Namespaces can be a powerful tool for code organization and conflict avoidance. Unfortunately, Javascript does not have native support for this extremely useful construct. That being said, the language's flexibility allows us to create a facsimile that works quite well.

Over the past few months, we have talked quite a bit about HTML5, more specifically canvases. There are plenty of other interesting HTML5 subjects canvases offer, which makes it by far the most fascinating and flexible object. We have covered topics ranging from simple rotations to photo filters. Today we are going to go over how to take your canvas and save it as an image.

HTML 5 and the Canvas tag has brought a whole world of possibilities when it comes to image manipulation. This tutorial will demonstrate one of those possibilities that is particularly powerful - getting raw image data and transforming it.

Displaying a message box in an iPhone application is something I have to look up almost every time. I decided it was time to create a tutorial on the subject - then maybe I'd actually remember the syntax. This tutorial will be short, but should cover pretty much everything you'd need to know in order to show alerts in an iPhone application.

One interesting corner of HTML5 development is web-based games. With a few well placed canvases and a healthy does of Javascript, you can create just about any game you can dream. However, the complex nature of Javascript has created the need for a few companies to release game engines built entirely in Javascript and HTML5. This is where Pulse comes in.

Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last.

In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year.

As we learned in our Regular Expressions Primer, regular expressions can be simple or extremely complex. However, there are a few concepts that were left out. Today we are going to cover one of those concepts... grouping.

Pattern recognition is a very hard thing to get right, and as a developer it can be as easy as a few lines of code or more than you can count with fingers and toes. Today we are going to go over a very common tool used for text pattern recognition: regular expression. So let's get started and dive right in.

HTML5 is pretty much the web 3.0 standard these days, and there are plenty of neat neat HTML5 tutorials out there to prove it. In fact, there are even a few game engines out there that are built for HTML5. A recent development in this area was the release of the Pulse developer preview. Here is a short demo of what is possible with pulse:

Learning to program is hard and one of the ways to make the process easier is by reading and using books. With our book reviews here at Switch On The Code we try to help you figure out which books are the best for any level of developer. In this review I'm going to go over the iOS game programming book Learning Cocos2D - A Hands-On Guide to Building iOS Games with Cocos2D, Box2D, and Chipmunk. written by Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich.