Abhishek Khurana's pages

If you are a bit disappointed by Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” keynote from yesterday, I’d say, don’t be.

Whatever little there was to take away, now,

• You’ve got access to iCloud and all ur data can reside and accessed from anywhere (read iOS 5 Devices).
• There is a new camera which makes you throw away ur 5 yr old Digicams (God! did they became a craze?)
• With iMessage which would work over WiFi too, its easier to connect with your circle of friends, due to bad connectivity (especially for AT&T subscribers).
• With “Find my Friend”, there will be exciting usage on it way (days of cheating for Husbands are over)
• And <drumroll />, there’s Siri (beta), to help you better organized with little effort on tapping for data and more on using it.

But you must know that,

• You really didn’t expect Apple to go for another major overhaul in design while iPhone4 is still so young.
• It was mainly a catching-up exercise with all new powerful Android Phones releasing so frequently in recent times (Galaxy S II, Nexus Prime etc.).
• There were some major announcements in WWDC earlier this year (iCloud etc.), which now only iOS 5 device & Lion Users will get access to.

And to say the least,

• It gives one more year of life to iPhone 4 users, as they won’t be mad enuf to throw away there recently purchased pieces.
• With cheaper iPhone4 devices, the latest & greatest (but penultimate) Apple offering could reach out to more (especially outside US, UK and other major countries where Apple usually roll out fast).
• Even if u get a 4S, thr is little you can do to flaunt your new prize and invite you friends to check it out.

So, its a phone that was supposed to be here while so much being explored on mobility recently (new Apps, Fields of Usage etc.). It was deja vu when Tim Cook declared it to be greatest iPhone ever. To this I’d say, for how long?

With this little breather out of their way, we still haven’t lost faith in Apple (in post Steve Jobs era) to come up with another game changer (read form factor) for us next year.

Screenshot via Techcrunch.

I mean think of the random size 4-square blocks aka tetrominoes that are supposed to be placed in bottom-up fashion, and mannerisms that go into deciding which side should touch the layer below u and the one above.

While one horizontal line without voids (lets call them bugs) will earn you some credit, there are more credits (plus bonuses) in store if you leave just enuf connectors in between while u wait for that one piece that joins them all together. TADA!

We have seen how developers like to break their code using setTimeout() method to avoid cases like executing (in one go) a piece of code for a long perceivable duration or exceeding Lines-Of-Code to blow away Browser Popup for Unresponsive Script.

However, with setTimeout(), the function argument (or JS code string) that is passed is added to UI Queue supposed to be executed after ‘x’ ms (2nd parameter). For the benefit of uninitiated, the actual time after which the snippet reportedly gets executed (provided UI Queue is not clogged with any more tasks) also takes into account Timer Resolution duration that varies from Browser-to-Browser. This resolution time takes into account the trade-off of executing the asynch script and machine power (that is more justifiable when users are on laptop, which is not a rare norm).

Apparently, W3C Web Performance Working Group has proposed a new method (for Effective Script Yielding), setImmediate(), current only supported in IE10 (among modern browsers), that will take in function argument pushed to UI Queue and gets executed as soon as it turns come (bypassing the timer resolution). Since, most of the time we write setTimeout() scripts to be executed one after the other, this method is an easy n fast replacement.

Read more on Timer Resolution here.

(Source: nczonline.net)

So I came across the speakers for jQuery Conf. 2011 (God! What wud i give to get a chance to attend one). This reminds me to catch up with the know-how of last one. And I found one interesting talk from Alex Sexton on jQuery Best Friends.

Owing to my recent confusion to decide between script loaders (LABjs, ControlJS) after reading Nicholas Zakas thoughts, I found a new player YepNope. This certainly calls for another round of evaluation.

Among other good practices (I still don’t think I need Modernizr), I really appreciate his thoughts on getting rid of any utility function which I for sure write one point or another and start thinking of integrating Underscore.js

Looking forward to use my learnings from here while redesigning iXiGO.com.

Douglas Crockford, the name needs no introduction for all JavaScript fans out there. Come Jan 25, Sunnyvale, CA is the place to be at, for the guru himself (courtesy Yahoo!) will be delivering lectures on history of JavaScript, its features & its uses. The carnival is divided into 5 part series marking 31st March as the end of it. For more details check out Crockford on YUIBlog.

The author of JavaScript: The Good Parts, is widely acclaimed to be part of community responsible of taking the language (that he calls world’s most misunderstood one) to new heights and revolutionizing the web and how the user’s perceives an application.

A lot has been written on web abt the Nexus One, Google’s first Google-branded, Google-sold “smartphone”. But while we still play a waiting game on this developement turning into an iPhone-Killer, what is really revolutionizing is the web page: http://www.google.com/phone.

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