How my jQuery Drag’n'Drop Jigsaw works

AU-bg I had a kind of implied request to talk about the code in this jquery jigsaw puzzle. I sort of figured you can grab a copy if you like, but maybe a little expository prose will enable you to focus on the salient parts of the script.
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Adventures in Resource Mining

In my previous post in this series, I described some ancient software that I wrote years ago that I would like to recycle for the web. This post focuses on massaging the existing resources so that they are web-ready. Boring, but critical, and not so easy, as it turned out!

AU-bg
Preparing the graphical assets:
The most obvious way that suggests itself to implement the puzzles on the web is to create a JQuery UI draggable div with a background graphic. We have a conversion to do. In Hypercard, assets are resources embedded in the runnable file (which was always a huge source of problems.)

To make things worse, my resources were embedded in a proprietary format created by a third party extension. The backdrops are split out separately, in the old fashioned PICT format. Everything is exactly the right size to sync up but nothing is the correct format. Redrawing all this stuff is not an option; however, there are plenty format converters. Getting the resources ready to move to the web is a two-part process:

  • Extracting the resources
  • Converting the resources to an up to date format.

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Hypercard What has thou wrought?

This series of posts is planned to document of some my adventures trying to leverage an abandoned Hypercard opus I did a long time ago. It’s more of a narrative than a how to. A lot of different realms come into play here. So if you aren’t up for reading a long multi-part techno-novela, scamper along now and go look for clips of Megan Fox or something.

HyperCardTop

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Embed.ly: One API to rule them all

Something very very cool fell into my inbox today.

The back story
I had been researching OEmbed kind of as a background project to see if I could use it in my own stuff. Now what is OEmbed, you ask? It is a specification by which a simple link transforms itself into rich content. If . . . → Read More: Embed.ly: One API to rule them all

How to integrate a jQuery plugin into Yii Framework

I have been studying up on Yii framework as a potential alternative to Zend. It has its pluses and minuses. Yii framework comes with jQuery included at the core. It was ridiculously easy to download a jQuery plugin, drop it in as a black box, follow the instructions for the front end, and it just works. I used the star-rating plugin. If you have a rating for a piece of content represented as a number such as 3.642/4 on a scale of 0-4, it is much more Web 2.0 friendly if you represent that graphically. Star-rating uses pimped up radio buttons to represent this number as five fractional stars. It also does the front end of dynamic interactive ratings, and as soon as I get my ajax back-end working on that I’ll post that too. Since the actual code being typed in is illegible in the video, I have included it in this article.

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Dojo toolkit wrapper

I’ve been finding lately that my simplest blog posts grow the longest tails. So here is one for all you dojo toolkit users or wannabe’s. I started seeing the following in dojo scripts that I hadn’t seen before, and couldn’t find any specific comments about it.

;(function(d,$){ /* your code here */})(dojo, dojo.query)

The leading . . . → Read More: Dojo toolkit wrapper