Over the years I’ve experimented with several autocomplete scripts, some were really nice to implement, others were really weak sauce. Recently, I had to once again implement an autocompete field in an input form, and decided it was time to take another look at my favorite library, jQuery, to get this done.

A recent experience with postgreSQL forced me to get to know some of the syntax and associated architecture associated with a postegreSQL (w/ PHP) environment. I’m documenting a few tips which would have been helpful, Google is great, no question, but postgreSQL is not the most documented… so here’s my newb tips.

Another quick jQuery tutorial! Here’s the demo.

I’m building an app that requires members to “invite” contacts for each new record they create. (This consists primarily of a name and email address.) In some cases the contacts will be invited several times. So, in lieu of having the user re-enter information on multiple occasions I store previously invited users in a mySql table, and then render them in a select list. As far as UX goes this allows members to enter a new name and email address combination, or, select from a dropdown of previous users, in turn auto-populating the input fields. (Which makes validation cleaner.)

I spent some time earlier today looking for a jQuery code snippet which would allow me to show some action links in a table row on hover… a pretty standard SaaS UI component for editing records.

Overall, the hover effect is pretty simple to use within the jQuery library, with show() and hide() methods. However, most of the examples I found were geared towards unique id’s or classes, which gets messy when dealing with tabular data.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about “The Cloud” and how it’s going to fundamentally change operating systems, and specifcally, the way we manage our information. With the anouncement of Google’s Chrome OS, this does seem to be a fair assumption, although the time to reach any significant saturation point is, I would guess, at least 5 or 6 years away.