Flash 10.1: Developing for Desktop and Device

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Yesterday Adobe made the beta of its new Flash 10.1 player available for desktop testing via Adobe Labs. The fact that it’s only a point release suggests that it’s a relatively trivial update but that’s not the case. In fact 10.1 is one of the most significant releases in the history of Flash.

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Typekit brings print-like typography to the web

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The website is among the most iconic technologies of the 21st Century but, as any web designer will testify, the typographical capabilities of modern web browsers are stuck firmly in the 1990s. In essence, if you want your fonts to appear broadly the same in all browsers, you’re limited to a selection of around a dozen viable fonts . Over the past few years a number of workarounds have been developed, the most notable and widespread being sIFR, a Flash technology that involves embedding the fonts in a SWF. Widespread but hardly ideal.

In principle, salvation is at hand with the almost complete adoption of the CSS @font-face property by modern browsers. This makes it possible to download a font stored on your server into the user’s browser. Theoretically, this solves the entire problem but, in practice, copyright issues mean that even free fonts cannot be used legally in that way. This may change over time but, in the meantime, web startup Small Batch has developed an ingenious solution called Typekit. (more…)

phpDesigner7: the best PHP editor just got better

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I’ve been using phpDesigner6 for over a year now and it’s become by far my favourite web development environment. Less bloated and more fleet-footed than Zend Studio, more robust (for me at least) than PhpEd and cheaper than both, phpDesigner is just as comfortable editing HTML and CSS as PHP and is reassuringly devoid of a drag and drop GUI.

Developer MPSoftware has now released phpDesigner7 which adds intelligent JavaScript editing to the mix. Not only do you get the obligatory syntax highlighting and code completion but this extends also to a range of the most popular JavaScript frameworks/libraries. These include jQuery, Dojo and Prototype but not, at present, the BBC’s Glow library. The net result of this is that code suggestion works not just for native JavaScript commands and functions but also the custom classes included in these frameworks: and it achieves this “out of the box” with no additional configuration. (more…)

The HTC Magic and Google Android: a Real World test

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Perhaps I’m a luddite but my mobile phones have tended to be, well, pretty basic since my first, screen-less brick 13 years ago. My priorities had been limited to good signal quality, long battery life, the best possible camera and easy-to-use texting. Occasionally, I’d look up the football or cricket scores on the BBC’s mobile site but that was about the limit of my ambitions.  The BlackBerry passed me by completely (I don’t like phones with QWERTY keyboards) and I’d had little interest in the iPhone due to its long, expensive contract options and umbilical connection to the truly loathsome (on a PC at least) iTunes.

And then I found myself tempted by the Apple beast just because I’d come across some teenagers mucking about with theirs, leaving me feeling jealous and inadequate (shallow, me?). So I nearly gave in. But I just couldn’t justify it. I’d either have to pay the best part of £100 for the phone (pay? for a phone?) or saddle myself with a £45 a month contract for two years: that’s an expensive and long-lived mistake to make. (more…)

FreeAgent Accounting software: a year in the life

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

It seems to me that there’s only any point commenting on Accounts software once you’ve been using it for a year. Well, just over a year ago, I made the switch from Sage to FreeAgent in the desperate hope that I might find something less labyrinthine, easier to understand and, perchance, actually useful on a day to day basis.

When I set my main business up in 1999 there was really only one choice for accounting software: Sage and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was still the case given their marketing budget and visibility.

The consequences of choosing Sage were that I needed to employ someone specifically to use that one piece of software and that I got very little use out of it because I would have needed to buy an extra licence to view the information. I confess that I experienced many instances of “Sage Rage” as every useful feature (such as my being able to share my book-keeper’s information) involved an extra licence at huge expense. In my view, Sage abuses its position as the de-facto standard but, having now used an online service, I will never go back to any desktop software, least of all Sage. (more…)