As the demands of the web change and developers experiment with different user experiences, the need for more native language improvements expands. Our presentation layer, CSS, has done incredibly well in improving capabilities, even if sometimes too slow. The need for native support for automatically expanding textarea elements has been long known…and it’s finally here!
To allow textarea elements to grow vertically and horizontally, add the field-sizing property with a value of content:
textarea {
field-sizing: content; // default is `fixed`
}
The default value for field-sizing is fixed, signaling current behavior. The new behavior, content, will expand as much as possible. To constrain the size a textarea can grow, use traditional width/max-width and height/max-height properties.
The underground world of creating and streaming Super Mario World-based ROM hacks continues to gain popularity. This popularity is a tribute to the creativity of gamers and the quality of the original 30 year old video game’s mechanics. Over the past decade, incredible ROM hacks like Grand Poo World 1 and 2, Invictus, and Dram World have brought joy (and horror) to the Mario community. Sure, Nintendo released Mario Maker and Mario Maker 2, but I love SMW Central patches because they allow all of us to create, much like open source.
The most anticipated hack in years, Grand Poo World 3, was just released and is taking the Super Mario World community by storm. You cannot, however, just download GPW3; due to legal reasons, and the ability to modify it further, the process takes some work. Let’s learn how to build Grand Poo World 3!
What You’ll Need
You’ll need multiple apps and files to build and play Grand Poo World 3:
The from SMWCentral
A clean ROM file (with .smc file extension) for Super Mario World (…Google helps; use to verify your file)
A patching utility for your OS ( for macOS, for Windows)
An emulator to play the resulting .smc file (, )
Patching Grand Poo World 3
With the files and utilities available, open the patching utility and provide the path, Super Mario World ROM File, and patched file path:
If the input files are successful, you’ll get a working .smc file for GPW3! The risk is usually the SMW ROM file, so be sure to validate it with JSRomClean.
With a successful Grand Poo World 3 created, it’s time to play!
The whole process of creating Grand Poo World 3 gives me joy due to two of my loves: video games and open source coding. SMWCentral has thousands of patches you can apply on top of and parellel to ROM hacks to implement features like and loads more.
Most developers spoil themselves with fun command line utilities to make their work easier and more efficient. One such command line helper allows developers to . How can you get the current branch? With this handy snippet:
git branch --show-current
It’s great to keep this snippet around for any automation you may create moving forward!
Visual Studio Code has taken the crown of most used text editor, at least in JavaScript spheres. VSCode is fast, feature-filled, and supports thousands of plugins to boost productivity. Developers can also tweak hundreds of settings to enrich functionality. One such feature is the autoSave feature.
A few months ago I changed my editor setup to autosave code as I type. Every app works that way, code editors should too.
I recently had to disable it briefly. Feels so backwards to explicitly press Save via cmd+s.
Here is how you can change VS Code to auto save:
— Christoph Nakazawa (@cpojer)
To autoSave files with VS Code, you can add the following to your text editor config:
Just about every Operating System and web action is instant these days, so eliminating the need for manual save just makes sense. Big thanks to my old MooTools colleague Chris Nakazawa for calling this out!
One of the best things that ever happened to t he user experience of the web has been web extensions. Browsers are powerful but extensions bring a new level of functionality. Whether it’s crypto wallets, media players, or other popular plugins, web extensions have become essential to every day tasks.
Working on MetaMask, I am thrust into a world of making everything Ethereum-centric work. One of those functionalities is ensuring that .eth domains resolve to ENS when input to the address bar. Requests to https://vitalik.ethnaturally fail, since .eth isn’t a natively supported top level domain, so we need to intercept this errant request.
// Add an onErrorOccurred event via the browser.webRequest extension API
browser.webRequest.onErrorOccurred.addListener((details) => {
const { tabId, url } = details;
const { hostname } = new URL(url);
if(hostname.endsWith('.eth')) {
// Redirect to wherever I want the user to go
browser.tabs.update(tabId, { url: `https://app.ens.domains/${hostname}}` });
}
},
{
urls:[`*://*.eth/*`],
types: ['main_frame'],
});
Web extensions provide a browser.webRequest.onErrorOccurred method that developers can plug into to listen for errant requests. This API does not catch 4** and 5** response errors. In the case above, we look for .eth hostnames and redirect to ENS.
You could employ onErrorOccurred for any number of reasons, but detecting custom hostnames is a great one!
