Firefox reached double-digit version numbers on January 31, 2012. It’s been a mere six weeks since we received Firefox 9.0 but there are several interesting features in the new version…

Page Inspector

Firefox now has it’s own built-in page inspector. To launch it, select Inspect from the Web Developer menu, point to an element and choose “Inspect” from the right-click context menu, or press Ctrl+Shift+I. The active element will be highlighted and a bar appears at the bottom of the window showing a clickable breadcrumb trail of the DOM hierarchy.

The HTML button shows the element’s location in the page source while Style displays an editable list of applied CSS rules and properties.

Let’s be honest: it’s not Firebug. But it looks good, works well and will be invaluable on those rare occasions when Firebug isn’t available. I was a little concerned the Inspector would clash with Firebug in some way but I’m yet to encounter a problem.

CSS 3D Transforms

Like the webkit browsers, Firefox 10 now supports CSS 3D transforms which allow you to rotate, skew and translate objects in three-dimensional space. You’ll require the -moz prefix but I suspect more developers will experiment with the effects now they’re supported in Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE10.

Fullscreen API

The fullscreen API is another webkit feature which has been implemented in Firefox 10. You guessed correctly — it allows a page to launch the browser in full-screen mode which makes it ideal for videos, games and other interactive media.

Before hackers and pop-up advertisers become too excited, you should note that the browser places several restrictions on the feature and users cannot be placed in fullscreen mode without their knowledge or consent. The API is not particularly stable; the W3C Fullscreen specification is an early draft and there are minor differences between the webkit and gecko implementations.

Visibility API

The visibility API allows you to check three new document true/false properties:

• visible — your document is the foreground tab of a non-minimized window
• hidden — your document is either a background tab or on a minimized window
• prerender — your document is being pre-rendered and is not visible to the user

It’s simple but allow us to make more efficient and usable web pages. For example, changing tabs could automatically pause a video or slow down Ajax requests.

Dynamic Forward Button

The Forward navigation button now automatically hides itself when there’s no page to forward to! I’ve not heard anyone complain about wasted toolbar space, but it’s a logical interface enhancement since the button’s rarely used.

Better Add-On Compatibility

Probably. Until version 10, Firefox assumed add-ons were incompatible if they were marked as valid for an earlier version. This was rarely the case and you could often force an add-on to install by changing the supported browser number. Mozilla has now reversed the policy; any extension which is compatible with Firefox 4.0 and doesn’t contain compiled code is presumed to be compatible.

Add-on issues have not been stopped completely, but the situation has improved considerably since last year.

Overall, Firefox 10 is a solid release with a good number of features. Say goodbye to version 9.0 and upgrade today … because version 11 will be with us on March 13, 2012.

For many years I used a code editor that is now discontinued by its developers, and the introduction of HTML5 and CSS3 led me to look for an editor that supports the new tags and properties. In this article I’ll share the criteria and process I used to find an editor suitable for making quick fixes and a development environment for large-scale projects. My initial candidate list contained over 30 popular Linux, Java, Windows and XUL software packages which had at least one stable release after January 1, 2010: Arachnophilia, Bluefish, Bluegriffon, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Dreamweaver, Eclipse PDT, Emacs, Expression Web, Geany, gedit, HTML-Kit, jEdit, Kate, KDevelop, Komodo Edit, KWrite, Netbeans, Notepad++, Notepad2, OpenBEXI, PHPEdit, PHPEd Pro, PHPStorm, Programmer’s Notepad, PSPad, RadPHP, Scite, SeaMonkey, Vim, WebDev, WebMatrix, and Zend Studio. You can google each program for their specific details

Read More:
PHPMaster: How I Chose My Programming Editor

Sometimes the idea for an article strikes me out-of-the-blue, like a lightning bolt or an airborne toxin. The quality of these sudden onset ideas varies greatly, and it usually directly proportional with the number of beers I’ve had pre-idea strike. My most recent attack hit me in bed as I was drifting off. It said: “Write a post about Ruby resolutions for the new year.

More here:
RubySource: Rubylutions for 2012

Firefox 9.0 is out? Seriously? I suppose it’s been six weeks since version 8.0 was released on November 8, 2011. If you’ve not received an automatic update yet, select Help > About Firefox and hit the Check for Updates button. If all else fails, head over to getfirefox.com and download it manually.

The add-on compatibility issue appears to have improved significantly. None of my extensions were disabled but I can’t promise you’ll have the same experience.

On the surface, little appears to have changed. Mozilla is claiming improved HTML5, CSS and MathML support. They have also published a long list of bug and security fixes to illustrate how busy they’ve been. Mac OS users may notice improved theme integration and two finger swipe navigation but, for the rest of us, the main changes are under the hood…

Improved JavaScript Performance

Mozilla are claiming a 20-30% performance boost for JavaScript in Firefox 9.0. It’s primarily been achieved using Type Inference (TI); a feature in the SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine which analyzes statements and variable values as a program executes to determine types. The information is used during JIT compilation to generate more efficient code.

It’s impressive. While I doubt you’ll experience a 30% speed increase in the wild, the early benchmarks show promise. Mozilla has certainly closed the gap on competitors, if not overtaken them.

New CSS3 font-stretch property

The new font-stretch property selects a normal, condensed, or extended face from a font family:

• font-stretch: ultra-condensed
• font-stretch: extra-condensed
• font-stretch: condensed
• font-stretch: semi-condensed
• font-stretch: normal
• font-stretch: semi-expanded
• font-stretch: expanded
• font-stretch: extra-expanded
• font-stretch: ultra-expanded

Typefaces will only appear differently if you have a specific font type installed. Remember that many fonts don’t offer condensed or expanded types.

Improved CSS3 text-overflow Support

Firefox has supported text-overflow: ellipses since version 7 was released in September. The property shows ‘…’ at the right-most end of a text string which overflows its container.

Firefox 9.0 allows you to truncate either end of the text with a hard clip, ellipses or a custom string. For example, if “12345678″ was centered in an element which was too small;

text-overflow: ',' ellipsis;

could result in “,3456…”

For more information, refer to the text-overflow reference at MDN.

A More Promising Future?

Mozilla has been losing ground to Google’s Chrome browser but Firefox 9.0 feels fast, stable and has fewer of the compatibility issues which held back earlier versions.

The organization has also announced a three-year extension to its search partnership with Google. The original deal — worth $100 million per year and 84% of Mozilla’s total revenues — ended earlier this month. Neither company has revealed the financial details; Google is certain to have renegotiated the terms, but it was hardly likely to ignore the preferred browser of one in four web users.

It’s also evident that Mozilla is trying to differentiate itself from the others — view their Firefox 9.0 video. While it’s a stomach-churning set of moralistic cliches (independently spirited people, we value values, we believe in you, etc), it’s true that Mozilla is the only browser vendor without ulterior business motives or commercial interests to protect. The web would be a lesser place without them.

If you’re considering the Firefox 9.0 update, it’s best to do so now. Firefox 10.0 is due on January 31, 2012.

WebGL is amazing. Take a look at X-Wing or First-Person Tetris in Firefox. What do you mean it’s not working?

My laptop’s two years old but, despite having a reasonable dedicated graphics card, WebGL is disabled in Firefox. Mozilla blacklist specific GPUs based on the driver version number, i.e.

• NVIDIA cards require a driver numbered 8.17.12.5721 or greater
• AMD/ATI cards are 8.741.0.0 or greater
• Intel cards normally require 6.14.11 on XP, 7.15.10 on Vista or 8.15.10 on 7 (although some products are completely blocked)
• Macs require OS version 10.6 or newer

In general, blacklisting is a good thing. You don’t want WebGL crashing the browser because your card doesn’t support the right number of Z/Stencil ROP Units, 128-bit floating point HDR, anisotropic texture filtering or some other bizarre feature no one understands.

Unfortunately, hardware vendors stop producing drivers for legacy products (anything released before last Tuesday). In some cases, your PC vendor will insist on releasing their own modified driver updates and there’s no guarantee they’ll do that. Your graphics card may be WebGL-compatible, but it’ll be blocked in Firefox if the driver version is 0.0.0.1 behind the approved list. Type “about:support” in the address bar and scroll down to the “Graphics” section at the bottom to discover whether your card is suitable.

And all you Chrome users can stop giggling — Google is adopting GPU blacklists in their browser shortly.

Big Red Warning

We’re about to bypass Firefox’s GPU blacklist. It’s a dumb thing to do and involves tinkering with dangerous configuration settings. Do this at your own risk: I can’t accept responsibility for any catastrophic PC failures, migraines, plagues, explosions or spontaneous human combustion caused by these changes … But it’s worth the risk to play X-Wing!

Here Be Dragons

Type about:config in Firefox’s address bar and make the following changes:

• To enable WebGL, set webgl.force-enabled to true.
• To enable Layers Acceleration, set layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true
• To enable Direct2D in Windows Vista/7, set gfx.direct2d.force-enabled to true

Now, cross your fingers, restart Firefox and try running a WebGL application. It’s probably best to undo those changes if smoke starts pouring from your PC.

WordPress 3.3 has been released. The world’s most popular CMS and blogging tool has been tidied and polished further to make web publishing even easier. It’s been downloaded 65 million times since v3.0 was released and is estimated to run 15% of all websites (or 22% of all new websites).

Existing users can upgrade with single click. I’ve rarely experienced problems doing that but it still makes me nervous. Back-up your files and database before proceeding.

Let’s see what goodies WordPress 3.3 has to offer…

Revamped Interface

HTML5 responsive design techniques have been implemented to help WordPress work on small-screen devices such as tablets. As you reduce the screen size, features such as the side menu automatically collapse.

If you suffer from aching fingers, v3.3′s new flyout sub-menus make it possible to access any administrative screen with a single click.

The (previously optional) admin bar and the header have been combined into a single toolbar. It saves space, is less obtrusive and provides quick access to help, comments quick add links and your profile. That said, I suspect it may cause compatibility issues with some plug-ins — it’s definitely a feature you should test before going live.

Finally, WordPress helps you discover new features with pointers which appear the first time you see them:

Drag and Drop Media Upload

Assuming you’ve got a decent HTML5 browser, you’ll never need to use the clunky “browse files” dialog again. One or more images or other media can be dragged into the media upload box.

In addition, there’s now a single upload panel for all media — no matter what file types you want to add. WordPress also supports RAR and 7z archive formats.

New Tumblr Importer

WordPress can now import content directly from Tumblr. Tumblog posts can be converted to a matching WordPress post format.

Better Co-operation

If you’ve ever received the “Warning: Bob is currently editing this post” message, you’ll be pleased to hear that co-editing activity lags should be a thing of the past.

There’s More…

Version 3.3 also offers:

• a new dashboard welcome screen for fresh installations
• a new post-update changelog screen
• more flexible and faster permalinks
• an overhaul of the editor API
• a new WP_Screen API for working with admin panels
• a new is_main_query() for determining whether you’re in the main loop

Time to Upgrade?

Few people will experience problems but they inevitably crop up with new software releases. If the whole of your business depends on WordPress, it might be advisable to let others find the issues and wait for version 3.3.1. If past experience is anything to go by, that’ll be available within a few weeks.

Have you upgraded to WordPress 3.3? Is it the best version ever or has your installation exploded?

Download WordPress 3.3 from wordpress.org/download

Twitter Bootstrap is a great way to quickly build a very polished web site. By now, we’ve all seen Twitter Bootstrap – it’s a great CSS and Javascript library open sourced by Twitter that makes it easy to produce a very polished looking site, with fantastic support for layout, navigation, typography, and much more. Twitter Bootstrap is based on Less.js , the popular dynamic CSS scripting language written by Alexis Sellier or @cloudhead . Less.js, like Node.js , is implemented completely with Javascript

View article:
Twitter Bootstrap, Less, and Sass: Understanding Your Options for Rails 3.1

There I was, sitting at my desk looking over the upcoming article schedule for Rubysource, when I realized I had inadvertently published TWO articles on Wednesday. The immediate consequence of my stupidity is we’d have no article to run on Friday (we try to publish M-W-F around here) and I’d have to fend off a bunch of different questions that all had the same answer: “Because I am stupid.” It’s our reaction in times of high adversity that define who we are as managing editors. Our first reaction was to smash our head on the desk while coming up with various adjectives about ourselves. Our second reaction was, inexplicably, to start referring to ourselves in plural third person, like royalty

See more here:
Happenings in Ruby

We’ve finally arrived at the moment of the map. For the last several articles in the Loccasions series , I have promised things like “in the next post we will deal with the map” and “I will lower taxes,” and I have not delivered. In this post, I will fulfill at least one of those promises. Adding the map to this application is almost completely a client-side proposition.

Read this article:
Loccasions: Going Client-Side with Leaflet, Backbone, and Jasmine

Git is a (distributed) version control system. What is that? A version control system is software that allows a programmer to track and manage the history of a project, where such a project could be a single file, a set of files, or an entire open source project with multiple programmers contributing from around the world.

View original post here:
PHPMaster: Introduction to Git, Part 1

In Part 4 you learned how to use gettext for one of the most complex aspects of localization a developer can face, plural forms. In this, the final part of the five-part series, I’ll teach you how you to automate part of the localization process by extracting msgids and generating a PO template file ( .pot ) from your application’s PHP code. Let’s dive right in! Extracting Strings from Source You’ve seen how powerful gettext is, and how easy it was to incorporate localization into your applications. But what about ongoing maintenance?

Original post:
PHPMaster: Localizing PHP Applications “The Right Way”, Part 5

If you’re ever stuck on a problem, Google it and you’ll find a swarm of users have most likely experienced the same issue and have already shared their solution. If it’s not out there, ask in a public forum and people will help you find the answer. And if you’ve managed to solve it yourself, then write about it! That way you’ll be contributing to helping others the same way others are willing to help you.

View article:
PHPMaster: The PHP People

If you’re ever stuck on a problem, Google it and you’ll find a swarm of users have most likely experienced the same issue and have already shared their solution. If it’s not out there, ask in a public forum and people will help you find the answer. And if you’ve managed to solve it yourself, then write about it! That way you’ll be contributing to helping others the same way others are willing to help you. That’s one part of the PHP community that makes it really stand out – people share their knowledge and are more than willing to help others along their journey with PHP.

Taken from:
PHPMaster: The PHP People

“You are wasting an outlandish amount of money writing code that already exists”

Joel Spolsky, Fogcreek, StackOverflow

In software development, we like to throw acronyms around, such as DRY, KISS and OAOO, which stand for supposedly better practices that lead to a more effective development process. But is the process used to develop software today really efficient?

Code reuse is largely accepted as “best practice” in our industry. Code reuse has many advantages, such as a smaller code-base which is easier to grok for developers. It’s easier to maintain and optimize, since you can make less changes in order to achieve the desired results. Many modern techniques and tools were created in order to better reuse and modularize code.

But while we’re reusing code, we’re duplicating effort. The same code is being written over and over in different places, wasting time and money.

As much as we’d like to think it, our industry is not yet mature.

Custom development should be the last resort

When you look at more mature industries, such as the auto industry, no-one makes their own screws, or their own wheels, pipes and so forth – they buy off-the-shelf components, which are mass manufactured by companies that know how to make those products best. This leads to both better products – through years of field testing and experience – and to much lower costs.

Do you think the auto industry would be profitable if they produced every (or any) component from scratch and by hand? So how come we have this very process in the software industry, only we call it “custom development”?

As software developers, we pride ourselves on our skills. We want to develop stuff from scratch, because that is often the interesting part. But – every piece of code that solves a problem that had already been solved, is wasted effort.

For our industry to become mature and take the next step in both innovation and cost effectiveness, we need to rethink some of the processes we use today.

The future of the industry is component based development

Enter open-source

Open-source is one of the greatest innovations our industry has experienced in the short time it’s been around. Open-source offers standard source-code solutions for many common problems, and has revolutionized the industry with products such as Linux, MySQL, Apache and others.

Free, open-source libraries and frameworks exist for almost every major programming language and platform. The amount of code that is available is huge and benefits the software on many levels: aside from significantly reducing the time needed to build many products, developers are basically sharing their experience and knowledge through the availability of their code. Becoming a programmer today has become much easier in many ways because of open-source.

Still a huge divide between open-source and commercial software

So why isn’t every common need met by an available open-source solution?

There are a few reasons for that:

• Most open-source projects are created on developers’ free time and good will – developers who have day jobs or work freelance to make a living. Unless they catch major traction, they remain side-projects that are often abandoned gradually until they are not supported in practice. Only 7% of open-source projects are actively maintained.
• Anyone can publish an open-source project – there is no quality assurance or guarantee that it’ll meet certain standards. Many amateur developers get started by publishing open-source projects before they can produce a solution that could become an industry standard.
• Discovery is a problem – due to the long tail of abandoned projects and varying quality, unless the project is visible and well known, many developers will prefer to develop a solution themselves.
• As widespread as it is, open-source still covers a relatively small proportion of common needs in software development. There are so many more needs than solutions that custom development is often the only option.

If all the code written for commercial products was repackaged and released as small open-source projects, then we would have already a solution for most common needs.

That is unlikely to happen though – the sharing incentive just isn’t strong enough for most people. It’s similar to the participation in generated content sites such as wikipedia – only 1% of the audience is actively creating while the others merely consume.

An evolved model – Commercial open-source

So where do we see the industry going in order to break through and become more standardized and streamlined? The answer, in my opinion, is provided by products such as MySQL, RedHat and Magento, which use a business model we like to call commercial open-source.

Those products successfully built a commercial model around open-source, by either dual-licensing (free version + premium version), offering paid support and updates, or variations thereof.

I believe that building a viable business case around the release of source-code projects is the only repeatable and sustainable model for most open-source projects, and this is the direction in which the industry will move in the next couple of years. As releasing code become a viable business, several positive things will happen:

• Open-source projects will be much more actively maintained. If you can support yourself by supporting your own personal projects instead of doing contract client work or working as a hired man in a company, I think it’s a no-brainer.
• Much more code will be released into the market. This is a very important point – in my opinion, the amount of available, ready-to-use solutions will grow by a factor of 10. So, while individual solutions will cost more than free, the overall cost reduction to software projects – compared to the cost that would be spent custom-developing those solutions – would be enormous.
• Once you turn the maintenance of open-source into a business, expectations also rise. I expect increased overall quality as well as curation services that help determine which projects have a quality code-base as a reference for developers.

An evolution is occurring, whether you like it or not

I have witnessed what I’ve written about here many times over years as a software developer and the founder of a development firm.

It is what I learned that spurred me to co-found Binpress, a discovery service and marketplace for source-code. I believe this is how relevant source-code solutions will be found in the future.

By curating the code and adding a supporting commercial layer around it, we are trying to evangelize this approach and help make it a reality.

I realize that there is a strong ideological resistance to this kind of movement. Open-source was originally created according to an ideal – which I can only marvel at and applaud, having been so successful in an ecosystem that is mostly motivated by a capitalistic approach.

I do think, though, that as an ideal, we’ve seen the best that open-source can do. The acknowledged successes will be very hard to replicate.

What we have currently is increasing noise, as more and more people have easier access to start programming and publishing their projects. We need to streamline the process and add that missing financial element that makes it sustainable and repeatable.

I’m sure you have your own opinion to offer on this subject, and would love to discuss it in the comments.