December 2007
61 posts
Tzi Software: AutoRate →
Freeware (Mac): Automatically assigns ratings to songs in iTunes based on play count and skip count
Senuti - Download →
Freeware (mac): suck songs off your and others’ iPods
DockArt →
Freeware (mac): use the current album art as the iTunes dock icon
You Control: Tunes – Control and access your... →
Freeware (Mac): adds buttons to control iTunes to the menu bar
Feature: The 23 Best iTunes Add-ons →
So How Do You Set The Last-Modified Header? →
What happens you want to set the Last-Modified HTTP header and all you have is a UTC date? Most likely you’ll get an exception. The culprit here is the sloppily designed interface of HttpCachePolicy. It so happens that you should pass to the SetLastModified a non-UTC date because here’s what happens inside the method: public void SetLastModified (DateTime date)
{ DateTime utcDate =...
Greg Houston Design » Blog Archive » Arranging... →
Amazon SimpleDB: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly →
Sometime last week, Amazon soft launched Amazon SimpleDB, a hosted service for storing and querying structured data. This release plugged a hole in their hosted Web services offerings which include the Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Amazon’s goal of becoming the “Web OS” upon which the next generation of Web startups builds upon came off as hollow...
Daring Fireball: Yet Another in the Ongoing Series... →
“Thereâs a lot of stupid packed into the above 13-word sentence.” Go get ‘em, Gruber!
IE8 Passes Acid2 Test, Web Standards Project Dies... →
Although he goes out of its way to downplay the significance of the event, there is no missing the sense of achievement in the words of Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch on the IEBlog today:
I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, December 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.
The Acid2 test was developed by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) as a...
Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone →
As a team, we’ve spent the last year heads down working hard on IE8. Last week, we achieved an important milestone that should interest web developers. IE8 now renders the “Acid2 Face” correctly in IE8 standards mode.
If you’re not a web developer, the details of this blog post probably aren’t all that interesting for you. I’d like you to know that we’re building IE8 for many different...
The Facebook of yore →
Ever wondered who Albert Einstein’s would “poke”, or what Charles Darwin would write on creationists’ “walls” - had such famous characters lived in an era obsessed with social networking sites like Facebook. Even the Facebook phobic would surely be interested to see the underlying social connections between these historical luminaries. Two computer scientists...
Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix →
A pretty matrix showing which fonts are available with which OS and which add-on software to help you construct your font stacks
Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix →
Web pages built in plain old HTML and CSS are displayed using only the fonts installed on users’ computers (@font-face implementations excepted). To enable this, CSS provides the font-family property for specifying fonts in order of preference (often known as a font stack). For example: h1 {font-family: 'Egyptienne F', Cambria, Georgia, serif} So in the above rule, headings will be displayed in...
Design-By-Contract with Spec# →
I was reading Billy McCafferty’s introduction to design-by-contract (DBC) and stumbled upon Spec# which extends C# to support contracts in the form of object invariants, pre- and postconditions, throws sets; non-null types, etc. Microsoft Research has a great intro whitepaper, The Spec# Programming System: An Overview (PDF) which is definitely worth reading if DBC is of any interest to you. Then...
Do we need a return to the browser wars? →
Alex Russell, proprietor of the Dojo JavaScript library, has written a provocative new piece that is so incredibly spot-on, it’s scary. It’s an absolute must-read for any web standards oriented designer. I just wanted the time to highlight a few choice quotes from Alex’s The W3C Cannot Save Us.
In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.
...
Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea →
I’ve been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I’ve been trying to come up with a way more structured way of evaluating them. Here’s a first attempt at defining that. It’s not as clear as I’d like it to be. But perhaps you’ll find it useful. Tractability
Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0? ...
Ext JS - JavaScript Library →
Very interesting v2.0 Javascript Rich Internet Application library based on YUI
DeWitt Clinton: T-Mobile and Twitter →
DeWitt Clinton: T-Mobile and Twitter. “If you think the rest of Internet needs net neutrality laws, that’s nothing compared with the backward-facing worldview of the established mobile carriers.”
New ‘Get a Mac’ Commercials →
The Rankin/Bass-style “Santa Claus” one is great. And if you think about “Misprint”, there’s a subtle branding point that’s emphasized, which is that Hodgman’s PC character represents PC computer hardware, not Windows. It’s a great way to make a complex point in a funny way — that even if you do want to run Vista, you can do it on a Mac and it’ll work well.
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CodeProject: Object oriented JavaScript class... →
Magic voodoo to bring the .NET class library to JavaScript (NB: I need to look into the voodoo to see if it really is voodoo)
Natural Sorting in C# →
Jeff Atwood recently posted about natural sorting. This is all about making sure that strings that contain numbers sort numerically. I’m slightly surprised to see that he wants to call it alphabetical sorting. Surely by definition, alphabetical sorting is defined by, well, the alphabet. This is an issue about numbers, not letters.
Anyway, he says he tried and gave up on a succinct C# version. He...
Sorting for Humans : Natural Sort Order →
The default sort functions in almost every programming language are poorly suited for human consumption. What do I mean by that? Well, consider the difference between sorting filenames in Windows explorer, and sorting those very same filenames via Array.Sort() code:
Explorer shell sort
Array.Sort()
Quite a difference.
I can say without the slightest hint of exaggeration that this...
flot - Google Code →
Flot is a pure Javascript plotting library for jQuery. It produces graphical plots of arbitrary datasets on-the-fly client-side. The focus is on simple usage (all settings are optional), attractive looks and interactive features like zooming.
Nerd Sniping →
The Versatile Button Control » Yahoo! User... →
The YUI button control is capable of rendering many different types of buttons: push buttons, menu buttons, calendar buttons, slider buttons, etc.
Continuing Intermittent Incoherency » Cross Domain... →
Cross-browser, cross-domain Comet technique
Do websites need to look exactly the same in every... →
Nice Web Type →
Gallery of nice typography on the web with an article aggregator
Threadless T-Shirts - The Internet Was Closed...... →
… so I thought I’d come out today
Remove DRM protection from iTunes tracks with... →
A few days back I found myself perusing the iTunes Music Store looking for a few songs that I had heard via Sirius*. After completing the painless process of purchasing the songs, I immediately synced the tracks to my iPhone and went on my merry way. Because I had spent very little none of my time following the DRM vs. DRM-free music download option being offered by Apple, I simply downloaded the...
IE and Standards: Chris Wilson Talks →
Web Directions South gave Kev a chance to meet with Chris Wilson. Here, he grills Chris on Microsoft’s reputation among designers and developers, finds out what’s in store for IE 8, and explores why backwards compatibility matters.
Is it time for a Gmail intervention? →
When Gmail first launched, and people were selling invitations for it on Ebay, it was easy to see why. A vastly faster and more efficient interface coupled with huge storage made for a really significant step in email via the web.
Web designers and tech heads loved it, and in fact all of our Email Standards Project email is accessed via Gmail. However, in one area Gmail has always lagged behind a...
YUI Library Examples: Charts Control... →
YUI Charts supports Flash charts that poll their data source and update in real-ish time. YDN FTW :p
Coding Horror: Hashtables, Pigeonholes, and... →
Discussion of how to assess hashing functions
Great list of Office 2.0 apps →
Ismael Ghalimi has a wonderful list of Office 2.0 apps that he’s using in his daily work (Office 2.0 are apps that you use to improve your work and which go beyond the standard Microsoft Excel/Word/Powerpoint apps that don’t let you easily collaborate with others). Does anyone else have a list that is better? How many apps/categories on this list do YOU use?
By the way, on Monday morning...
Hashtables, Pigeonholes, and Birthdays →
One of the most beloved of all data structures in computer science is the hash table.
A hash table is a data structure that associates keys with values. The primary operation it supports efficiently is a lookup: given a key (e.g. a person’s name), find the corresponding value (e.g. that person’s telephone number). It works by transforming the key using a hash function into a hash,...
Can we have common sense in copyright laws? →
Jeremy Toeman asks for common sense in copyright laws and warns his congresscritter against the PRO IP act: “Common sense tells me that the maximum penalty for transmitting an MP3 file should not be over 1000-fold the maximum penalty of shoplifting a CD from a store.”
We aren’t going to have common sense in this, sorry. The political system is jiggered by those who have money and can pay for...
Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code →
Google Graphing API: Request a chart from Google with the parameters on the Query String for easy peasy charting
Google Chart API →
Google Chart API (via). Really neat charting API from Google—simply encode your chart data and configuration options in to a URL and Google will serve up a nicely rendered PNG. No API key required. It’s like a documented version of the Google Groups rounded corners API.
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and... →
Conversation with Bill Gates about IE8 and Microsoft Transparency. Molly asks the tough questions about IE8—it looks like there should be a lot of IE8 material at MIX08 next year.
OpenID 2.0 Final(ly)! →
OpenID 2.0 Final(ly)!. Launched at the Internet Identity Workshop. The most interesting feature is probably directed identity, which goes a long way to solving some of the usability issues involved in users having to enter their own URLs.
Why is Adobe creating its own web applications?... →
Adobe released several new web applications this year and many more are on the way.
In a relative short timeframe, Adobe acquired an online word processor, created a cool color tool, released a free document sharing tool and announced online versions of Photoshop and Premiere.
Now you might think that this is simply Adobe’s latest attempt to grow the company by entering waters previously...
C# From a Java Developer's Perspective →
Sand Castle →
Sand Castle is a tool being developed by Microsoft to enable Javadoc-style generation of documentation from /// comments
The Hives – Tick Tick Boom →
E rtm give JaneFoth £2.75 tomorrow
Just got caught staring at some chav from the bus. Hate that guilty feeling…
Deutsche Telekom Wins Ruling in IPhone Sales... →
Deutsche Telekom Wins Ruling in IPhone Sales Dispute — Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Deutsche Telekom AG, Europe’s largest telephone company, can block buyers of Apple Inc.’s iPhone from using the handset on competitors’ networks, a German court ruled, overturning an injunction won by Vodafone Group Plc.
Source: Bloomberg
Link: ...
First Nationwide Business Sign Up! →
You will have to forgive us, at the moment we are finding everything regarding our nationwide launch exciting! We have just received our first nationwide business sign up, and it is a pretty special business at that! The St Fagan’s National History Museum in Cardiff was not only our first business to sign up outside of London, but they were also our first Museum to take control of their listing!
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