Category: Technology

jQuery datepicker, tabs, AJAX

The whole bloody day fighting with jQuery datepicker. Still no luck, so maybe you have something to tell. The setup is as follows:

– jQuery tabs with content being loaded via AJAX calls

– Inside tabs content there are forms with jQuery datepicker

The problem is that datepicker doesn’t work correctly. There are two possible results (except for those where everything is broken completely):

– Datepicker is displayed and popup is shown, but when selecting a date – it is not inserted in the input field (though it is send correctly when form is submitted)

– Datepicker is displayed and everything works (even when selecting a date it is correctly inserted into field), but after switching between tabs for 2-3 times, datepicker is disappearing from some fields and stays enabled on others.

I tried everything I could find. Working with jQuery live, jQuery livequery, setTimeouts (for proper delay on DOM updates). Tried accessing through classes and through IDs, tried generating random IDs just in case there is a collision or something else. Nothing works :(

Pissed off, experimenting further, but looks like I am running out of possibilities…

Custom RSS feeds

As per Tiamat‘s complain about Twitter updates on my blog creating mess in his google reader (or whatever he is using), here is a URL to RSS, where those posts are filtered away (by Yahoo!Pipes). Original pipe is here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5e7808dfc84475b6b4fc83df775e35bd

In addition, there is a russian category in my blog which is not shown on front page, nor it is included in default feed. You can always see posts here and RSS here. Alternatively, you can see all those posts on my LiveJournal account (and use LiveJournal RSS).

Searchable drop downs with jQuery

Today was looking for a plugin to make huge drop-downs searchable. I have first checked the jQuery Autocomplete plugin, but that works better with plain text inputs, then browsed through tens of other similar plugins and even tried couple of them. Finally, my choice went to jQuery Searchable Drop Down Plugin.

Main reason of choice – ease of setup. Just include the script in the head and then use something like this in your code:

$(function() { $('#myDropDownSelectElementId').searchable(); });

Finish story, works just like it supposed to.

Google Talk Video/Audio and Mobiles

While my brother is playing around with GTalk video/audio calls I came to a point, where I believe I need to buy an adroid-powered phone :)

Not sure if the functionality I want is already there, but I believe it is on a way. I am talking about transparent selection of transportation media for a phone call to a friend. Imagine an android phone with WiFi and GTalk integrated (not even talking about GMail and Contants stuff). So with such thing when you want to make a call to your friend, the phone will check if you are on Internet and your friend is signed in to GTalk and try calling for free through this channel, otherwise just make a normal dial through GSM. Manual control should also be present for sure (so a user can decide himself how to call).

On the other hand, if your friend has a similar mobile, he can receive GTalk voice/video calls directly on it as well. So phone-to-phone call is free through Internat exactly as it would be through GSM.

Ofcourse there are plenty of things to consider before the idea could become completely usable, but as an idea, I think it is really cool.