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iPad’s Default Applications

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Tuesday, March 9th, 2010
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The iPad is close to release with less than 1 month to go. So you might be asking, what applications are available with the iPad by default?

There are 13 applications available by default which have been optimised and enhanced specifically for the iPad. iBooks is a new application for the iPad but the following have been removed when compared to the iPhone:-

  • Stocks
  • Calculator
  • Clock
  • Weather
  • Voice Memos

I understand why the Clock and Voice Memos iPad application may have been skipped as they would be very difficult to create an interface to suit the size of the iPad. Do you just create a bigger clock? No, of course not. I don't understand why they couldn't come up with the idea of a world map showing analogue clocks in different timezones, wouldn't that be efficient for the iPad.

Whilst people consider this to be a small utility, you wait until the calculator is not available whilst you have the iPad in your hands. We have been promised these missing iPad applications will be available on the iTunes store so hopefully this is true.

Will have to check with the staff down at my local Brisbane Apple Store.

Mootools Enter Key Event

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Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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If you're wanting to fire an event when the enter key is pressed on a text field, then all you simply need to do is the following:

 
   $('text-field-id').addEvent('keydown', function(event) {
      if(event.key == "enter") {
         alert("Enter Key Pressed");
      }
   });
 

Nice and simple.

Finally! The CSS language has been improved.

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Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
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LESS is a easy to use markup language to extend CSS with variables, mixins, operations, and nested rules. Best of all it's easy to convert to LESS, you simply rename your CSS extensions to .less and you are ready to go.

Of course your existing CSS won't utilise the power of LESS, but it's an easy way to migrate. You could spend a day converting your CSS code to the structure/formatting LESS enables or simply modify as you code.

Variables
Variables allow you to specify widely used values in a single place, and then re-use them throughout the style sheet, making global changes as easy as changing one line of code.

 
 @brand_color: #4D926F;
 
 #header {
    color: @brand_color;
 }
 
 h2 {
    color: @brand_color;
 }
 

Mixins
Mixins allow you to embed all the properties of a class into another class by simply including the class name as one of its properties. It's just like variables, but for whole classes. Mixins can also behave like functions, and take arguments, as seen in the example bellow.

 
 .rounded_corners (@radius: 5px) {
    -moz-border-radius: @radius;
    -webkit-border-radius: @radius;
    border-radius: @radius;
 }
 
 #header {
    .rounded_corners;
 }
 
 #footer {
    .rounded_corners(10px);
 }
 

Nested Rules
Rather than constructing long selector names to specify inheritance, in Less you can simply nest selectors inside other selectors. This makes inheritance clear and style sheets shorter.

 
 #header {
    color: red;
 
    a {
       font-weight: bold;
       text-decoration: none;
    }
 }
 

Operations
Are some elements in your style sheet proportional to other elements? Operations let you add, subtract, divide and multiply property values and colors, giving you the power to do create complex relationships between properties.

 
 @the-border: 1px;
 @base-color: #111;
 #header {
    color: @base-color * 3;
    border-left: @the-border;
    border-right: @the-border * 2;
 }
 
 #footer {
    color: (@base-color + #111) * 1.5;
 }
 

The Startup Bus with 12 Strangers

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Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
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The idea is simple, 12 random strangers board a bus in San Francisco and travel at 60 miles an hour to Austin. The journey will take over 48 hours, during this time they will conceive, build and launch 3 tech startups in time for a SXSW party in Austin. The experiment is called 'The Startup Bus'.

Sounds interesting and unfortunately I see it as a complete waste of time. Why? To create 1 tech startup in 48 hours wouldn't be sufficient, there isn't enough time to plan, discuss, experiment, build, and test in 48 hours with 12 developers - let alone 3 tech startups.

I've seen people waste their time many times over on their ideas and it generally comes down to one thing. As with any idea, you don't want others to know about it until you're ready, usually this is when you want to launch your idea. Unfortunately this causes a big issue, you need to research and discuss your ideas with others as your idea may not be everyone's cup of tea.

'The Startup Bus' are looking for sponsors and I wish them the best, it will be interesting to see what comes out of this experiment but I'm not expecting any of them to be the next YouTube or Facebook that's for sure. And hey, if they pay for my flights, food, and accommodation to San Francisco and Austin, I will surely like to participate.

How to Disable Wordpress Plugins

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Monday, January 25th, 2010
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I recently used a new Wordpress plugin which crashed my whole site, couldn't do a thing and I definitely couldn't access the admin site to disable the new plugin. So to disable the plugin, you need to access your database.

Using a tool like phpMyAdmin or if you're an experienced user you can access the database directly. Go to the 'wp_options' table, find the row 'active_plugins', you will see something similar to the following, depending on the number and type of plugins you have installed: a:1:{i:0;s:19:"akismet/akismet.php";}

That value represents every active plugin on your site, so to quickly disable all your plugins, copy this string to a safe place for backup (just in case), clear the value completely and save. All your WordPress plugins are now deactivated, now you can reactivate all the plugins except the one that was causing you problems.

Firebug make huge improvements

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Thursday, January 21st, 2010
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The Firebug team have released Firebug 1.5, with many bug fixes and new great features below:-

  • Mike Radcliffe’s Inspector. Firebug's key feature, now solid as a rock,
  • Jan ‘Honza’ Odvarko’s expanded and refined the Net panel, with more accurate timings,
  • Steve Roussey’s reworking of HTML editing and entity support,
  • Kevin Decker’s CSS and Style side panel improvements,
  • Support for dynamic, graphical breakpoints throughout Firebug.
  • It works with the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3.6

Most importantly, it is released before Firefox 3.6. The biggest problem is upgrading Firefox and finding Firebug no longer works.

How to get Flash working within the Safari Browser on the iPhone

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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
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Tobias Schneider has built an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript and HTML5, quite impressive. Hosted on GitHub for everyone to download and use.

Works well in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (and, yes, iPhone Safari). Very useful for desktop users as well, if the user doesn't have Flash installed you can call Gordon to run the Flash files instead (great for users who do not have privileges to install Flash on their computer).

Quick and Easy Installation Instructions

  1. Download Gordon
  2. Insert a script tag in the head of your HTML file to the Gordon javascript file 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../gordon.js"></script>
  3. Insert a div or span tag where you would like the Flash file to appear within the body of your HTML file 
     
<div id="stage"></div>
 
  4. Add a JavaScript onload event to insert the flash file within your div or span 
    <body onload="new Gordon.Movie('flash-file.swf',
{id: 'stage', width: 500, height: 400})">
  5. Enjoy !

Forbidden Issues with Apache2 on Mac Snow Leopard (10.6)

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Tuesday, December 1st, 2009
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There's a common issue people are experiencing when they upgrade their Mac to Snow Leopard (10.6) with forbidden issues whilst accessing websites created through Apache's virtual hosts. The problem is simple, the new httpd.conf file in Snow Leopard is a bit more strict, and so it should be, simply follow the steps below to fix the problem.

Assuming you have Apache2 running and you have your vhost file setup and working. Open your vhost file and make the following modifications:

sudo vi /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf

Opens your httpd-vhosts.conf file with vi

   <Directory /path/to/your/website>
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride All
      Order Allow,Deny
      Allow from all
   </Directory>

Add the block above within your tags, save the file, and restart apache (sudo apachectl restart).

That's it, you simply need to tell Apache to allow access from all. If you want to secure this further you may Allow from your own computer only (127.0.0.1).

Full List of Countries in a CSV File

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Sunday, November 15th, 2009

A full list of countries in a CSV file.

Full Country List (CSV) - Zip Archive

Your site is becoming slow, slower, and slooooowwwwer

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Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Developing websites today requires interaction with users and 'something' to keep users coming back. Creating a website is no longer simply throwing up images, copy, and hope your site achieves everything you desire.

Adobe Flash used to be widely used to achieve a rich user experience with websites, but JavaScript has made a reappearance and taken charge of creating the desired user experiences. Once a website has been launched, you simply can't help it but enhance it - and don't be shamed, it's worth it. But often we add too much way too quickly and everyone may not have a super fast Internet connection like you do.

Whilst writing JavaScript or CSS, it's good practice to keep your files separate, but when a user downloads all your files, it's all the initial server requests for each file that are slowing down the page the most. You could develop all your JavaScript and CSS in two files, but you can easily go over 5000 lines before you know it - which makes it extremely difficult to develop more, test and debug.

Unfortunately, the more you add to a website the slower it becomes to download and view. Fortunately, there are a million methods or probably just 20 (I haven't counted) to enhance the speed of your website.

Firstly, install YSlow from Yahoo, it also requires Firebug. YSlow offers suggestions for improving the page's performance, summarises the page's components, displays statistics about the page, and provides tools for performance analysis, including Smush.itâ„¢ and JSLint.

Read through each suggestion YSlow supplies and you will find your site's download and viewing speeds increase with every change. As to speeding up the JavaScript and CSS files, I recommend Minify to combine the multiple CSS or Javascript files, remove unnecessary whitespace and comments, and serve them with gzip encoding and optimal client-side cache headers.

By using Minify, you can reduce the time taken to download your site by over 300% simply reducing the number of files to download.

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