I tell myself that I write JS every day, but I don’t. I write jQuery. Don’t get me wrong, it gets the job done. But it never feels right. Now, jQuery and its DOM-centric approach (at least in common usage) aren’t all to blame. Its just as much my fault in that beyond the library, I know very little about the language. I intend to do something about it. I have a plan and I’m going to share it with you. First, here are my goals:

We often find ourselves asking our co-workers, "Does anybody have recommendations for #{task X}?" Frequently, the collective response is based on little more than, "Well, in the past, I had success with #{solution Y}." This is the first in a series of blog posts in which we search for a more empirical answer.

In this case, we have taken over an old rails 2.0.2 application, largely unmaintained for some time. The app allows users to exchange and compare code snippets in a variety of languages. As one of our first tasks in refactoring and updating this app, we have decided to move the task of syntax-highlighting those code snippets from the server into a client-side javascript function. A cursory examination reveals several candidates: highlight.js, prettify, jquery-syntax, syntaxhighlighter, shjs, and lighterjs.

In a nutshell, Node is a Javascript framework for building network apps. Network apps are broader in scope than webapps. They don't need to run on HTTP, thus freeing you to write lower level tools. Node doesn’t necessarily have to be part of your core app, and in many cases, it makes for a good fit for writing some of the support functions for your webapp. I'll cover the basics of getting Node setup, some event driven programming, and miscellaneous Node goodies.

It's the question everyone who works with her wants an answer to: How can Patti be so seriously awesome? This woman does it all: project management, programming, design, has created a successful startup, has run Ignite events on both sides of the coast, and she can cook up a mean braised pork belly. In this week's Intridea Insider meet Patti Chan!

There are several cases in which it might make sense to tailor your app's content based on a user's physical location. But asking them directly is a bit of a pain. Luckily, it's extremely simple to find a user's location knowing only something you will always know about a visitor: their IP address. Today I'll walk you through how to use IPs to geolocate your visitors in a Rails application using Geokit and MongoDB's geospatial indexing with MongoMapper.

A lot has been written on the subject of “what makes a *great* native mobile app”. There is plenty of literature on the matter in books, cheat sheets, and well-meaning blog posts. At Intridea we spend a lot of time focusing on what it means to create really great mobile applications; therefore, we want to share some tips on the process. In this post I'm going to focus on what to avoid during mobile development.