Joel Nagy .com

Whenever you need your web design to be pixel perfect a nice simple way to check things out is to to use CTRL+ (Mac: APPLE+) in Firefox to zoom in (use “-” for out) and then use the MeasureIt add-on to count the pixels.

Quick, simple and easier than screen capturing and bringing the cap into PhotoShop to examine.

Gaming like it’s 1969 but with a 2009 twist.  OnLive is the new “console” in gaming; everything is done on the server and sent down to your PC or your TV with their own micro console.  It’s quite possible it could work on a netbook one day.

It’s coming full circle again.  Back the 60s we had mainframes that supplied all of the processing to the dumb terminal.  Then the PC age came and all the processing went completely to the PC.  Then the Internet came and with JavaScript and AJAX the processing was split between the browser and the server.  And now OnLive is presenting the possibility of Gaming with processing of the heavy graphics and AI done on the server, and in their case a massive server farm.

They will be offering a micro-console for playing directly on your TV.  I imagine that this micro console code could easily be built into devices that are Internet ready with USB/WiFi support such as TiVo or even the Wii.

They have a beta program which you can sign up for.

I’ve been using TwitterBerry for my BlackBerry Storm, but I don’t quite love it so much as I use more and more desktop and web based apps.  I feel like there are some features that I need, that would make things easier.  So until I have the time to learn the BlackBerry SDK and write my app, I’m going to list out what I think is important and useful.

• Multiple Accounts - (for Corporate and Personal) all tweets from people you follow will be integrated into main list and have capability to have color coding
• Groups - The app will have grouping capabilites (along with automated groupings (such as per account groupings and recent friends etc…) and groups can be accessed by swiping sideways on the list view (also the abiity to hide groups from swiping and only view from group list availble from main menu)
• Tweet Caching - The ability to cache a tweet while you are not able to access a mobile signal
• In-app Flagging - for followup gets added to the “Flagged” automatic Group
• Search tweets of my friends - You know you recall a friend that tweeted about something particular, so search only within those tweets

So this is the start of my “favourite” twitter mobile app.  I’ll add more as I come up with more ideas and wishes.  Let me know what ideas you think are important or ones you think don’t work for you.

UPDATE: Here’s another feature I’d like it to have as well:

• Email tweets or add to social bookmarking service like del.icio.us

I write this post in the hopes that one day IT departments across the planet will wake up and realize the cost effectiveness of upgrading IE 6 to IE 8.  As a web developer I spend about one third to one half of my time when a bug arises (ussually for IE 6 alone) solving the problems of Interent Explorer.  This week alone I needed to code a few simple JavaScript scripts for a new project and each piece of functionality took only a few hours to get the basics in place, but then required about twice as much time getting it to work in IE 6.  Cross Browser functionality is a known task in my line of work, but it can be a nightmare when it comes to IE 6 and it’s outdated functionality.

Internet Explorer 6 came out in 2001 (eight years ago) and IE 7 came out in 2006.  According to Upsdell IE 6 accounts for ~26% of browser usage, this is still unfortunately a large enough user base to warrant developing web sites that are compatible.  MicroSoft still manages to push out security fixes every now and then, and that might be the real culprit of the situation.  If MS simply stated that they would no longer support IE 6 and that the only way to get new security features is to upgrade to IE 7 at least then I think companies would make the switch.  I think that the costs associated with a rollout upgrade are probably cost effective if you think about the time spent dealing with security risks to individual PCs that are vulnerable with IE 6, and you think about the time wasted on simple productivity of users that do not have a browser that was even built when Web 2.0 became a standard.

IE 8 is desgined to be a relatively decent competitor to the existing landscape that now includes Chrome and Safari 4 for the PC. The new version has many features such as their Accelorators and InPrivate browsing that can be very useful, along with tabbed browsing (a novelty of an idea that IE 6 will never support) that enhance the use of the browser as a tool.

So I thought I’d take a stab at using ping.fm to update my Twitter, LinkedIn, del.icio.us, GTalk and Facebook acounts when I post a new blog entry.  I imagine I’ll need to hack my wp-mail.php like I did with TwitterUpdater so that I can still blog from my BlackBerry and have the updates ripple out.

I tested their service from within their own interface and it didn’t update del.icio.us and LinkedIn took about 10 minutes or so to update.  We’ll have to see if it’s working fine from this basic blog post entry.

I notice that a few of people, particularly @davewiner like to go on multi twitting diatribes. Is this a proper use of the Twitter medium? Is it valuable to use a half dozen micro blog entries instead of a single entry that links to a full blog post.  Or possibly a more refined message that gets right to the point in 140 characters or less.  Now I certainly have nothing against Dave or others that twit in this manner, but it is not common amongst the few people I follow. Certainly Twitter was designed to be a status mechanism and this fact is why I see that it isn’t meant for an extended conversation.
Maybe Twitter is different now than when it started.  But I think the 140 limit is important to get users to commit to a single thought that is valuable to their followers.

For a few years now I’ve relied on zoom: 100% as my saving grace for finding lost elements in Internet Explorer.  You see sometimes when you try to position an element on the screen, place a transparent <div> over a Flash object, or do something slighly out of the ordinary, IE will freak out and not display the object, hide it, or drop it to the bottom of z-index order.

Fortunately there’s a solution in the form of a hack called Zoom.  Zoom is a CSS style that allows IE to zoom in on an element.  Typically you don’t need to do this, and oddly enough when you do apply zoom even at the non-zoomed level of 100% it forces Internet Explorer to re-evaluate it’s CSS styling.  So now you can make sure that these lost elements come back to where they are supposed to be.

So when in doubt, use zoom.

<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
	#element{
		zoom: 100%;
	}
</style>
<![endif]-->

Everyone these days is discussing the fall of the newspaper industry.  I haven’t read a newspaper since I delivered them as a kid.  But I do read the New York Times online and still get more of my news from Google News, blogs and even twitter.  The abundance of self picked sources and varying levels of depth will mean that there will not be a loss of content.  But I do see that the level of well thought out stories with researched facts is not what one would expect from a blog. Blogs are very much opinionated and heavily slanted. There is no line of non-biased journalism online.  Is that a good thing? I have to think no, considering that average people believe what they read without considering the source.

We will probably have to wait and see what happens when they all close down, but hopefully enough true resourceful online sources pick up the mantle successfully.

We officially launched a new version of our website for kb.com which is focused on the true core of any company, the people. Sure we have the typical statements about what we do and a portfolio of the work we’ve done, but the bulk of the site is a profile for every employee, here’s mine.  Our team here worked very, very hard to get this up and running.  The whole site is built on MODx as a CMS for the primary reason that it easily allows for pages to be content managed by anyone and rendered as XML, and that it has an extremely easy interface to hand code PHP (with what they call snippets) tp allow for all sorts of dynamic functionality from the server side.  The front end is built with Adobe Flex in combination with jQuery which handles deep-linking, proper autosizing of the page, loading the SWF and all of the tracking.

The site required a lot of digging into MODx to filter and deliver all of the data to Flex.  I made a number of snippets and modified quite a few, especially ListIndexer, to provide XML output that drove the front-end.  In order to populate the site, I also made a number of custom SQL scripts (converted via Regular Expressions from an Excel document) that pushed content into many of the tables.  The hardest part here was populating all of the template variables; which required figuring out the variable mappings.  In the end the site has 6 sitemap files totalling in 400+ URLs all of which are deep-linkable.

I don’t think this site could have been put together without MODx, no other decent (and free opensource) CMS has the capabilites to handle XML output and simple server side scripting access.

The team that helped bring this site together is Ro Pulliam (an amazing Flex freelancer), Anthony Cafaro, Tara Milone, Megan O’Connor, Heather Martin, and Jason McKim.

Last Monday I placed an order with Zappos.com and received the shoes the next day without even upgrading to their expedited shipping.  One of the pairs didn’t fit right so I ordered two more sizes the next day and again received next day shipping.

This is what I call phenominal service.  Zappos’s free shipping, along with free upgrades to faster shipping and 365 days to return items makes Zappos the next best thing to Amazon.com and possibly the next Amazon if they continue to add more product lines to their inventory.

Image by Oliver Ortega Chua via Flickr