“Where are you from!?”
“New York”
“FUCK THAT CITY. I moved from New York to Austin 10 years ago and never looked back.”
The was the first person I met in Austin. We split a cab from the airport to the bar I was meeting my friends at.
“New York City. I’ll tell you what. I ain’t never left anything there, so I ain’t goin back.”
Why z-index doesn’t work even though you set z-index: 99999;
A common complaint I hear from developers is “Why isn’t z-index working?” Usually they’re having trouble getting an element to appear over other element.
They know that higher z-index means closer to the viewer’s screen, so they set
z-index: 99999;But still, the element does not appear above…
The hackers are at it again! Rutgers student, Waynce Change or @wyc on github put together a Spotify remote! This remote works with the web player.
Now you can search, play, pause, backtrack and skip songs on Spotify Web with your phone. I know one person in particular who’s going to be very happy about this!
Chrome will update the extension to the latest version automatically, but if you need to install it head over to the Chrome Web Store.
That brings us to a total of a dozen remotes! We started with just 6 remotes at launch, and although we’ve both created and lost remotes along the way, the current list of supported sites stands strong!
The full list of remotes include:
Remember, you can make your own remote or improve existing ones by contributing to the Mote.io Chrome Extension. Hackers like you are responsible for making the last half dozen remotes.
I’m also excited to announce, a very highly requested feature, the ability to change Pandora stations!
Pandora is the most popular remote by far, and the ability to create new stations is the most common feature request.
Now when you synchronize your phone with the Mote.io extension and Pandora, you’ll get a search bar where you can type the name of an artist to use for a new station. Get the update from the Chrome Web Store.
That’s everything for now! Make sure to follow me or the Mote.io account on Twitter for more updates.
box-sizing: border-box; versus width:auto; and width: 100%;
My last post generated a lot of discussion about
box-sizing: border-box;so today I’m going to provide a small overview of how it interacts with variouswidthproperties.
box-sizing: border-box;is still experimental (IE8+) but you can make use of it by with the following browser…
The difference between width: auto; and width: 100%;
My friend Scotty asked me to help him debug a CSS issue he had with his grid generator which was caused by him defining
width: 100%;.It’s almost never a good idea to define 100% width. The property is misleading in that it seem like you’re only modifying the element’s visual size. However,…
In my last post, I talked about what CSS margin collapse is. When I explain this to fellow programmers, their first reaction is usually “why does that happen!?” or “I hate that bug!”
It’s not a bug, it’s actually a core component of type layout.
First, let’s take a step back. When was the last…
Watch out, your CSS margins are collapsing!
When HTML elements are stacked on top of each other, their margins collapse.
Let’s take a look at an example.
div { background-color: blue; width: 100px; height: 100px; margin: 10px;
}See the Pen hsmgv by Ian Jennings (@ianjennings) on CodePen.
Thanks to the grid in the…
Today I’m going to show you how to add Speech to Text functionality to a chat room using Wit. Wit is a natural language processing API, meaning it takes raw audio input and processes it into data developers can use.
This walkthrough is also available via video. Follow along with the instructions below. Additionally, you can check out the full speech to text chat demo here.
First, we need a chat room.
You’ll first need to sign up for a PubNub account. Once you sign up, you can get your unique PubNub keys in the PubNub Developer Portal. Once you have, clone the GitHub repository, and enter your unique PubNub keys on the PubNub initialization, for example:
Let’s start with the Chat in 10 lines of lines of code tutorial. I’ve embedded the full example here. You can play around with the chat room by typing a message in the input field and pressing “Enter” or “Return.”
See the Pen PubNub Chat in 10 lines of Code by Ian Jennings (@ianjennings) on CodePen.
When sending your message, a publish action is made on the PubNub network using the PubNub Javascript SDK. All clients that are subscribed to the same channel will receive that message.
Here we take the value from the input box and publish it to our ‘chat’ channel.
Subscribing to the channel is just as easy. Supply the channel name and a function to call when a message is received.
Here we subscribe to the same ‘chat’ channel and append add the text to the chat output when we receive a message.
Now that we’ve got our chat example, let’s add speech to text voice recognition! We’re going to combine Wit’s Microphone example with our chat example.
Note: Microphone relies on WebRTC, which works on Chrome, Firefox and Opera right now. Safari and IE don’t support WebRTC yet.
Follow the directions on the Wit site to set up your Microphone example or skip ahead to the fun part and play with my hosted demo.
Press the microphone button then say “send a message” and then your message. You should see the following appear below the microphone icon.
The first result is the parsed intent that you programmed Wit to recognize. The second is the message_body, the parsed message for that intent.
Note, when you use your own API key, you’ll need to train Wit to use your own intents like my “send a message” intent.
Now let’s combine the two demos to create a speech to text chat room!
All we need to do is hook up the mic.onresult results to a PubNub publish. Then, whatever message gets returned by Wit will be published to chat!
Check out the full working demo here or browse the source.
There are all sorts of improvements that can be made to this demo. We can support more intents like “who’s here” or show who’s talking by combining more Wit and PubNub features. An expanded demo is coming soon.
Because margins collapse, the elements need not be concerned with their siblings.
Whenever you work with CSS, it is important that the properties and values you assign to a class are only relevant to that specific class and never in relation to a sibling.
For example you never want to add more margin-top to an element because it is “too close to the header.” The correct approach would be to add more margin-bottom to the header.
A couple months ago I made a spreadsheet called “Friends.”
I listed all the people I wanted to spend time and put them in a spreadsheet. I still feel dirty about it.
The truth is, it solved a problem that was becoming a larger and larger issue for me last year. My friends were becoming a victim of my inability to keep up with the intense networking system in NY.
To set the stage here, there’s all sorts of funny stuff going on.
Personally I’m not interested in playing this game.
