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Blogs » Archive for April, 2008
You can stick your em-dash up your dot dot dot
So once again I find myself intensely irritated by a growing wave of practice that is touted as correct when its correctness is entirely arbitrary. I’m talking about the finer points of typography.
A recent post by Christopher Phin, called Top Ten Typographic Mistakes Everyone Makes really exemplified that for me (sorry Chris, nothing personal!) with remarks like this:
there’s little chance that using a period instead of an interpunct will obscure or confuse your meaning – but they are nevertheless wrong
And this:
those aren’t proper quote marks; they should be sixty-six and ninety-nine quotes
The use of interpunct is not more correct than period, the use of straight quotes is not wrong, and (my personal bugbear) the use of three dots instead of ellipses is perfectly fine. Exactly as with grammar, the details we’re talking about here are not rules, they are conventions, and no more right or wrong than the collective will that made them conventional.
We see similar examples in grammar, for example over split-infinitives. According to the prescribed rules of grammar it’s wrong to split an English infinitive: to go boldly rather than to boldly go. But language is a living thing and it changes all the time. Really, the …
Measure Map Redux?
Only a week or so ago I was wondering if Measure Map had been abandoned by Google. This morning, out of the blue, I got an email that began amusingly with the words “Remember Measure Map?”. Well it appears Google is set to launch a new version! Here’s what the email had to say:
Remember Measure Map? A couple of years ago, we gave you an account on an
early alpha test of our blog analytics software. Since then, a lot has
happened. We got acquired by Google, we redesigned their Analytics app, and
we’ve since rebuilt Measure Map from the ground up.
To move to the new Measure Map the email instructs the account holder to login to a new server and fill in a simple signup form in order for the conversion to begin. A Google Analytics account is required as is the installation of the Analytics tracking code on your blog. Perhaps this means the new Measure Map will be an alternative front end to Analytics data?
Anyway, I filled in the form and now await the next step:
Great! You’re all set. We’ve got a few things to set up on our end. We’ll send …
Bigger And Better: Trends in Mobile Screen Sizes
An interesting couple of posts in the past week by Morten Hjerde, in which he compiles Norwegian usage data (mobile phones with color screens, support for Java and a web browser). In his posts, Hjerde:
- charts mobile screen size trends and declares that small phone screens (smaller than 240 x 320) are dead and can be ignored,
- recommends 240 x 320 as the target size to develop for, and
- encourages user interface designers to begin thinking of how to design for wide-screen mobile displays, as that is the direction that mobiles are headed.
He suggested that:
It is obvious that 240 x 320 (also called QVGA) is on a roll. It is by far the most common and it is growing rapidly. If you develop, this should be your target screen size.
Looking a bit further into the future, the iPhone may not be the only phone on the market but everyone agreed when it was released that it raised the bar for a mobile web experience.
The competition is just now starting to catch up, which means developers have more and more pixels to play with. Hjerde previewed the screen dimensions of …
Twitter’s turning me to drink
About a year and a half ago I was totally over Twitter. When I say “over it”, I mean So Over It that I couldn’t even get Into It. Twitter was new, I didn’t know many people using it, and all the twits and tweets seemed so utterly self indulgent… some would say, many still are. To make matters worse, my husband is an EEO (early, early, adopter); if he can beta test something, he will. So when Twitter came along, he was pretty excited.
Like many others, I didn’t really get the relevance of Twitter. To some extent I thought it was a prime display of insecurity via the Look at Me channel. As someone who really struggled with the decision of whether or not I should even enable comments on my blog, Twitter was a real challenge.
I saw it as a one-on-one activity (i.e. person – device) rather than a one-to-many relationship via the device. Face to face conversations were interrupted by regular mobile beeps alerting a DM (not a Deep and Meaningful, but rather a Direct Message), and in one instance I was even woken up at 3am no less, by a message alert on my …
.NET on the ‘Net April 17-23 : Putting it all online
This post is offically quite late. A combination of hackers and the first nice weather in 6 months can be quite distracting.
Microsoft has made some big announcements this week around their web strategy. Microsoft’s Salesforce.com competitor, Dynamics CRM Online, launched this week. With this launch and plans to add more services under the Dynamics umbrella, this could mean that many of us will be integrating elements of these tools into our web applications soon. While I haven’t read any responses from salesforce.com, I have noticed that they’ve already purchased Google AdWords related to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It will be interesting to see if this new Microsoft toolset will catch on.
In addition to releasing Dynamics CRM, Microsoft announced details about the upcoming Live Mesh service. Live Mesh represents Microsoft’s next step in moving away from a desktop-centric model to a more web integrated software plus service model. Like the Dynamics Platform, Live Mesh could provide some interesting opportunities for integrating some office style features into you apps. It remains to be seen what developer tools will be available surrounding these services. I was hoping to post a quick first impression here, but my account is still pending.
The Visit …
CSS Gradients, Transforms, Animations, and Masks
With the CSS Working Group seemingly toiling in obscurity to pin down the exact wording of specs that may never be implemented in a real-world browser, the WebKit team is leading the charge in moving the web forward by implementing new CSS features that you’ll be able to use in production in just a few months’ time.
Every browser contains a rendering engine responsible for producing a rendered page from the HTML and CSS code that makes up a given web page. WebKit is the rendering engine at the heart of Apple’s Safari browser (not to mention most recent Nokia cell phones and the Adobe AIR platform). You can download the latest work-in-progress version of WebKit to try it out.
Web designers interested in the future of CSS have a very good reason for downloading WebKit right now. The team has introduced some astounding new CSS features that Apple is planning to release in this June’s 2.0 update to Mobile Safari for the iPhone and iPod touch. Presumably we can expect an update to the desktop version of Safari for Mac OS X and Windows around the same time.
Here’s a run-down of the features …
The Week in ColdFusion: 16-22 April: Community best practices
Welcome to the 15th “Week in ColdFusion” wrap-up! I hope that I’m saving people time, or at least pointing out some handy posts you might have missed. If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. Too long? Too short? Not enough of X? Too much Y? I’d love to hear it!
Best Practices
Onto the posts: Peter Bell has started a series of articles on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD). He’s kicked the set off with Why Test? and followed up with Books on Unit Testing and Test Driven Development and then an article on Getting Test Infected – pairing up with another developer to pick the unit testing habit up from them. Food for thought if you’re curious about Unit testing or TDD.
Speaking of deep thinking, Barney Boisvert has posted on how far the ColdFusion community has come in the past few years, with ColdSpring, ORM solutions like Reactor and Transfer, and frameworks like Fusebox, Mach-ii and Model-Glue now so widely adopted. If you’re using these tools, learning them or even just thinking about these topics, Barney would like you to congratulate yourself!
Community
The first round of results from Jim Priest’s CFML IDE …
Live Demos: The SitePoint CSS Reference Goes Interactive
The popular SitePoint CSS Reference today added an exciting feature to its already impressive list — live demos.
This is a feature that was among the most commonly requested in our recent reader survey. It’s common knowledge that many beginner web developers learn best by doing. Now the most comprehensive reference for CSS on the Web comes with a sandbox in which you can experiment and learn in real-time.
The talented and wonderfully controversial James Edwards is the brains behind not only the code, but some of the quirky content contained within the example markup (if you understand all of the obscure song lyrics, book quotes or sci-fi movie one-liners then you’re doing better than I am!).
We’ve just launched this today, so there may be a couple of kinks that still need ironing out. Feel free to let us know in the comments for this post (or if it relates to a specific page, on the page of the reference site itself).
Smooth your deployment with Passenger
I alluded to the release of Phusion’s Passenger (AKA mod_rails) – an Apache module that can run multiple Rails sites, just as PHP does. The significance of this is pretty huge. Up until now, running rails has required running Mongrel behind an Apache proxy or using FastCGI (or preferably fcgid).
Although Mongrel did a sterling job, I have never been a big fan of having two points of failure – problems with either Apache or Mongrel would render your site unreachable. Not only that, adding capacity to your system required adding a number of mongrel instances, each with it’s own port and each with it’s own memory overhead, which can get very messy for shared hosting providers.
Passenger will allow hosting providers to install one Apache module, requiring the client to simply upload their application – no permission issues, or troublesome configurations files. However, it is also very useful for a developer – instead of having to run script/server when testing your application, you can install a local version of Apache, setup a few virtual hosts, and have instant access to your test sites.
Currently, Passenger only runs on *NIX type environments, eg Linux and OSX. The Phusion team have worked …
Google Invests Big In Clean Energy
Californian power company eSolar, which is focussed on building small-scale solar power plants, has raised $130 million in funding including $10 million capital from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org.
