Google trends is a great site to check out if your curious about trending topics. Whether you are curious about technology, fashion, stocks, celebrities, etc. It’s all there. In fact, it’s probably more fun if you just go not knowing what it’s about and just getting to learn the system – that’s what I did.

I found out about the valueForKeyPath for NSArray today and apparently you can do a similar thing with NSDictionary. Find out more about Key-Value Collection Operators from Apple’s website.

I want to give a shout out to some great Q&A forums I’ve used over the years. I’m giving these in chronological order:

kirupa.com — This a forum I used for help with actionscript. I used it for AS2 as well as AS3. It’s a home to Senocular who is one of the best developers I’ve ever recieved answers from.

One of the guys I work with stumbled upon a quick and easy way to use logic to check if a value is not a valid number (non dependant on type). The logic is as follows:

"123" == +"123" // true

"asdf" == +"asdf" // false

Now you can check to see if your variables are numbers even when they come through as strings (eg. from a form)

 

I just stumbled across a new factoid regarding javascript. Occasionally JS will throw unneeded decimal places on to float multiplication. For example: 

0.1 * 0.2  // will show 0.020000000000000004

This can be remedied by a couple libraries such as BigDecimal and BigNumber. If you aren’t too concerned with exact fractions then it’s probably easier to use a Math.round

I’ve been doing a lot of IOS on the weekends lately and today I ran into two problems in regard to String Format Specifiers. I found out that if I don’t use them correctly then xcode gives me runtime errors that look like they are related to bad memory management, but it’s just because I used the wrong specifier.

Recently I stumbled upon a talented AS3 developer. I was reading an article on “like” buttons from within flash and when I was sent to a page of his that covered Facebook Oauth connections in Flash. He has some fun projects on there and the header of his page is p2p drawing in flash. Pretty cool.

I added some code sharing tools recently and wanted to give you the scoop. I use two: One is Github’s tools for sharing code and it’s called Gist. The other is a pretty widely used markdown display tool that has a bunch of nice features (like coloring text and showing line numbers) which is Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter. Hopefully one or both works for you too!

Have you ever been curious as to the common practices of others? I certainly have been. A friend of mine spotted a Google Javascript Style Guide the other day which gives a heads up for a lot of pre-defined practices that are being used. You’ll likely be familiar with a few of these, but you might just pick up a thing or two (I did).

At work I’m constantly dealing with HTML, CSS, and JS files so a good text editor goes a long way. I’ve been using TextMate for some time, but recently a colleague discovered a text editor called Sublime Text 2. It does a lot of the same things TextMate does and even uses alot of the same TextMate bundles.