour, learning about databases (MongoDB) was no longer in scope for the course. However, thanks to the solid foundation I got from the rest of the course, I am now confident that I can work this part out on my own.

WARNING: After a couple of beers it seems Remy has a tendency to get over-excited whilst demoing his pet projects. If there are any full pints on the table, get your laptop and bag out of the way ASAP!

All in all a great day. I left feeling inspired to build new things, eager to learn more and smelling somewhat beery, thanks Remy.

#RDGGEEK is a native Objective-C app that displays the speakers and talk descriptions for Reading Geek Night events past, present and future. The app is powered by a JSON feed from the main Reading Geek Night website. The event data is stored offline and updated every time the app is launched.

The #RDGGEEK app can now be downloaded from the app store.

The course was an excellent introduction to xCode, Objective-C and the iOS SDK. In addition to this it really helped to cement the principles of OOP in my mind. Much to my delight, the example projects were very well thought out and could be applied to many real world applications.

Aral was a knowledgeable and enthusiastic teacher with a real passion for user experience. Big thanks to Yell for funding my place on the course and an even bigger thanks to Aral for opening the door to the App Store.

To find out more details about future dates for this course check out Aral’s website.

Josh wanted a portfolio site to showcase a wide variety of media including; audio, video, photos and a news feed. He also wanted to manage the site using wordpress and for all of the content to be navigable without any page refreshes.

This was the first time I had worked with the new wordpress 3.0 release and it was a great opportunity to make use of the new custom post types. I personally think this is one of the best sites I have ever built and enjoyed every minute of it, Thanks Josh.

Josh’s website: http://joshwynter.co.uk

As a front-end developer on the project I was quoted in the article as saying…

“The front-end dev team at Yell wanted to advance the coding standards, and moving to the HTML5 doctype was the first logical step. We made use of custom data attributes, placeholder attributes and local storage, all of which contributed to an improvement in the quality of our source code and the performance of our JavaScript. We also had the added benefit of being able to simplify our charset, style and script tags.” - Chris Bewick

This was an excellent project to work on and I am delighted with the reponse. Many thanks to @brucel for the great write-up and to @doodlemoonch for being, as always, a delight to work with.

This article can be found on page 57 of issue 204 of .net magazine.

I am really excited to be able to announce the publishing of my guest author post, HTML5 Custom Data Attributes (data-*) on the HTML5 Doctor website.

I have used HTML5 Doctor as a learning resource many times in the past and it feels great to be able to give a little something back.

Many thanks to Richard Clark, Remy Sharp and Mike Robinson for their constructive feedback on the article.

I haven’t felt this left out since my mum refused to buy me proper Nike trainers at school. Dribbbling is a new phenomenom all about sharing what you are working on and getting encouraging, inspiring and constructive feedback from other designers.

I think it is a fantastic idea and I love the execution of it, the site is simply stunning. Unfortunately dribbble is still an invite only proposition which is a bit whack if you are not friends of friends of the creators or an internationally renowned design super hero.

Whilst I am still unable to dribbble in public I thought I would dribbble in private and put out a blog post with the shots I would be dribbbling if I could.

These shots are both from projects I am currently working on and any dribbble-esque feedback on either would be much appreciated.

A current client project

An ongoing personal project

PS - If anyone out there has a spare dribbble invite they could send my way I’d be as happy as a kid with proper Nike trainers.

UPDATE: I now have my very own Nike trainers thanks to the lovely Matt Carey!

I was rather amused by this proposition and set to work on my own idea which has now been uploaded to the Hardboiled card flickr group. The nine best entries (as judged by Mr Clarke himself) will go on to feature in the pages of his forthcoming book “Hardboiled web design” to assist in the explanation of CSS3 selectors.

Shortly after my last post, Snap Bird creator Remy Sharp (@rem) replied to my email and said that he wanted to incorporate some of my ideas into the Snap Bird design. A couple of weeks later, after some great work from Clearleft’s Paul Annett (@nicepaul), the final Snap Bird design has now been launched.

Much to my delight, my bird illustration has been adopted as the Snap Bird mascot and has also been made into a favicon!

Many thanks to Remy and Paul for a credit in the final design, much appreciated.