Dates in JavaScript

Doing a bit of reading up to try and get my dates working properly in the value app. I found a great article on UX design guidelines for date/time inputs…it has some pretty good examples on what I’m trying to avoid!

Moment.js

I added Moment.js to give more control over how my dates are displaying in the app. By default they all displayed in UTC time (Sun Aug 27 2017 17:00:00 GMT-0700 (PDT)) but obviously this is ugly. Yesterday I got it to look a bit better by appending toDateString() to the date which was a bit better: Sun Aug 27 2017. With moment I can set the date to any format I want, for example moment(thing.purchaseDate).format("dddd, D MMMM YYYY") displays Sunday, 27 August 2017. Much better! And of course I can change the format any number of ways, and also eventually add support for users to select their own format.

Datepickers

I also needed to solve the issues presented by using the input type="date" form field which acts very differently in different browsers (see yesterday's post for details). The rabbit hole led me to jQuery UI which has a datepicker widget. Super helpful because I didn’t even know jQuery has a UI API before this. This jQuery UI Intro on YouTube, as well as this intro to the datepicker helped me get set up pretty quickly.

And the best of all: using this means using input type="text" instead of input type="date" which I picked up from the Chrome developer FAQs. By using the datepicker to input the date as text instead of a JavaScript date object, it now uniformly enters the date in the user’s timezone in all the browsers I am able to test.

So all in, got all the date issues ironed out and now ready to move on to styling the site. But it works!

Other Stuff

I finished Ariana Huffington’s book Thrive which introduces a third metric to measure success by (in addition to the metrics of money & power, which everyone already seems to be pretty comfortable judging others by 😁): one’s ability to thrive. “Thriving” combines one’s wellbeing, intuition, spirituality, and positive habits. It was a quick and encouraging read I’d recommend!

Up Next

Keep working on the value app & deploy it in the next couple of weeks.