• Always store time in UTC
• Convert to local time on display (local being defined by the user looking at the data)
• When storing a timezone, you need the name, timestamp and the offset. This is required because governments sometimes change the meanings of their timezones (eg: the US govt changed DST dates), and your application needs to handle things gracefully… eg: The exact timestamp when episodes of LOST showed both before and after DST rules changed.

via bluesmoon – Handling Date/Times and timezones. The three basic rules of storing date/times in a web application.

Merely removing warnings doesn’t save our work from peril, but using an “undo” function does. Let me say that again: The solution to our warning woes is undo. With a robust undo, we can close our work with reckless abandon and be secure in the knowledge that we can always get it back. With undo, we can make that horrible “oops!” feeling go away by getting our work back.

via A List Apart – Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo. Rather than use a warning consider using the ability to just undo. Less hassle to do the action and easy to fix in the case of a mistake.

I have a flash project; it has many source files. I have a fairly heavily-used class, call it Jenine. I recently (and, perhaps, callously) relocated Jenine from one namespace to another. I thought we were ready – I thought it was time. The new Jenine was better in every way – she had lost some code bloat, she had decoupled herself from a few vestigial class relationships, and she had finally come home to the namespace that she had always secretly known in her heart was the one she truly belonged to. She was among her own kind.

via Stack Overflow – Flash CS4 refuses to let go. It gets even better.

Simple HTTP+JSON method of accessing a user’s information in a user approved sandbox on the user’s desktop. List, upload, delete, move, copy, and get files as well as many other features.

via Dropbox – Developers. This could be a really fun API to play with.

The demos have three levels of obstacles for non-Safari browsers even if the other browsers implemented the HTML5 features being demoed (only video and audio; the rest is CSS!) and implemented the proposed CSS features once standardized:

via hsivonen – -webkit-HTML5. Apple promotes open standards by calling them by the wrong name and using the most closed version possible to prevent all other browsers from seeing the effects. Oh and one of the demos doesn’t even work in anything other than the latest version of Mac OSX.

Also note that for the majority of use cases, all of these methods are plenty fast to use. When you start having to manipulate large jQuery collections, .show() and .hide() might become too slow in IE, and you might need to bump up to .addClass() or .removeClass(). Enabling/disabling of stylesheets would only be necessary in the most extreme cases, but if things are hiding to slowly for you, you might want to give it a try.

via Now you see me… show/hide performance – Learning jQuery. Personally I like using the add/remove class the advantage of it already being slightly faster for IE makes it even nicer.

The CSS gradient feature was introduced by Webkit for about two years but was rarely used due to incompatibility with most browers. But now with the Firefox 3.6+, which supports gradient, we can style create gradient without having to create an image. This post will show you how to code for the CSS gradient to be supported by the major browsers: IE, Firefox 3.6+, Safari, and Chrome.

via Cross-Browser CSS Gradient – Web Designer Wall. Cross browser gradients without images, yes please.

A lot of startup business models involve building products that fill gaps in existing platforms. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and there have been a few success stories. But if you don’t own the platform, or if you aren’t wildly successful at filling the gap you’re taking a really big risk.

via The Dangers of Building on Someone Else’s Platform | trevoro.ca | blog. There is a definite and real danger to merely filling the gaps in other platforms, generally whatever you can do the company building the platform can do or buy the ability to do.

jStorage is a simple wrapper plugin for Prototype, MooTools and jQuery to store data on browser side.

via jStorage – simple JavaScript plugin to store data locally. If you ever wanted to play around with Local Storage this just made it a whole lot easier.

You know, when you do an ajax call and you never quite know where to position your loader. prettyLoader takes care of that for you, by default, prettyLoader will “hook” to the jQuery ajax function and display a nice spinning circle next to the mouse cursor and hide it once the ajax call is complete, neat no?

via prettyLoader | Stéphane Caron – No Margin For Errors. Very nice though personally I prefer using a basic ajax loading icon and replacing the form with a standard size (typically 32 pixels square) loading icon.