Prateek Saxena

Pentagram

Prateek Saxena — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 03:04:37 +0000

Yahoo Messenger in Yahoo Mail Beta

Prateek Saxena — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 11:51:21 +0000

Finally the moment that we have all been waiting for Yahoo Messenger is not available on Yahoo Mail BETA. This is the coolest thing that has ever happened. I am sure you wanna see a screenshot now -

It is totally cool you should try it out!!

Apple Inc. Website

Prateek Saxena — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 05:43:40 +0000

Today I woke up. My sister is about to get a MacBook in a few days (it is shipping from Japan). So I am really excited and stuff. Seems that it is not only me that is excited about stuff related to Apple.

Today a lot of stuff went down in Apple Inc. They have completely changed there website from the Aqua glassy buttons look to something maybe more like Leopard??

They also released Safari for Windows . One new iPhone advertisement as well. But, I am not able to run the WWDC 2007 Keynote Address, and the suspense of looking at leopard is killing me.

I will be blogging more about this once I get into the action.

WordPress: 1 Million Blogs

Prateek Saxena — Thu, 24 May 2007 04:17:41 +0000

Yipee!! Now WordPress.com is hosting 1 Million blogs. I was waiting for a lot time for this to happen. And I contribute 4 blogs to this even though I write only one

I know its not 1 Million yet, but will be soon and I wont be able to blog at that time

WordPress Error

Prateek Saxena — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:36:49 +0000

I was seeing my stats yesterday on WordPress yesterday and then decided to add a new widget to the blog. When I went to the presentation section an error occurred on WordPress. I am not sure if you have ever seen an error on WordPress before or not but it is kind of cute and funny. Check it out-

I really liked it . As always a quick refresh solved the problem

Tecnorati Revamp?

Prateek Saxena — Wed, 23 May 2007 08:02:07 +0000

After writing the previous post on Joost and I went to ping Technorati I saw that they have revamped there website. I mean they have actually revamped there website and have not given it a face lift like most websites. They have changed there “Sign In” form from a small toolbar like “Digg” to a brand new shiny light box!

Cool isn’t it. They have also added an array of slick new features to the website lately. Like of course Technorati Authority. Also now on the top there is a bar that shows the latests searches mades on Technorati (<>) scrolling. Apart from the header the basic overall design is approximately the same.

I really like what they have done to there website. Unlike the other who just seem to ditch the old user interface and make a new one from scratch to get some hype for a few days, the Technrati people are actually working on what they have and are doing a great job .

Joost!

Prateek Saxena — Wed, 23 May 2007 07:46:53 +0000

So I finally go a Joost invitation from the Joost and TechCrunch initiative to spread Joost invitations. So I signed up and downloaded it. Its pretty neat. I really liked the interface and stuff. But there is one problem, If I pause any video if just shows me an error that I can view the video now. Nor can I see anything else now from that channel.

So I see the video (actual movement) for about 2 seconds and then a long pause. This is bad .There should be way that I can stream it first and view it afterwards so that there is a pause free viewing.

Otherwise the video quality is great and there is a lot of variety as well. Tell me if you want an invite

Web 2.0 in 5 Minutes

Prateek Saxena — Sun, 20 May 2007 13:24:26 +0000

I think I first saw this on Techcrunch or some other website so I thought that I would share it.

JavaScript: Simple Animation

Prateek Saxena — Sun, 20 May 2007 10:50:42 +0000

I decided to write a small post explaining how one can do simple animation in JavaScript without script.aculo.us, moo.fx etc. Thought I highly recommend both these libraries and I really like animations done through them and I myself use script.aculo.us! I thought that it would also be good to know how they do it.

So let us start. We a are first making a simple HTML page with an image and a link to shrink that image we are also including a simple CSS file, prototype so that our code can be shorter and logic.js.

The HTML will look something like this -

Here we will try to make this image shrink with the help of prototype. You just need to click on the following link.

Our CSS file just includes padding and margin declarations for the body. Our JS file looks something like this, I will explain each line later -

Event.observe( window, 'load', function(){ $('link').onclick = shrinkImage; }); shrinkImage = function(){ domID = 'rails'; var dimensions = $(domID).getDimensions(); function shrink(){ if(dimensions.height<0 || dimensions.width<0){ $(domID).hide(); return; } $(domID).height = $(domID).height-5; setTimeout(shrink, 50) } setTimeout(shrink, 50) }}

If you want you may also download the ZIP file for the JavaScript: Simple Animation tutorial.

The code JS code is pretty short (17 lines) so I am going to refer to code from there line number only. So at line 1 we use prototype’s Event observer and once the page has completely loaded we access the “anchor” element whose id is “link” and we attach a the “shrinkImage” function to it onclick. The fun begins at the shrinkImage function. We first make a variable where we keep the domID, you may wish to take this as a function parameter too. We get its dimensions and keep it in the dimensions varialble.

We now make a nested function inside the shrinkImage function and this function is called shrink. If the dimensions of the element are zero then it hides the element and breaks out of the function. If not it reduces the elements height by 5. We are trying to shrink an image so if we reduce one the other is reduced in the correct ration. Then we create a timer which calls the function again after 50 milliseconds. Once this function is completed we call if after an interval of 50 milliseconds and the animation begins!

Any feedback is welcome!

FamFamFam Icons: IE Issues

Prateek Saxena — Sun, 20 May 2007 09:48:54 +0000

Everyone knows about the extremely popular open source FamFamFam icons created by Mark James. I am a fan of these icons as they are very clean and have no copyright issues and stuff. Even though there are several free icons like the Tango Icon Gallery they still do not have as many icons or the same quality as FamFamFam.

There is just on itsy-bisty problem with the “Silk Icon Set” of FamFamFam. As you might know that all icons are 16X16 PNG files. These PNG files have some transparency for, well the transparent part of the icon. All this is perfect but the problem in Internet Explorer ( like always). If you put these icons on a website and view it through IE then instead of the transparent area you would see a gray background.

I am not sure whether it is Mark James fault that he hasn’t saved transparency correctly or it is IE’s fault. So if you want to successfully use FamFamFam icons on IE you will have to use either PhotoShop or IrfanView to save them as GIF and then use them. I might be converting all of them into GIF and posting them here soon (though I am not too sure about the copyright issues that might arise).

If you are a user of FamFamFam Icons be cure to check out the Icon Selector for the Silk Icons!