5 Essential Firefox Plugins for Web Developers March 13, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Drupal, Reviews, Browsers, Standards, Web Sites, PopSci, Programming , add a commentSince I have a new job, I had to sit down at a fresh installation of Windows today and get my machine developer-ready. I already miss the Dock and Transmit and the Terminal, but I’ll deal.
One thing I noticed was my reflex-like action to go download 4 plugins no web developer should be without. They are, in no particular order:
- Measure It! How wide is that sidebar? Don’t pull out the DOM inspector or Firebug, just MeasureIt! I also like that once you drag the box it persists on the screen and you can drag it around to compare measurements.
- ColorZilla Sample any color in your browser - don’t open Photoshop, just hover over a color you like and voila! Also generates Photoshop pelletes, but I don’t open Photoshop, so I don’t use that feature.
- FireBug I can’t actually tell you how awesome this is. Being able to see the http response of every file that was loaded and how long each file took to load is already a killer app, not to mention dead-simple editing of any markup, CSS or JavaScript on your page, and being able to execute JavaScript on a live website without having to open any windows.
- Web Developer Toolbar My #1 used feature is the Resize menu. So many pages break my window from being exactly 1024 wide, and I also want to check things out at 800 wide as well. This just feeds the my OCD streak and lets me get on without worrying.
- Honorable mention: FasterFox This wasn’t on my list, but it is now, if only for the nifty little timer in the bottom-right-hand corner of the browser that tells you how long it took for the page to load.
These don’t include any of my plugins for personal productivity, web browsing, media sharing, or Search Engine Optimization. Instead, these are 5 plugins I think should come pre-installed on every developer’s machine.
Also, if you’re doing Drupal development, I hear very good things about this Theme Developer Module for Drupal 6. I’m not using 6 on any production sites yet, but I think it will prevent you from having to open up TextMate and do a “Find in Project”.
Leave your favorite development plugins, or other kinds below.
iPhone Web Clip Favicon Fun! January 28, 2008
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, HowTo, Drupal, Browsers, Trends, Design, Web Sites, interface, Branding, phone, Petentials , 1 comment so farIf you have a web page of any kind - blog, business, social network, whatever - take 3 minutes out of your day and hook this up.
Everyone has a fun little 16×16 favicon to sit in the bookmarks section, links bar, or tabs of their favorite browser (Flock, Songbird and Firefox come to mind). This has been a long-running tradition with webmasters and SEO companies to give you that last bit of branding: the favicon!
Now with mobile devices and desktop apps (rich internet applications, too?) getting into the mix, there is a need for favicons larger than squint. Enter, the apple-touch-icon and associated rel tag, which is even easier to implement than a favicon. No special file formats, no special programs needed. Instead of a screenshot of the web page, you now have a degree of control over a bookmarker’s (webclipper’s? that sounds nice) touchscreen.
All you have to do is name the thing apple-touch-icon.png and throw it in your document root. According to the primary vivid, it should be 57×57px, but that’s actually the rendered size and not likely the size Apple uses internally. If you go to http://apple.com/apple-touch-icon.png, theirs is a nice round 129×129, which is roughly 2 1/4 times larger than 57×57. I figure Apple must know something we don’t, so I’ll play along.
And now, a handy diagram to show you what’s up:
Favicon
16×16Apple Touch Icon
57×57Apple’s Official Icon
129×129
Once you get your image loaded, borrow the boss’ iPhone and add the webclip to your home page. There is also a preview screen that lets you know instantly if your icon is working (not pictured).
The iPhone even added a nice glossy, buttony finish to the experience. Ahhhhhh…! You’ll also notice the edges of your icon may get trimmed (which caused the boss to make a face). This is, as far as I know, normal. If you don’t want the boss to make a face, center the icon and leave some extra space around. Using the Apple example may be a helpful guide.
Last but not least, you may be wondering: “Why do I have to name my icon something so specific, and why do I have to use the document root?” Looks like you don’t. Again our friends at vjarmy.com tell us that there is a rel-tag we can throw in the header if we want to place the icon elsewhere:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/path/to/my-cool-icon.png" />
If you don’t want to use a .PNG, you have smelly feet, but if you’re OK with being known as the smelly foot man, by all means, don’t use the best web picture format. I also had to dissuade my boss from experimenting with transparency in the .PNG, because I’m quite afraid of the results. Imagine a person with a naked woman on their iPhone desktop; now imagine your company’s logo displayed distastefully close to (or on top of) an unmentionable portion of said woman’s body - with a transparent background! Yikes. I would feel very sorry for Six Apart on that day…
I find the apple-touch-icon tag to be a scoche proprietary for my taste, but so are iTunes tags in podcast RSS feeds, so I guess we must needs put up with a little bullcrap every now and then.
I also heard someone recently complain about sites that have a default iPhone interface, and I mostly agree. They should put the interface on a subdomain so you can get at the regular functionality of the site, but I believe a truly useful service should be user-friendly through multiple interfaces, and traditional web apps are not always suited to touch screens.
If you have any questions (or if I forgot something) buy all means, let me know.
I am also hoping to make a small and fun Drupal module that encourages you to upload a 129×129 image to use as your site’s official webclip instead of a screenshot, so be on the lookout for that. Would you like to see other iPhone-friendly features integrated, like style sheet includes, javascripts, etc? I’d love to know.
Flock and Facebook Screencast November 21, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Podcasts, Music, HowTo, Video, Browsers, Trends, Web Sites, mashups, Facebook, interface, Teaching, Friends , add a comment
The new Flock is out and better than ever, so I’m inspired yet again to screencast about it and show you more about this browser. In this edition we talk about how Flock has integrated your Facebook friends (and Flickr, MySpace, YouTube) right into the sidebar. You can keep the People bar open while you surf the web and make updates to your status, write messages, subscribe to media and share with your friends with just a simple drag-and-drop. This is the version of Flock you’ve been waiting for, trust me.
Download the Screencast (iPhone friendly!)
If you want to see anything else demonstrated, like if you want to teach your boss how to upload YouTube videos, I would be happy to create something custom for you. We do dedications!
Flock Blogging with Photos September 14, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Podcasts, HowTo, Events, Video, Browsers, Fringe, MySpace, Liberatr, Web Sites, photos, interface, Teaching , 1 comment so farPart II, Electric Boogaloo!
This screencast demonstrates how to use Flickr photosharing and the Flock browser to add photos to a WordPress blog (or any blog or web page, really). Flock makes it dead-simple to upload, tag, and post photos. You can probably download the browser, sign up for Flickr and post photos to you blog faster than you can watch this video (about 7 minutes). Let me know what you think or if there are any tough spots.
Download the Screencast (in stunning 480×320 optimized for iPhone!)
There was a time when I was thinking of doing lots of screencasts and trying to build a whole site around it. Mike G of CFPHP and I were talking about something along these lines today - he’s the reason why you have an iPod-sized ‘cast. If you want to see anything else demonstrated, like if you want to teach your boss how to subscribe to RSS feeds, I would be happy to oblige. I am just sort of doing these as they come up until we come up with some cirricula.
Miro is stepping it up September 5, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Music, Quotes, Video, Reviews, TV, Browsers, Trends, itunes, open source, Miro, Songbird , 1 comment so farMiro player (formerly Democracy) is an internet TV application that works on a subscribe and download model. Some would call it a podcatcher. Others would say it’s ready to leave the other podcatchers in the dust.
Why would I say such things about a project that’s been around for so long? Because they changed their name and branding? Because they’re doing some nice user-friendly screencasts? Because of bittorrent support? No. Well, maybe bittorrent. But that’s not what I mean. Check this list of recent updates:
From the Miro Blog:
# OPML import and export allows lists of channels to be shared.
# The Windows Options panel has been reorganized into pretty tabs.
# Miro will return to the last place visited in the Miro Guide when you click away and return.
# If you add an alternate channel guide, Miro will display the name and icon for that site.
# Single file downloads are now supported.
# Mefeedia, Yahoo! and Yahoo! Video are added as search engines.
# Veoh has been temporarily removed due to compatibility problems.
OPML import and export allows lists of channels to be shared. Also, notice where it says an alternate channel guide… I’m not sure what that’s all about, but it sounds cool.
Why is OPML cool? Well, OPML is a way of describing a list, or a list of lists. Feeds are lists. I can make a list of all the feeds I’m watching (we are talking video here) and then share it with a friend. Or anyone who reads my blog. Or my pownce friends. Or people using the Share my OPML site, or even people on the NetVibes Ecosystem. How cool is that? You can’t do that in iTunes. Can’t.
Alternate Channel Guide? The CG is the screen that loads when you first start up Miro (Democracy). Here’s what the Miro blog has to say about new channel guides:
Use the Channels -> Add Channel Guide menu to add the likes of blip.tv, mefeedia and even digg. You can browse for videos and feeds. With the blip.tv subscribe button, you can add a channel directly into Miro.
You can’t do that in iTunes. I give iTunes a lot of credit for being the best (easiest to use) podcatcher out there, but combining Miro and a great audio browser like Songbird, you can duplicate and outgrow all the features of iTunes (especially since Songbird has a pluggable interface like Firefox) without having to use a proprietary system like iTunes, because these two systems are open-source. Now you can get your music and video from anywhere, even iTunes in the case of Songbird, and enjoy it alongside the best content streamed from around the web.
More OpenLaszlo August 28, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Links, Video, Browsers, Trends, Standards, OpenLaszlo , add a comment“Some conference that wants to sell me stuff” has a webcasted talk by David Temkin, Founder and CTO of the Laszlo corporation. For a majority of the time, he talks about why they chose to develop the Laszlo Webtop. It is a philosophy, and like all great arguments in computing, it comes down to philosophy, not technology.
I found said webcast after reading about it on Antun’s Blog, and he found me after my “really positive post” last week.
All this webtop vs. desktop is actually really interesting. I think some remarkable points from David’s talk are:
- Desktop makes it really hard to share data between more than one machine. I would add especially if they’re not on the same LAN/WAN.
- The fundamental GUI for desktops hasn’t changed at all in 20 years. This point is so much a part of the fabric of the desktop experience that it will take years to turn over.
- Downloadable and local apps with web enablement are something cool, but phishers and virus makers have forced us to be untrusting of anything we have to download. Even Apollo has warnings for installing 3rd party apps.
- There are still certain apps we need a full-fledged desktop for, like CD/DVD playing, ripping, burning. If we gave that functionality to the browser (with proper permisssion, of course), desktop apps could be replaced by web apps.
- Some enterprises are installing full-fledged versions of their intranet/portal/CRM on every employees laptop so they always have a full working copy of the app. This happens because business logic is not currently transportable in downloadable apps. Yes, not even with Apollo.
I guess I just summarized the whole thing for you, and you don’t really need to watch it any longer, but he says a lot more that I felt like I knew, and maybe you guys don’t know. Check out Antun’s Blog for info about how to access the webcast (you need to give them your name/email), then watch and learn.
Forget Flex, Go OpenLaszlo August 24, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Links, Video, Wikipedia, Reviews, Browsers, Trends, Standards, interface, OpenLaszlo, flash , 3 commentsNote: Mike G. from Central Florida PHP is giving a talk about Flex this Saturday at DeVry @ Millenia.
A good friend of mine, Jake, recently visited Orlando raving about Adobe’s Flex, and how it was going to make Flash development for people who think in HTML and Object-Oriented programming much simpler and faster. I went looking into Flex and discovered OpenLaszlo. Laszlo used to be a Flash-only framework, but it can now publish DHTML just as easily, and with a few added bonuses you don’t get with Flash, like including an iFrame.
After watching the OpenLaszlo 4 Programming Tutorial Screencast, I’m convinced that Laszlo is more capable than Flex, and there is less proprietary code to learn since you use Javascript instead of Actionscript. It’s all ECMA, XML and xPath, so I guess at some point it becomes 6 vs. a half dozen, but I will mention one small caveat: iPhone compatible. Oh yes, I’ve seen the first iPhone app in Laszlo, and it’s pretty and touch-screen happy. (I think it goes without saying that if it works on iPhone, it can work with all major browsers)
Am I raving? I’m not allowed to rave, because I haven’t tried both systems, but from where I’m sitting this is another situation where an equal amount of training and no expensive development tools are going to get your job done in the same amount of time, and end up being more flexible, easily extended and powerful. You can convince any boss of that if you’ve got all the information.
Under the hood from Wikipedia:
Laszlo applications can be deployed as traditional Java servlets, which are compiled and returned to the browser dynamically. This method requires that the web server be running the OpenLaszlo server.
Alternatively, Laszlo applications can be compiled from LZX into a binary SWF file, and loaded statically into an existing web page. This method is known as SOLO deployment. Applications deployed in the manner lack some functionality of servlet-contained files, such as the ability to consume SOAP web services and XML remote procedure calls.
Hear that? Static! One score for Flex is the ability to run as a desktop app (using AIR/Apollo), but that requires a download, and that’s a no-no on the internet.
Do you know Pandora uses Laszlo? That’s a pretty app, and yes it runs in Flash, but I bet it doesn’t have to. The Behr ColorSmart app is pretty nice too, and no hand-keyframed Flash? Love it. Wikipedia says Yahoo!, Earthlink and the Internet Archive are known to use Laszlo as well. I like those websites too.
Last but not least, it’s open source! Published under IBM’s Common Public License, which is a less-lawsuit inspiring type of GPL. Flex is supposed to be published under the Mozilla licensing, but that version is still in beta. Laszlo has been open source for 3 years now. Eat it, Adobe. I’m not giving you guys another penny.
I’ll be very proud to integrate some Laszlo apps into Petentials, which is built entirely on open source software - Drupal, PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux.
Blogging From Mylo January 18, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Reviews, Browsers, Trends , add a commentI wonder how easy it is to blog from my new toy… The “killer apps” on this thing are really Skype, IM and musc/movies, but the web browsing was very necessary. Without it, something would be missing. The keys are relly too small for anything more than a quick text, but cest la vie.
I have to push <func> + enter to make a new line… who knew? You also learn the valuue of punctuation and the 102-key qwerty keyboard when you have them taken from you!
WTF Maxcast? January 17, 2007
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Site News, Orlando, Links, Video, Reviews, Browsers, Trends, Standards, Web Sites , 7 commentsSomebody was surfing the boards and user profiles over at Meetup.com looking for go-getters to invite to a seminar about ‘monopoly’ this weekend in Orlando. The link in my email pointed to a page on Maxcast.com.
Here’s the deal: in order to use this revolutionary industry-changing service you have to install a plugin… WRONG! Seriously, the second I see plugin, you had better have “Britney’s Hoo-Ha” (to quote Alex Rudloff) on the other end if I am going to install something. Plugins slow down my browser, I don’t like too many. USE FLASH PLAYER like everyone else.
You can’t even watch the demo without installing the plugin! No flash, no quicktime, no WMV, not even RealPlayer! Even crappy realplayer would be better than a proprietary maxcast player.
Here’s a reason to like HelloWorld, a service my friend Jason is selling. It works with your existing hardware and software. I haven’t used it, but sometime soon I will be posting a Scoble-style video I recorded with Jason demonstrating the service. This is going on Charlie and Ryan’s someday-to-be-announced Inside Orlando video show. The show definitely has a Scoble feel to it, but instead of Silicon Valley, we are going all Central Florida and CFL expats (some people started out here but moved on).
Is that officially too many shows? Maybe. Charlie was also telling me about possibly doing a real estate show with Bill Ferrante from Florida Creatives… I bet John Rife would be on top of that too. Ah well, you all probably stopped reading this post long ago.
I didn’t install that plugin, and I never plan to either.
Thinking of Mylo November 27, 2006
Posted by Ryan in : Tech, Blogging, Music, Links, Video, Reviews, Shopping, Browsers, Trends , add a comment
Day after Thanksgiving I went down to the Millenia Mall to prove that I’m not afraid of Black Friday shopping (but I must say the perpetual line around the corner at Starbuck’s was a bit unsettling). In the tech wing (seriously, there is an import gadget store, a Sharper Image and SonyStyle all in a row) I came across the awesome Nokia N93 for $999 and something I didn’t think I would like: the Sony Mylo. I haven’t bought one yet, but it is on my Christmas list.
The Mylo is a personal communicator, meaning it does a lot of stuff hip phones do without actually being a phone. Using WiFi for connectivity, you can surf the web with a real Opera web browser, IM with Yahoo or Google, and the big sell in my eyes — Skype. Since I know people who live in England, I want to call them without paying international calling rates. I can also see this as a cell phone replacement in the home or office on top of the on-the-go abilities. Considering Skype WiFi handsets retail between $189 and $299, the Mylo at $349 is not bad when you think about all the extra functionality it has, and the big surprise…
OK, here’s the skinny: until the end of the year, Mylo units bought from Sony include a free year of T-Mobile HotSpot access! I mean, that’s a $30-a-month service if you agree to a year, so this unit pays for itself even after you consider taxes. Did I mention this thing plays movies and music off of memory sticks too? It comes with 1GB of flash, and you can add a memory stick up to 8GB, meaning 9GB of space. That is plenty for video podcasts and a couple of TV shows, which is what I would use it for.
If public buses or subways had wifi, this device would be great for commuters. A little chat, some music, some light blogging, maybe the morning news, and if the bandwidth is good, a Skype call or two, all without paying a greddy cell phone company. Amazing!
The downsides: No camera, which I think is a major lacking feature from this unit and the PSP (and just about any other device). I don’t have a camera that uses memory stick, so my next camera will need to be a Sony, which I guess is a long term buy-in on my part. Also, the device is designed to work with Windows, not Mac, but I’m not that worried. We have Smart Folders and a healthy community of developers working hard on all the little things that make it more fun to own a Mac.
I can’t stress enough the value of the free year of wifi at every Starbuck’s, Borders, countless hotels, and most of the airports in Florida. The T-Mobile HotSpot deal is the the last straw for me. I just hope this device still exists in a year, and the next version comes with a camera. Please?
