Able Technology » javascript

Cameron Prebble wins Outstanding Mashup

marcus — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 02:06:02 +0000

We are very proud of Cameron’s entry into The Great NZ Remix & Mashup competition. Cameron’s Mashblock is the winner of the Outstanding Mashup and Best use of Google cloud computing services. Well done!

About Mashblock

MashBlock is a tool to visualise demographic data from the 2006 Census for 66 Territorial Authorities, 2000 Area Units, and over 48000 Meshblocks.

This site is built to provide fast location-based queries utilising the Google Maps Geocoder, HTML 5 Geolocation and the AddressFinder autocomplete library to allow the user to find the Meshblock, Area Unit and Territorial Authority their search falls in.

The backend site is built with Ruby on Rails and a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS plugin. The frontend utilises the javascript libraries jQuery, Raphael and the Google Maps API to create the visualisations and user interaction.

All the data is sourced from Statistics New Zealand.

NZ Post Ratefinder API beta released

marcus — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:42:31 +0000

Able Technology has built an API for New Zealand Post that calculates the cost and delivery options when sending packages nationally. The specification and some sample API calls are available from our beta testing site http://workshop.nzpost.co.nz/ratefinder.

Please try it out, and let us know what you think.

Address Finder

In addition to the Rate Finder, you can use Able Technology’s Address Finder product to find postal codes, and validate New Zealand postal addresses. Some great API examples are available at api.addressfinder.co.nz

Display access keys automatically

nigel — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:43:28 +0000

I have written a Javascript routine which displays a list of the available access keys at the bottom of the page.

Maintaining a list of access keys used for each individual page was going to be a tiresome exercise. As Javascript can interrogate a page for this information, it seemed a little silly manually creating the same result.

So, I give you access_keys, an unobtrusive Javascript routine that searches for and displays access keys that it finds at the bottom of each webpage. Now available on GitHub with full instructions.

Thanks go to Radio New Zealand for inspiring this effort and then releasing it to the world.

Javascript speed test results [UPDATED to include Google Chrome]

nigel — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 01:28:00 +0000

Test case: sorting a table containing 750 rows of data. Using the table-kit library.

Browser	Time
Internet Explorer 6.0 (using an XP virtual machine)	19 seconds
Internet Explorer 8.0b2 (using an X virtual machine)	5 seconds
Firefox 3.0	8 seconds
Firefox 3.1b1 pre	8 seconds
Safari 3.1.2	4 seconds
Webkit trunk (31 Aug 2008)	4 seconds
Google Chrome	9 seconds

It�s great to see modern browsers executing Javascript so fast. It will be interesting to see how Safari 4.0 compares, which is due to be released shortly.