Category: Demo

Streaming Foursquare checkins with Google Maps

By Ashish Datta | 1 Comment on Streaming Foursquare checkins with Google Maps

This Saturday was the second annual Redline Challenge which is a bar crawl from Downtown Crossing to Davis Square that loosely tracks the MBTA Redline.

This year, we decided to use Foursquare to allow the website to track the position of several of the participants on the challenge. Foursquare natively allows you to track your checkin history with private URLs. Currently, they support a handful of formats with KML being the most interesting for our purposes. You can find your private URLs by navigating to http://foursquare.com/feeds/

We used the Google Maps API along with the KML stream from Foursquare to dynamically place markers on the map as different users checked in to different venues.

Here is the PHP we used to pull back the KML feed, transform it to JSON, and spit it back to our jQuery on the client side:

Pretty straight forward. Here is the jQuery code on the client side to add markers to the map:

That’s about it.

QR Bookmarklet

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on QR Bookmarklet

I got tired of having to find the same website (mostly recipes) on my phone after looking at them on my workstation or laptop so I decided to whip together a bookmarklet to throw a Google powered QR code on any page.

The bookmarklet will just slap a QR code image with the current page’s URL (window.location) so that you can open the page on your phone. ps. Barcode Scanner for Android will automatically open the URL in a browser.

Without further ado, QR Code Bookmarklet

jQuery.trigger weirdness

By Ashish Datta | Leave a Comment on jQuery.trigger weirdness

Earlier today, I was trying to use jQuery to trigger the submission of a form after a radio button was clicked. The form tag looked something like:

So for a regular submit button:

Everything works fine, you’ll see the alert() and the form won’t submit because of the return false.

I ran into issues when I tried to trigger() the submit event with jQuery. I was trying to trigger the submit() event on the form via jQuery. The problem I ran into, was that the saysomething() function was getting called, but the “return false” seemed to have no effect.

The final form looked something like:

For some reason, if you submit the form via a jQuery trigger the form submits even though saysomething() gets called. I’m not sure if this is the expected behavior but it was certainly something of a shock. Anyway, a live version of the form is running here.

Run jQuery each() serially

By Ashish Datta | 2 Comments on Run jQuery each() serially

jQuery.each() is pretty sweet but earlier today I wanted to run some animations across a set of three elements and since the animate() calls are non-blocking everything was happening at the same time. What I wanted to do was have the functions execute in a serial fashion (1 after the other).

I poked around and it doesn’t look like there’s a native way to do this. After a bit I decided to just whip something up and see how it works. Here’s what I had originally:

That ran fine but everything happened at the same time. The modified serial code looks like:

Basically, what it does is after the first element, the code will delay execution of the each() function until the hasCallbackCompleted flag is set for the correct element.

jQuery UI $.dialog – on the fly HTML

By Ashish Datta | 3 Comments on jQuery UI $.dialog – on the fly HTML

Wow its been awhile!

We’ve been insanely busy over the last month or so. We launched Setfive Ventures and are anxiously anticipating the launch of both WeGov and OmniStrat in the immediate future. There are also a handful of internal project that should be rolling out before Christmas. Get Excited.

Anyway, the jQuery UI Dialog class is pretty sweet. Basically, it provides a class to display a modal dialog box from a regular old DOM element (a div, span, or whatever.)

One of the thing that isn’t explained well (or at all?) in the documentation is that you can create a dialog with on the fly HTML! I found this out after posting on the Google Group asking why this feature didn’t exist (it does. Ashish fail.)

So if you want to create a dialog with on the fly HTML all you need to do is:

$("<p>Hello World!</p>").dialog();

Pretty sweet.