Design Patterns

The Mudbug Media programming team regularly meets for “study hall” sessions in which we review important programming techniques and practices. Recently, we discussed the classic Design Patterns approach to software engineering. Design patterns are flexible templates for solving common problems in software design.

Many patterns are easily implemented thanks to standard code libraries, such as the JavaScript library jQuery, which we use frequently. The lazy initialization pattern, for example, is standard via jQuery’s $(document).ready() function—it delays the process of running the enclosed code until necessary. The observer pattern is made trivial thanks to .bind(), allowing objects to be notified automatically of changes in state. And the .each() method implements the iterator pattern, accessing every element of an aggregate object in turn.

Insightful Elements

How many times have you tried to Google every known element in time to Tom Lehrer’s “Elements Song” only to have your noble (gasses) effort derailed because Google wasn’t anticipating what you were going to type in next?  Well, your atomic wait is over.  Google Insight now knows what you are thinking before you do, and they’ve got the elements to prove it.

Typography T-shirts

We’ve got typography inspired t-shirts, SEO blogs, the always-exciting field of qualitative web analytics and new jQuery animations to share with you this week.

Search News

Sexy searches, Facebook changes and an indelible ink road trip – this Link Roundup has it all.  Take a look at what we’ve been looking at this week.

We want to know what you think.  Tweet, write on our wall or leave a comment below.

The Quicksand Advantage

A few weeks ago, I was assigned to evaluate a jQuery plugin called Quicksand that allows you to shuffle data around in a unique way.

The plan was to add Quicksand to the team page of our website, which is a great place for this type of application.