Firefox 8.0 Released

Developers over at Mozilla have released Firefox 8.0, Mozilla Firefox Adds Twitter Search and New Features that Make Web Browsing Easier.

Some features in the new release are:

• We no longer see “major” releases of Firefox as meaning anything
• twitter is now included as a search option
• Load tabs on demand
• Disabling add-ons installed by 3rd party add-ons
• Added support for CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing)

As far as us developers are concerned:

• input and textarea now support selectionDirection and setSelectionRange()
• Focus ring on elements using the tabindex
• insertAdjacentHTML is implemented
• Nested label event handling is fixed
• window.postMessage() will pass File and FileList objects between windows
• .contenteditable areas now back to paragraph entry mode (shift enter is <br>)
• Fixed text-decoration rendering in quirks mode
• Console now has a dir() command that will display a list of the properties of an object.

Tags: CORS, Firefox, mozilla, Twitter

How to Hide all the WordPress in WordPress

I’ve been working on writing an article on Purpose Built WordPress templates.  This morning I ran across a post by Ben Word, at benword.com — How to Hide The Fact That You’re Using WordPress.

WordPress tends to add a LOT of “stuff” in both the final HTML, and all the layers that build it.  This is done to accommodate the masses.  As a developer you can write <img src=’images/image.gif’ alt=’test’> or you can ping a database, resize an image, pull the proper alt tag, construct the final img tag then output it to the screen.

All the same, WP adds code to your header to account for all the functionality it MIGHT use.  Not necessarily all the functionality it does use.

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Tags: Ben Word, benword.com, CSS, JS, WordPress, wp_head

Google+: Google Apps users Finally Welcome

Saw a “+You” link in the top left corner of my Google Apps mail, and clicked on it.

Google finally added Google Profiles to Google Apps users.

Please check out my Google+ profile – Sean Walther.

Tags: Google, Google Apps, Google Plus, Google Profile

jQuery 1.7 Released

jQuery 1.7 was released today, November 3rd, 2011.

Check out the post on blog.jquery.com for details on the update.

Some highlights:

• New Event APIs: .on and .off
• Better performance on delegated events (almost a 50% improvement)
• Better support for HTML5 in IE (blech, IE)
• AMD (Asynchronous Module Definition, this guy describes AMD well) support (it will work with AMD compliant loaders)
• Added jQuery.isNumeric()

I would love to thank the jQuery team for the regular updates to a platform we all love (don’t we?  leave comments yes or no)

You can use the following CDNs to link / get the code:

• Google CDN:
  Not Live Yet - https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7/jquery.min.js
• Microsoft CDN (Go Microsoft for getting it up so fast!):
  http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.7.min.js
• Official jQuery CDN:
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.js
  http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.7.min.js

Tags: AMD, Google, jQuery, Microsoft

iPhone 4S Battery Life Problems?

A friend of mine just forwarded me an article on iPhone 4S battery life problems.

It’s What’s Really Killing your iPhone 4S Battery? published on Business Insider.

From the article:

Battery performance on the iPhone 4S isn’t quite as good as it was on the iPhone 4.

Some chalk it up to the more power hungry dual-core processor, which makes sense. Kind of.

Read more: http://gizmodo.com/5854193/whats-really-killing-your-iphone-4s-battery#ixzz1c66vAqXB

Some problems brought up were:

1. Corrupt iCloud contacts
2. Apps bugging out, not closing properly
3. Location services (remember, if you have Find my Friends turned on, GPS is always on, location reminders too!)
4. iTunes wi-fi sync.  Technically this should only happen when the phone is plugged in, but it could suck more battery
5. Sending Apple some error reports.

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Tags: battery, business insider, iOS 5, iPhone 4S

Why do I pick the iPhone over Android?

Saw an excellent visual representation with the problem on Android devices at theUnderstatement, Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support.

As a web developer geek, I have a soft spot in my heart for open source.  It’s how software should be developed, and how things should work.  In reality, it’s not the perfect environment it should be.

End users are lazy (I will leave it at that), developer’s aren’t the most user friendly, and developing software is complicated.

These problems are what cause  web developers to have a hard time (even though we have the W3C, and major support for a single version of HTML).  App developers have an even harder time.  iOS developers are in a much better position because of the stability of their platform.  Android app developers have tough competition in terms of getting their apps to work perfectly on all types of devices.  With open source comes extreme complexity in supporting older APIs, older hardware specs, and various manufacture modifications.

The graphic speaks for itself, the creator (Michael DeGusta) did an excellent job illustrating this problem.

All that green next to the iPhone models is why it is a better platform to support as a developer.

How can any startup app developer test every possible device with Android?  I don’t even want to compute the permutations of devices and software versions.

Tags: Adoption, Android, iPhone, Michael DeGusta, Support, theunderstatement

Google Analytics: Real Time analytics Support

As of this morning, Google Analytics has been updated to provide FREE real time analytics.  This is the biggest thing that has happened to Google Analytics since it was released.

To access the new feature, you must be using the “New Version”:

1. Click “New Version” in the top right corner (if it says “Old Version” as a link, you are using the new version)

Then, once you log out, and log back in to the New Version:

1. Access your profile
2. Click on “Home” in the top nav
3. Click “Real-Time (BETA)” in the top left nav
4. Real time reporting!

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Tags: Analytics, Google, Google Analytics

Google Chrome 15

Google released Google Chrome version 15.

The only real change, is the addition of a New Tab page.

At the bottom of your New Tab page you’ll see some “bars” (not sure what the official name is yet).  By default it’s split into two options, “Most Visited” and “Apps”.

You can drag apps / websites to create new tabs.  If you want to rename a new tab you double click on the tab and you can give it a name.

The release coincides with an update to the Google App Store.

Here’s a video showing the new features:

Tags: Browsers, Chrome, Google, Google App Store

iPhone 4S: How’d Apple Make that Site?

Apple has a pretty cool web page for the iPhone 4S.  It’s not something you would expect to see on a web site.

When I first saw it, I had assumed they were all separate images being animated one at a time.  I know it had to be CSS3 doing the transitions, but didn’t realize quite how elegant the solution was.

@johnbhall does a great job illustrating Apple’s approach to making the site we see on the iPhone 4S page.  His example simplifies Apple’s approach a bit (imagine his example, but with multiple sprite images, one for phones, one for copy).

UPDATE

I took the original article creator at his word, but some things didn’t add up.

@johnbhall says that his example is jsut a demo, but he has the concept behind the iPhone 4S page entirely wrong.

How do I know?  It’s pretty easy…

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Tags: Apple, css3, HTML5, iPhone 4S, johnbhall

iOS 5: How to make a free custom Ringtone and Text tone

Tags: iOS, iOS 5, iPhone, ringtone, text tone