May 2013
2 posts
1 tag
Idea: Show/hide panes with toggles instead of tabs
Currently, Dabblet employs a system of tabs to show/hide panes, with preconfigured options of which panes to show for every tab:
There is also a setting that modifies the layout of those panes:
This was done to minimize cognitive overhead and provide easy, pre-baked options to the user of the pane combinations they are most likely to need. However, after my colleague, Doug Schepers...
Updates over the last few months
There has been a while since the last post in this blog. However, this doesn’t mean dabblet is not moving forward. There have been a number of improvements, practically everything we promised in the previous blog post:
JavaScript support
JavaScript support was added in a new tab. It will run when a dabblet loads, as well as when you hit the Play button in the JS tab or hit Cmd/Ctrl + Enter...
November 2012
1 post
Lots of improvements in the pipeline
As many of you probably know, I’ve started working for W3C Developer Relations since this August. Half of my time is devoted to WebPlatform.org, a very promising project to document the web with the help of all major players, in a vendor-neutral way. Even before I joined W3C, we discussed using a hosted, customized version of dabblet in WebPlatform.org, as a platform for live code examples. I...
July 2012
1 post
User profiles come to dabblet
For many months, dabblet was just a web application with hardly any social components and that seemed to work fine. However, discovering new interesting dabblets was a pain. While user profiles do not completely solve this, they are a step in the right direction and something that was requested multiple times in the past. They’re basically a wrapper around Github profiles combined with a user’s...
April 2012
3 posts
Dabblets now degrade gracefully in non-CORS...
Following a suggestion by Roman Komarov (@kizmarh), dabblet now redirects to the full page result when viewing saved dabblets in non-CORS browsers such as Opera 11.6 or IE9.
1 tag
New feature: Custom font size per dabblet
A new setting has landed in dabblet: Custom font size! It’s incredibly useful for presentations, where you might want to show the code at a very large font size. Also, it makes it possible to adjust the presentation of very small or large demos to give them a more suitable font size.
The setting is saved with every dabblet, so when you share one, you are also sharing its font size. Of course,...
2 tags
Full page result is now on its own subdomain
So, for example to view the full page result for dabblet #2191425 you will now go to:
http://result.dabblet.com/gist/2191425
instead of:
http://dabblet.com/result/gist/2191425
Obviously, the new syntax is prettier, more in line with URL conventions and more consistent with regular dabblet URLs. However, this was not the primary motivation behind the change. The new syntax is more secure,...
February 2012
2 posts
1 tag
View all panes at once and other updates
One of the most frequent requests I get for dabblet is being able to see CSS, HTML and Result all at once, similar to how JSBin and JSFiddle work. As you probably know if you’re following this blog, I was planning to allow full customization of the number and layout of the tabs, and I’ve already implemented this in the experimental branch (albeit a bit buggily).
However, something...
1 tag
Always visible menu bar for larger screens
One of the most frequent complaints I get about dabblet’s UI is that the top menu bar auto-hides.
This saves a lot on vertical space (and looks nice when closed), but I can see how it can be annoying. However, I hate preferences creep more than anything, so I was reluctant to add an extra setting for that, even when others did it for me.
However, today I came up with an idea: You...
January 2012
3 posts
1 tag
Linking to individual revisions
You can now link to individual dabblet revisions, which is ideal for tutorials. Check these revisions of the same dabblet:
http://dabblet.com/gist/1695733/c68f732103cd030eda63ce3ba8bdbc88c4463ee4 http://dabblet.com/gist/1695733/a82c6bbf13a1fbd9ec56141b16504060ec98a57c http://dabblet.com/gist/1695733/1e949dd3c1566124ef606cacd7fa8b5564502365...
Dabblet’s first month in review
Dabblet turned one month old four days ago, on January 15th. The response from the community has been overwhelming, thousands of people are using it daily to create and share CSS and HTML experiments and in some cases even entire website templates.
As for the numbers, dabblet got 4K unique visitors on its first day and 11K on its second. During its first month, it got a total of 65K unique...
Dabblet update: URL & Entity previewers, subtle...
I decided that rather than working on a separate experimental branch and eventually merging the whole thing with the mainstream version of dabblet, to keep them both separate and integrate features from the experimental branch once they mature.
So, today I’ve integrated some features that seemed stable enough in the private beta:
URL & entity previewers
Nicer scrollbars in Webkit....
December 2011
3 posts
3 tags
4 tags
URL and entity previewers in upcoming dabblet v1.1
A URL previewer was a very common request. I had my qualms at first but I decided it’s useful enough to outweigh the disadvantages. It should work for everything displayable in an <img> element, including SVGs and data: URIs.
Along with that, I’ve also implemented an entity previewer, which is useful when you’re not sure whether you remember an HTML or CSS entity...
4 tags
