Web Development

Welcome to YUI Weekly, the weekly roundup of news and announcements from the YUI team and community. If you have any interesting demos or links you’d like to share, feel free to leave a comment below. This week saw two new releases for YUI projects. First up was YUI 3.10.1, a patch release to resolve a vulnerability detected in the .swf files used in the IO utility and Uploader components. Please see this security bulletin for more details on the issue and steps to ensure your applications are secure. Also released this week was YUICompressor 2.4.8, which includes improved compression results as well as general fixes. At this week’s Open Roundtable (YouTube) we invited our friends at Wells Fargo to join us. After some quick intros, we began a discussion about their products and interest in YUI, then dove a bit deeper into some talking points regarding DataTable, Skinning, and Tooling. If DataTable development is something interesting to you, you’ll find quite a bit of discussion in the video about details of the component and its upcoming roadmap. YUI’s Shifter build tool got a version bump to v0.4.0 this week and you can upgrade via npm -g install shifter. This update fixes an issue that was discovered after our migration to Grunt for building releases. The version bump is a minor version (as opposed to a patch version, e.g. v0.3.9) because this does introduce a backwards incompatibility. If you are using a copy directive in any of your component build.json files, the 2nd parameter is now relative to your component’s build path as opposed to the source path, so you’ll need to make the appropriate update when you upgrade your copy of Shifter. An example of this change can be seen in commit 609f7d, which includes updates to /src/io/build.json and /src/uploader/build.json. Thanks to the AlloyUI crew for our awesome new t-shirts! If you are unfamiliar with AlloyUI, it’s a self-described “UI framework built on top of YUI3 that provides a simple API for building high scalable applications.” Their website is full of goodies, such as examples, Tutorials, and API docs. Check it out! Do you have experience with JavaScript, Java, Internationalization, and love solving complex problems at massive scale? Yahoo’s internationalization team is hiring! New and updated Gallery modules include: debounce, dd-momentum-plugin, task, scrollspy, io-utils, and affix. Links of the Week (thanks to JavaScript Weekly ) Draft Specification for ES.next (Ecma-262 Edition 6) Introducing Augmented JavaScript Introduction to Map and Reduce in Javascript JavaScript Regular Expression Enlightenment … and more

Fed {API} to provide curated Government data sets. Stremor Corp releases Content Summarization API. Plus: Apigee launches a research and strategy organization for the app economy and 2 new APIs. Fed {API} aims to Collect, Corelate and Catalog Government Data The Data sets that are being released by Government agencies presents a challenge to developers due to their sheer numbers. It would be great if the data was aggregated from multiple resources and cataloged for consumption via APIs, so that developers could focus on their applications and surface up important visualizations and reports. Fed {API} is a project to do just that for the developer community. As per their site “Fed {API} is an experiment, a proof of concept to begin to intersect the many public government data sources to give developers the ability to use this data to use in their applications, reports and analytics to showcase Government operations.” Access to Fed {API} is available only via a private invite and interested developers can send an email at jobrieniii@540.co and also join Fed {API} Google Group. Stremor releases API to shorten Content Given our busy lifestyles, the trend towards summarizing content in small snippets that are easy to digest is picking up. Recently, Summly, the app that provides pocket sized news was acquired for more than $30 million by Yahoo. Stremor Corp, has made available its Liquid Helium Search and Summarization APIs that help create short versions of long content. The Liquid Helium Platform is the engine that converts written content into mathematical values and algorithms for predictable analysis, extraction, and manipulation. One of those applications is towards summarization of content. The API is available on the Mashape Cloud Platform and the Summary API converts text or HTML of any length to a single paragraph of approximately 75 words. API News You Shouldn’t Miss Apigee Institute Launches, Research Points to Apps, APIs and Data as Key to Competitive Success Google announces new payments API for Chrome browsers Crosswa.lk Aims to Let You Download iOS Apps Directly from Websites 2 New APIs Today we had 2 new APIs added to our API directory including a cambridge university press collections service and a u.s. farmers market information service. Below are more details on each of these new APIs. Cambridge Journals Online API: Cambridge University Press publishes over 300 peer-reviewed academic journals covering research across a range of subject areas. In addition to journals, Cambridge Journals Online also keeps their metadata and supplementary materials like video, images and datasets. The RESTful API gives developers access to all of the data for use in third party applications. USDA National Farmers Market Directory API: The USDA National Farmers Market Directory provides the public with self-reported information on U.S. farmers markets. This includes the locations, travel directions, operating times, product offerings, and accepted payment methods for the listed farmers markets. The accuracy of this information cannot be guaranteed and, for listings that have not been recently updated, prospective market-goers are advised to contact the listed market representative or check the market's website (if available) before visiting. The USDA National Farmers Market Directory is maintained by AMS Marketing Services. The directory's contents can be accessed programmatically using SOAP calls issued in XML format. Sponsored by

The news of data visualization provider Tableau’s IPO on Friday is yet another sign that the movement behind data and analytics continues to gain steam. With that in mind, today we’ll take a look at recent mashups that allow users to perform data analytics of some kind and often show the results through interesting visualizations. Read below for more information on each. World Statistics – Powered by the Google Fusion Tables API, this service visually displays world statistics on a map. Statistics include: Population, GDP, and currency unit. APIs used include: GoogleFusionTables. More at our World Statistics profile. Noodler Car Comparison – Noodler makes vehicle comparison easier for car buyers. See similarities and differences at a glance. Data from Edmunds.com, the highly reputable research site. APIs used include: Edmunds.com Vehicle. More at our Noodler Car Comparison profile. Energy Usage Analytics – View and compare Monthly, Daily and Hourly Electricity usage using interactive charts. APIs used include: GoogleChart. More at our Energy Usage Analytics profile. WoMEn index – Measuring world’s musical energy average emission intersecting user data from last.fm and song energy data from echonest. APIs used include: LastFM, EchoNest. More at our WoMEn index profile. Sponsored byRelated ProgrammableWeb Resources Google Chart API Profile, 87 mashups

Hackers across the country are getting ready to participate in the first annual National Day of Civic Hacking which will take place in over 80 cities on June 1st and 2nd, 2013. The two day event will bring together citizens, developers, government agencies and entrepreneurs to create applications using publicly available APIs and datasets, to help solve a civic or social problem impacting the local community. At the time of this writing, the National Day of Civic Hacking features over 85 locally organized events, 19 government partners, 37 data sets/resources and 5,000 participants are expected. There are three main types of events that cities participating in the National Day of Civic Hacking can choose to organize and host; block party, hackathon and brigade meetup. The type of event will vary from city to city and will depend on the needs of the local community. There are currently over 20 challenges submitted by federal government departments and agencies. The White House has even submitted a challenge to the event (registration now closed), that involves the recently released We the People API. Here are just a few of the challenges that will take place at the National Day of Civic Hacking: Hacking the Digital Public Library of America – Use the DPLA’s dataset of over 2.4 million records of digitized cultural heritage from our nation’s libraries, archives, and museums to create visualizations, mapping applications and data enhancement tools. The Location Affordability Data Challenge – Create an API that helps consumers, planners, policymakers, and researchers to leverage a new database (currently in development) of neighborhood-scale housing and transportation costs. Farmers Market Directory – Creation of mobile applications to enhance the Farmers Market experience and make trips easier by using USDA’s Farmers Market Directory. We Love Data – How can we encourage people to interact with space data in new and meaningful ways, in effect promoting space enthusiasm, education, and a stronger human community? The Census American Community Challenge – Leverage statistics about every neighborhood in the nation to create useful tools that look at everything from commute times to median income to poverty rates. The organizing partners for the National Day of Civic Hacking are Code for America, Random Hacks of Kindness and Innovation Endeavors. Government agencies participating include White House Office of Digital Strategy, Census Bureau, NASA, Department of Labor, USDA and many others. Are you a civic hacker? According to the National Day of Civic Hacking website FAQ, “Civic Hackers” are defined as: “Civic hackers” as we think about it for the National Day of Civic Hacking are engineers, technologists, civil servants, scientists, designers, artists, educators, students, entrepreneurs, community members – anybody – who is willing to collaborate with others to create, build, and invent open source solutions using publicly-released data, code and technology to solve challenges relevant to our neighborhoods, our cities, our states and our country. To find National Day of Civic Hacking events near you or to view the complete lists of challenges and events, visit hackforchange.org. Sponsored by

This week, we are happy and proud to announce what our designers and developers did with the new look of DMXzone.com. Now, it's lighter, runs smoother and is supplied with amazing new technologies. In our weekly content summary you'll also find a numerous of showcases that we designed during the week, using DMXzone's most popular Dreamwaver extensions. To celebrate the fully redesigned DMXzone, we put the HTML5 Parallax Slider and HTML5 Slideshow on sale with 50% off until next week! Check out the full list of content below.

This guest post comes from Andy Thurai. Andy is the Chief Architect & Group CTO for the Intel unit that is responsible for Cloud/ Application security, API, Big Data, SOA and Mobile middleware solutions. You can follow him @AndyThurai (Twitter) or at thurai.net. Now-a-days every single CIO, CTO, or business executive that I speak to is captivated by these three new technologies: Big Data, API management and IoTs (Internet of Things). Every single organizational executive that I speak with confirms that they either have current projects that are actively using these technologies, or they are in the planning stages and are about to embark on the mission soon. Though the underlying need and purpose served are unique to each of these technologies, they all have one thing common. They all necessitate newer security models and security tools to serve any organization well. I will explain that in a bit, but let us see what is the value added by these technologies to any organization: IoT – is specific data collection points that employ sensors placed anywhere and everywhere. Most often times the information collected by these devices are sensitive data and contain specific identifiable targeted data. IoT allows organizations to analyze behaviors and patterns as needed but also poses an interesting problem. Gone is TB (Terabytes) of data; now we are talking about PB (petabytes) of data which continue to grow exponentially. IoTs use M2M communication, which are a newer channel and create a newer set of threat vectors. Big Data – store massive amounts of data (some of these data are from the aforementioned IoTs) and having the necessary software and infrastructure that allow you to access them faster which promises to cost you a fraction of what it is costs today, further enabling you to capture as many data points as possible. API – interface, enabler and interconnector between systems by providing a uniform and portable interface (whether it is to the big data or the platform that enables big data). While each of technologies at first glance appears to be serving different constituencies within an Enterprise, there is an undeniable interconnectedness that exists. The IoT collects data from everywhere. Hence, it is pouring tons of data that need to be not only stored somewhere, but also analyzed properly so that the dots can be connected, to ultimately form meaningful patterns that people can make use of. [In the graphic above assume all communications to the central neural system is via APIs.] With the evolution of these technologies, there is a very raw, basic, and yet incontrovertible need being expressed. Every business yearns to be better than its competitors in catering to the needs of its consumers. I mean the “consumer” in a loose sense here – be that an individual or for that matter, an organization that is consuming your offerings. Ipso facto, this means you need to capture as much information as you possibly can about the target consumer behavior, so that it can be analyzed, protected, stored, shared selectively, and most importantly, so that it can serve your consumer better (or perhaps to be used when strategically monetizing an area of your business). None of these technologies is in a trial phase any more. If anything, the social media explosion provided ample evidence that these technologies are being used quite effectively already (real life POCs). Of late, all of these technologies have been gaining adoption in the sacred technology worlds, such as the healthcare and financial sectors. However, when you employ these technologies with your production applications, you need an enterprise grade security that is built from the ground up to provide a necessary level of protection. In the social world, the model had always been, “build [it] first and secure later based on the need” (or never in some cases). With healthcare, federal and financial sectors, that model is no longer tenable. You need to secure data at

Good typography has always been a defining aspect of effective Web design, and this holds true especially for websites in which the emphasis is on presenting a large amount of content — specifically, articles, news and stories. Whether for a magazine or international newspaper, the designer of any website that distributes a lot of content has always had to consider typographic details as seriously and thoroughly as a print designer would. In 2009, we conducted a survey of then current typographic practices. Since then, responsive design techniques have clearly gained momentum and established their place in the landscape of CSS layout. With the advent of mobile, new modes of browsing websites and reading text have emerged. Online publications have had to reevaluate how their content is presented on mobile devices. Web typography is as rich, versatile and accessible as ever before. Yet new opportunities introduce new complexity; and with new implementation challenges, we are all spurred to reconsider our practices. Now, three years later, we’ve reviewed the original study and explored how Web typography has changed over these years. We spent countless hours between February and April of this year collecting new data and exploring common developments and trends in Web typography. How Did We Conduct The Study? We have compiled relevant data from over 50 well-respected websites to address these questions. For this study, we selected a wide variety of international newspapers, magazines and blogs, all of whose typographic choices should have been carefully and thoroughly weighed. We chose publications and organizations that have a very large readership (such as The Boston Globe and The Financial Times) as well as specialized magazines with smaller yet often more demanding readerships (such as A List Apart and UX Booth). These websites focus primarily on text-based content rather than on generic environments such as Instapaper and Readability. As such, they need to be highly legible in order to ensure that users continue visiting and reading on their websites. Because readability of content is (or rather should be) the main design goal of these publications, the techniques they follow could be considered good practices. However, the results presented in this study should be taken with a grain of salt. Issues We Were Interested In The questions asked in our first study nearly four year ago remain relevant but need to be complemented by questions about the challenges of mobile devices. How widely has responsive design been adopted by publications, if at all? Has there been any change in the typographic choices of big and small publications? How many weights of a large font family should we deliver to mobile devices? How large should the font size of body copy be? How should the font size change on a responsive website? Optimizing readability could require changing the font’s style, size and spacing according to the viewport’s width and height. The second article in this series will address the growing diversity of eBook readers and mobile apps whose purpose is to give users a pleasant, improved or enhanced reading experience — from desktop readers down to smartphone readers. We were curious about the specifics of design and typographic choices that make reading articles in these applications more pleasing than reading on the original websites. Note: For the sake of continuity, we have stayed close to the format of the original study from 2009. This article is meant to update the data, and hopefully detect new trends and reach new conclusions. Typography In Online Publications After carefully analyzing the style sheets in the publications in this study, we compiled a comprehensive spreadsheet of typographic points and collected the relevant data. You can view a spreadsheet of the raw data, which contains more data than was pertinent to this article. Not limiting ourselves to the questions in the original study, we will broac

For this stunning hotel showcase we used the Advanced CSS Animator to create drop effect of the website sections on page load and also to animate the navigation menu buttons. Also the features images are presented in a beautiful HTML5 Slideshow that has title and description of each picture. Below, the facilities and the wellness center are advertised in DMXzone Nivo Sliders, which on click open the larger images version in a DMXzone Lightbox.

With this movie Brian Wood will show you how to create a div container with text, which is changed through the HTML5 Slideshow.

With this movie we will show you how to create an HTML5 Slideshow that retrieves its images from a Dynamic source like MySQL presented by Brian Wood.