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Imagination time: Imagine for a moment that you have an app, it has one button and one little window. When you click the button it changes the text within the window to something else. Now, when you get into flash development it seems like the easiest and clearest way to do this is to wipe out the contents in the window, but you would be wrong for thinking so. While it is the most obvious I intend to prove to you that to do so is both slower and prevents you from turning on the juice later with caching. On to story time: We're building an app for the OpenPeak tabletop device, it's totally rad and you'll love it I promise but that's really not the point of the post. When we started the app we had what I considered a pretty awesome solution, we'd clear the state, build it onto a global, then write the global out to a window on the app. It actually worked great for a long time until we decided to start doing some caching where it became wildly apparent that I had actually written all three parts of that app dead wrong. It's pretty exciting to do something wrong enough that you can write about it later. :) Read More…

Here's a tiny shopping cart block for Ubercart that fits right in with the menu. Of course the standard block could be themed this way, but this is handy when the design calls for the full-sized block elsewhere in the layout. Read More…

If you haven't already heard of it, the Theme Developer is a great tool. It works like firebug, but for Drupal. You can click any element on the page to inspect it, and the Theme Developer window will show you what template files and functions were used to render it, and give you suggestions on which files you can edit to affect it. For a newbie Drupal themer, this can be a god-send. Read More…

As someone who has worked in the web industry for over 10 years, I've seen a lot of friction between designers and developers. Though there are rare individuals who act as both developer and designer, when a project is sufficiently complex and or the timeline is compressed enough, it often requires cooperation by people who specialize in one or the other discipline. This often means a struggle between vision and execution. Read More…