Topper's Blog » process http://blog.toppingdesign.com Usability, Information Management, Rails, Javascript & (oh no) Web 2.0 Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:52:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Fast RFC 3339 date processing in javascript http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/08/13/fast-rfc-3339-date-processing-in-javascript/ http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/08/13/fast-rfc-3339-date-processing-in-javascript/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:41:35 +0000 Topper http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/08/13/fast-rfc-3339-date-processing-in-javascript/ At Motionbox, we use a RFC 3339 time format in some data we return. Javascript doesn't natively handle this format with Date.parse. The only other blog post I've seen on the subject is this:

http://dansnetwork.com/2008/11/01/javascript-iso8601rfc3339-date-parser/

However, since that's a regular expression that's parsing on the string, it can sometimes be slower (but not toooo bad... 1000 iterations on the code from the blog post above took < 100 miliseconds in IE7 (~40 miliseconds in Firefox on a macbook pro).

I knew we could do better with splits. With my code below I got it operating 60% faster (so operations take 40% of the time from the code above).

PLAIN TEXT
JavaScript:
  1. Date.prototype.setRFC3339 = function(dString){ 
  2.                 var utcOffset, offsetSplitChar;
  3.                 var offsetMultiplier = 1;
  4.                 var dateTime = dString.split("T");
  5.                 var date = dateTime[0].split("-");
  6.                 var time = dateTime[1].split(":");
  7.                 var offsetField = time[time.length - 1];
  8.                 var offsetString;
  9.                 offsetFieldIdentifier = offsetField.charAt(offsetField.length - 1);
  10.                 if (offsetFieldIdentifier == "Z") {
  11.                     utcOffset = 0;
  12.                     time[time.length - 1] = offsetField.substr(0, offsetField.length - 2);
  13.                 } else {
  14.                     if (offsetField[offsetField.length - 1].indexOf("+") != -1) {
  15.                         offsetSplitChar = "+";
  16.                         offsetMultiplier = 1;
  17.                     } else {
  18.                         offsetSplitChar = "-";
  19.                         offsetMultiplier = -1;
  20.                     }
  21.                     offsetString = offsetField.split(offsetSplitChar);
  22.                     time[time.length - 1] == offsetString[0];
  23.                     offsetString = offsetString[1].split(":");
  24.                     utcOffset = (offsetString[0] * 60) + offsetString[1];
  25.                     utcOffset = utcOffset * 60 * 1000;
  26.                 }
  27.                
  28.                 this.setTime(Date.UTC(date[0], date[1] - 1, date[2], time[0], time[1], time[2]) + (utcOffset * offsetMultiplier ));
  29.                 return this;
  30.             };

]]> http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/08/13/fast-rfc-3339-date-processing-in-javascript/feed/ 3 Boxes and Arrows: Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/03/02/boxes-and-arrows-bringing-holistic-awareness-to-your-design/ http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/03/02/boxes-and-arrows-bringing-holistic-awareness-to-your-design/#comments Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:23:11 +0000 Topper http://blog.toppingdesign.com/2009/03/02/boxes-and-arrows-bringing-holistic-awareness-to-your-design/ Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design - Boxes and Arrows

We did not find any correlation with user satisfaction and those teams with the most specialized team members, one way or the other: some teams with the most specialization did well, and some teams did poorly. What we did consistently observe among teams that had high user satisfaction scores, was one characteristic that stood out above all the others—what we began to call shared, holistic understanding. Those teams that achieved the highest degree of shared, holistic understanding consistently designed the best web applications. The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment—a holistic view—the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was “siloed” into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.

Yes, yes yes. I now work for a company that believes in top-down and bottom-up understanding. I didn't always. I've always said that even the full-time janitor needs to understand the business goals in order to most-effectively do their job.

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