Recent Blog Posts
Blogs » Archive for May, 2007
@ GDD07: Google Gears – Bringing Server & Client Even Closer
This post comes from Google Developer Day in Sydney, Australia, where Aaron Boodman has just finished his presentation on Google’s new enhancement to web applications, “Google Gears”. With Sydney being on the right side of the planet, you saw it here first!
The goal of Google Gears is to allow rich, AJAX – heavy web applications to become fully functional both on and offline. Delivering this capability would be a substantial step toward Google’s aspirations of becoming the dominant application platform.
To solve this problem, Google Gears brings local database storage to your web browser, and provides an offline synchronization service to keep local and remote data in sync.
All data interactions should take place locally, helping speed up the UI, whilst a background process takes care of the sync tasks whenever a connection is available.
On the storage side, Gears embeds an SQLite database server into a browser extension, providing API hooks to query and update the database much as you would with any other db.
Aaron was somewhat lighter-on for detail on the sync aspect, which is unfortunate as this is the crux of the offline < -> online problem. Anyone who has tried to keep various …
Photoshop CS3 New Features: #1 - Quick Selection Tool
So, we’ve had the Adobe CS3 web and design suites for two weeks now and we’re starting to really get a feel for the improvements. As you might expect with such a large cross-section of applications, some have eveolved more than others — at this stage my view is Fireworks and Photoshop have some pretty nifty new tricks while Dreamweaver’s improvements seem to be less far reaching than CSS reinvention in version 8.
With any upgrade decision, it usually comes down to three factors:
- Will it run OK on my current system?
- What are the new goodies?
- Do I have the cash?
Question #3 only you can answer.
The answer to question #1 seems to be ‘yes, each application seems to run at least as quickly as CS2, usually quicker’. In fact, the startup time for Photoshop CS3 is less than 10 seconds on my system compared with well over 20 for CS2, with similar results for Illustrator. I know it’s only 10 seconds, but it’s a very, very long 10 seconds when you’re waiting and reading the list of developer credits. Many a time I’ve found myself wondering ‘which one of you is responsible for this CS2 load time?’.
I digress. In short, upgrading your …
Now you can be as cool as me - GO GET CF 8 BETA!
Yes folks now you get to be as cool as I’ve been! For the past few weeks / months I’ve been involved in the ColdFusion 8 aka Scorpio beta. Today you too can play with the next version of ColdFusion. Adobe today released the first Release Candidate or Public Beta for ColdFusion 8!! I’ll give you a second to jump around, pick yourself up off the floor, or just read that all over again.
So why is this version going to be so great? What can you look forward to exploring? Well here’s my highlights:
- Built in server monitoring - Yes now you can monitor your server for tuning, bottlenecks, and performance issues
- Built in debugger - If you’re an Eclipse fan then this will be something you’ve been dying to have. Now you can!
- Spry integration - Yes folks it’s not getting even easier to build AJAX application with ColdFusion and Spry integration.
- .NET Support - While I haven’t played with this myself it’s now available for those of you who need it.
The stuff / tags I’m most excited about:
- CFFeed tag - Read RSS / ATOM and create RSS 2.0 / Atom 1.0 feeds …
User Style Sheets Come of Age
User style sheets–CSS files that sit on the user’s desktop machine and override a site’s original styles–have been around for a long time. Personally, though, I’ve never really seen the benefit.
Sure, from an accessibility perspective, I concede that the ability to restore underlines to links, bump up the font size, or improve the contrast of a site would come in handy for someone with a vision impairment (or a low tolerance for offensive colour combinations). But there’s never been any real incentive for me to spend time changing the design of someone else’s site, especially when:
- there was no easy way to share and promote a user style sheet for a particular site
- adding a style sheet still involved a fair amount of mucking around–files had to be saved to specific folders, and browsers needed relaunching before the style would take effect
- per-site user style sheets still aren’t supported in Internet Explorer, and
- the foundations (markup) could change drastically from under your feet anyway.
Power to the User
In 2007, finally, it seems that times are a-changin’. Well, not in IE, they’re not–point number 3 above still stands (and as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any add-ons to enable this functionality). But if you use …
The Art & Science of CSS Rounded Corners (and beyond)
As you may well have noticed by now, our new advanced CSS book — The Art & Science Of CSS — has been officially released across the site, although it’s been available for a little while if you’d looked.
If you’re interested but held off purchasing till now, you’re in luck. Use this link to get a $10 discount on The Art & Science of CSS PLUS select a free poster of your choice (DHTML/CSS/Linux/PHP).
- The Art & Science Of CSS + Free Poster = $29.95 + Shipping
Make no mistake: this offer auto-expires a week from today, so don’t wait too long if you want to use this discount link.
Onto the book’s content.
An entire chapter of Art & Science (chapter 6) is dedicated to the implementation of rounded corners. Looking at all the online tools, articles, blog posts, head scratching and sometime teeth-gnashing focussed on the issue over the last 5 years, it is probably not all that surprising.
However, as Jina demonstrated in her ‘Breaking Out of the Box’ feature article, it’s easy to forget …
Good and Bad PHP Code
The following is republished from the Tech Times #165.
When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so much about the kind of programmer they are. Here’s the question: “In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?”
The reason I like this question is because it tests more than just a candidate’s encyclopedic knowledge of PHP’s functions. Zend’s PHP certification does a good job of that (as does the test that Yahoo! issues to applicants for its PHP developer jobs, apparently).
Rather, the answer to this question tells me whether a PHP developer has, for example, experienced the pain of working with poorly-written code inherited from a careless predecessor, and whether he or she will go the extra mile to save the rest of the team from that same pain.
I don’t have a set notion of the perfect answer to the question, but I do know the kinds of things I’m hoping to hear. Just off the top of my head:
Good PHP code should be structured. Long chunks of code can be broken up into functions or methods that …
News Wire: Is PHP Doomed?
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PHP Interview questions from YAHOO
A few questions from the exam (or at least one of them) that Yahoo! administers to applicants for PHP development jobs. A few were a little bit “memorize the function names” for me, but others, like “How do you debug a PHP application?” are great!
(tags: php yahoo!) -
Silicon Valley Could Use A Downturn Right About Now
TechCrunch, the blog that spreads the good news about the latest Silicon Valley start-up, says that, these days, the Valley sucks. Sounds like Bubble 2.0 is in full swing…
(tags: business) -
Money for Nothing
Joe Hewitt, the creator of Firebug, responds to the TechCrunch rant. In his opinion, the repeating bubble-to-burst cycle we are seeing has little to do with technology, and a lot to do with the way the US government raises money by provoking inflation.
(tags: business politics) -
Formal Weirdness
CSS guru Eric Meyer explores the unsolved (and unsolvable) issues with the styling of HTML forms. In short, if you try to make the current standards apply to forms in a consistent way, you lose the ability to even set the background color of a text field.
(tags: css standards) -
JavaScript “Associative Arrays” Considered Harmful
Andrew Dupont busts the myth that JavaScript associative arrays should be created with …
Feedburner Acquired by Google
According to Techcrunch the rumor that Google is buying Feedburner is now official. Until Google or Feedburner posts it, it’s still a rumor to me! But considering the source it looks like this deal is going through in the next 2-3 weeks. I’ve already seen talk about people wanting to leave just because Google is buying them, though I’m not sure why. When did Google buying a company become such a bad thing?
I don’t think too much will change with the Feedburner service. Google tried to start their own feed advertising program and it fizzled pretty quickly. This is likely an attempt by Google to try and get back into that market. Feedburner also offers CPM based ads which is another good fit for Google who has been expanding their ads in that area lately. Hopefully this won’t mean they’ll replace the CPM ads with the Adsense contextual ads that seem to be doing worse and worse for many publishers.
The other features Feedburner offers, like publishing your RSS feeds and providing usage statistics is another perfect fit for Google. They gain access to all those feeds which will I’m sure will be used on their blog search, among other …
Fireworks CS3 Features: Intelligent Scaling
Republished from SitePoint Design View #33
Adobe’s first take on Fireworks — CS3, or version 9 in the old money — has finally been released into the wild and is getting some good press. As we only received the full review edition last week, I’ll publish a full wrap-up in the next Design View, but for the time being I thought I’d look at one of the package’s nicest new features: intelligent or “9-slice” scaling.
Symbols — in Flash or Fireworks — have always been a great concept. If you use a bit of CSS, there’s something quite familiar about being able to define a permanent reference graphic, then use linked instances or copies of that graphic in your artwork. Changes to the symbol automatically flow through to copies, just as CSS changes flow through to your document.
The biggest drawback I’ve always found with using symbols has always been scaling issues.
While it doesn’t really matter if your radio button doesn’t resize elegantly, the majority of buttons, text fields, dropdowns, scroll bars, tabs, and other screen widgets we might use in a typical design are required to resize to fit the content they contain. In
the …
News Wire: We’re Back!
With Simply JavaScript, the book I co-wrote with Cameron Adams, officially off to print, I’m now able to resume publication of the SitePoint News Wire. Thanks to those who continued to submit links during the downtime. Enjoy!
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Pimpin’ Products Ain’t Easy
Amy Hoy demonstrates how to put your product’s best foot forward on the Web, and points out some common mis-steps you should aim to avoid. (thanks gnarly)
(tags: business marketing design) -
The No Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications
Dan Webb: “With this post I’m going to blast through the absolute essentials you need to get started…” (thanks gnarly)
(tags: standards rubyonrails identity) -
Instruct Search Engines to come back to site after you finish working on it
Shows how to send a 503 (Network Unavailable) error to search engines while you are making modifications to your site. (thanks apachedude)
(tags: http search apache php perl) -
Objecty
A JavaScript library that makes it dead simple to embed video in your web pages. I’m not sure I like the custom attribute it requires, but its better than most alternatives. “It’s meant to re-swizzle the whole paradigm. (Or something.)” (thanks gnarly)
(tags: flash javascript media software) -
EJSChart :: 100% Pure JavaScript Chart
Currently in beta, a JavaScript library for generating stylish and interactive …
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