Monthly Archive for September, 2009

Cool text editor plugin

Published on September 23, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I love this zen coding plugin that expands css classifiers into html template text. Fantastic idea.

So you type this:

div#name.one.two

And the plugin expands to this

<div id="name" class="one two"></div>

Now I just need to find someone write the plugin for Notepad++, VS2008 or jEdit.

Where does the mobile internet live?

Published on September 23, 2009. 0 Comments

Interesting post on where the mobile internet lives over on the blog for the guys from 5th Finger International.

Funny point about the .mobi domain hardly being used at all. I personally disagree with segregating mobile content sites out. I hate to use the ‘C‘ word again, but so far as internet publishing is concerned, it’s all about Convergence.

And don’t get me started on all these iPhone specific sites. Wrong, wrong, wrong !!!

It’s like we didn’t learn from all the “Made for Internet Explorer” debacles over a decade ago. Sites targeted to a specific browser are wrong, I don’t care how sexy the concept seems now. We’ve already been down this road for the PC and it took us many, many years before we got to a point where the web was generally consumable by anyone on any PC browser.

I’m all for segmenting the mobile experience into down-level vs. up-level rendering, but this latest trend of going down-level vs. iPhone is the work of the devil I tell yah. Can’t we just skip all the teething problems that internet development went through over the last 10 years and jump straight into mobile web at the same maturity level as we are for PC?

Disclaimers:

  1. I own an iPhone and have hated it as a phone pretty much since I got it. (It’s a great convergence device though)
  2. In my role at ninemsn I head up the developer team for the Australian arm of 5th Finger.

Outlook add-in new explorer hook bug

Published on September 22, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Found this over on Noam Lampert’s blog, originally form monologue.

I remember running into this bug when writing a rather trivial outlook add-in that registered a toolbar on all new explorers. At the time I was so far under time pressure that I just caved and changed the toolbar installer to install it on all toolbars by default (worked around the bug). I didn’t think that it might be a garbage collection issue. Good spot by Noam and co.

Short version: Any new explorer callbacks will get garbage collected unless you actually create an explicit reference to the Application.Explorers that you manage in your add-in.

So you would replace this:

Application.Explorers.NewExplorer += new ExplorersEvents_NewExplorerEventHandler(Explorers_NewExplorer);

with this:

Explorers explorers = Application.Explorers;
explorers.NewExplorer += new ExplorersEvents_NewExplorerEventHandler(Explorers_NewExplorer);

Microsoft AJAX CDN

Published on September 16, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Over on ScottGu, this announcement about Microsoft setting up a CDN for ASP.Net Agax and jQuery.

Free for commercial and non-commercial use. A great idea for sites that heavily use jQuery or ASP.Net Ajax.

Monotouch for iPhone goes 1.0

Published on September 15, 2009. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

According to miggie, Monotouch for iPhone goes 1.0.

This enables you to use a static version of .Net (actual mono) with native C# bindings of the iPhone API, so no Compact Framework concepts for iPhone just yet. I agree with this decision, since people developing for the iPhone want their apps to look like they were developed for the iPhone.