Interesting use of c-clamp design

Got forwarded a link today to The Big Mouth Project and noticed a nice variation of the c-clamp design (header at the top, body "clamped" in the middle, and the footer clamping it all together).

When the page first loads, the clamp is closed



Once the content finishes loading, the clamp expands



And expands



Nice.

Java Instance Initializers

I've always been aware of java static initializers, and have been quite comfortable around them

public class Foo {
    private static final Map<String, Object> CACHE;
    static {
        CACHE = new HashMap<String,Object>();
        CACHE.put("foo", new Object());
        CACHE.put("bar", new Object());
    }
}

But I saw this the other day

public class Foo {
    private final List<String> emailAddresses;
    {
        emailAddresses = new ArrayList<String>();
        emailAddresses.add("foo@bar.com");
    }
}

Did some research and looks like an instance initializer, which is just like a static initializer except is run every time an instance of the class is created.

Very useful if there are multiple constructors for a class, and you don't want to keep running the same initialization code over and over again.

Some interesting examples here

e-texteditor gone open source

It appears that my favourite text editor has gone open source!?

Not entirely sure what this means for the future of e-texteditor but hopefully this will mean the company will release updates more often than once every 6 months!