Category Archives: development

Creating “Write That Thesis!” at the ROLE developer camp

Posted on December 6, 2011 by

Last week I attended the ROLE Developer Camp in Leuven, Belgium in my role as a “developer advocate” for the project. ROLE has been developing lots of interesting technologies around flexible personal learning environments, and this event was partly to … Continue reading →

Posted in apps, development, widgets | Leave a comment

Creating subtitles and audio descriptions with HTML5 video

Posted on June 28, 2011 by

At the a11y hackdays last week I was inspired by Bruce’s talk on HTML5 video and Web-VTT (web video text track) to make a W3C Widget for quickly creating text tracks. The basic components of the widget are the HTML5 … Continue reading →

Posted in a11y, development, javascript, widgets | 1 Comment

Bashing Widgets in Bolton

Posted on March 25, 2011 by

I had a great time this week at the CETIS Widget Bash organised by Sheila and Li. You can read lots more about it on Sheila’s blog. The wookie-dev mailing list went fairly ballistic during the event with tracker reports, … Continue reading →

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Adventures in progressive enhancement (pt 2)

Posted on March 21, 2011 by

I’ve had some more time to play with progressive enhancement (see my earlier post) and I’ve learned a little more about the kind of techniques needed. One of the interesting statements that Bryan made in his slides is “the absence … Continue reading →

Posted in apps, development, mobile | 1 Comment

Adventures in progressive enhancement

Posted on March 16, 2011 by

Like many people I was very impressed last year with Bryan Rieger’s slide deck Rethinking the mobile web in which he set out the case for designing websites with mobile users as the first concern, and then progressively layering enhancements … Continue reading →

Posted in apps, development, javascript, mobile, widgets | 3 Comments

Inter-widget communication

Posted on March 9, 2011 by

One of the common feature requests and extensions developed for Apache Wookie is the facility to let widgets talk to one another, something that tends to be called inter-widget communication (IWC). I’m now involved with two EU projects (ITEC and … Continue reading →

Posted in development, javascript, widgets | 2 Comments

Do you understand i18n?

Posted on March 3, 2011 by

If you didn’t already know, “i18n” is the shorthand developers use for “internationalization”, which is the ability of applications to operate using things like international character sets and languages. Many developers assume – sometimes rightly, but more often wrongly – … Continue reading →

Posted in development, i18n, standards | 1 Comment

JavaScript: Dynamic binding and lazy loading

Posted on March 2, 2011 by

For a project I’m working on at the moment I have a requirement to be able to transparently switch between implementations of APIs that my W3C Widgets use based on the user’s context. For example, if the Widget wants to … Continue reading →

Posted in development, javascript, widgets | 2 Comments