May 06th, 2008
Since I gave some dap to IE for getting a developer toolkit embedded into Internet Explorer 8, I feel like I should also give kudos to Opera for releasing the top-secret and closely guarded Dragonfly. Opera annoyed the hell out of me at SxSW when they devoted an entire booth to promoting “Dragonfly”, but refused to tell me anything about it.
I’ve only had a quick look of it, but it does look like a pretty slick tool. The main problem I see for them here, is that they are fourth in the market (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) and fourth to get a developer toolkit. Its hard to work from a position of weakness like that. I hope they prove me wrong, since competition is always good for what we do, and I have to say, I’ve always had a soft spot for Opera.
If you have the chance to play, please leave comments with what you think of it! How does it compare to Firebug? How does it compare to IE?
Continue reading “Opera DragonFly released”. Posted in
Browsers with 5 comments 
May 06th, 2008
Ever get so wrapped up in your work that you forgot to eat? I found an alternate source of sustenance. My cat.
Continue reading “Stupid pet tricks”. Posted in
Personal with 4 comments
May 05th, 2008
Well, I was greeted pleasantly by my RSS feeds today, it seems that the jQuery User Interface project has officially released.
This is great news, and I have to say (I’ve been using the UI components in beta) that they are brilliantly done.
Continue reading “jQuery User Interface is officially out”. Posted in
Javascript with 7 comments
May 04th, 2008
I was thrilled to see that there was an update yesterday to the CodeIgniter Textmate bundle for CI 1.6. If you use Textmate or E-Texteditor (Windows) then download it and give it a shot. Nice work… thanks, I’m using it right now!
A few other little utilities I’ve been getting a lot of use out of recently. The first is the excellent clipboard utility Jumpcut. It keep track of the last 10 (that’s configurable) things that you’ve copied and makes them available to you.
There are also handy keyboard shortcuts to get at it. Normally not super-useful, but I’ve been doing a lot of work that has needed me to copy and paste language keys, and this let’s me buffer up a whole page worth of
$this->lang->line('something');
and paste it all at once. Sure faster then copy > flip page > paste > flip back > copy > flip page > paste > repeat again and again. Its also open sourced under the MIT License.
Another great little tool I’ve discovered recently is for my mouse. I’m one of those guys that needs and uses the 4th and 5th buttons on my mouse. The left I use for copying, and the right for paste (see a pattern here), but in Leopard, those buttons default to… jeez I don’t remember… Expose I think. Reconfiguring them was a bit of a pain. Fortunately, I found the excellent USB Overdrive, which you can use to re-program your mouse buttons. Aside from having what might be the ugliest website I’ve seen this year, the little shareware application has been fantastic, and is well worth plunking down my $20 for it (although to be clear, the downloaded version is 100% functional and remains so).
On the topic, other little known utilities that I love include caffeine (temporarily prevent your computer from sleeping) and AppDelete (gets rid of stray files when deleting a program). That’s hardly an exhaustive list… just 2 little quickies for anyone reading this ;)
Continue reading “CodeIgniter textmate bundle and other stuff that’s saving me time”. Posted in
with 4 comments
April 30th, 2008
- Rickrolling is funny when its unexpected. If every freakin' link you send me is a link to youtube
I'm going to stop thinking its funny I stopped thinking it was funny after the second time you did it.
- "It doesn't work" is not a valid request for help.
- Having the solution in front of you, and then rebuilding it is much easier then building something from scratch. When you see a new feature or change in your favourite software, try not to look at the result and think to yourself "that was easy". Definitely don't contact the author of said change and tell him it was easy. That's just "bad form"©.
- Would somebody from Rogers please come clean and admit that the real reason they want me to switch to e-billing has absolutely nothing to do with the environment? Over the years I've requested (in writing) they stop sending me so much crap many times. How many companies tell us to "consume more because its good for the environment"? Blah.
- In the vein of real environmentally conscious companies, let me just say that I've been thrilled with Bullfrog Power since the first day I contacted them. If you're in Ontario or Alberta, switch now - you'll be glad you did.
- Telling someone who's trying to help you with something that they are "selfish" because they won't log into your server and do your work for you is dumb.
- Webhosts who tell their customers that they've been "hacked" but offer no explanation, evidence, or logs are irresponsible bordering on criminal. Get yourself a real webhost if you've heard this before.
:: deep sigh of relief ::
I feel better now... ;)
Continue reading “Mr. Grumpy Pants”. Posted in
Personal with 6 comments
April 24th, 2008
I’ve been saying for a little while now that I’ve fallen in love with jQuery, and I mean, who hasn’t? I’m so impressed with it, and so are the other smart people at EllisLab, that we’re integrating it into CodeIgniter, and into ExpressionEngine. But this blog still doesn’t use it. If you poke into the source code, you’ll see Mootools.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/js/mootools.js"></script>
So I’ve been wanting to migrate my own code to recently out of Moo, and into jQuery. This will let me do a few things, not the least of which is apply the CI jQuery library in another real-world test case. So why haven’t I moved it yet? Well, a quick audit of my code, and the only thing I’m using Moo for is the fancy lightbox effect on my about page, and several posts. It actually is Slimbox, a clone of Lokesh Dhakar’s excellent (and popular) Lightbox. So the short answer, is that I didn’t want to migrate the legacy code.
Then it dawned on me, my code is all semantic and clean, there’s no javascript hooks, the only markup used to implement lightbox is
<a rel="lightbox" href="something">...</a>
so it should be an easy replacement. Then yesterday, (via Ed Finkler’s Funkatron), I found the jQuery Lightbox plugin. How is it that I only just yesterday found this?
A quick look, and it seems to be solidly written, the semantics are the same, and it should be (apologies to Ron Popeil) the “set it and forget it” solution I’ve been looking for.
So in the next few days, the plan is to migrate DerekAllard.com to jQuery, and start adding a bit more sexiness into the robot.
Next post: my favourite jQuery plugins ;)
Continue reading “jQuery on DerekAllard.com”. Posted in
Javascript, Noteworthy with 12 comments
April 16th, 2008
I’ve wrote about my 2008 South by Southwest experiences earlier, but try as I might, one of the things I just couldn’t capture was the fun and excitement I felt when we gave our presentation. For my part, I got to chat for 10 minutes about CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine, and the communities, and future plans. It was a blast. Kind of like being secret agent revealing stolen plans ;)
After SxSW, I wrote up a blog entry for EllisLab called ExpressionEngine 2.0, fully CodeIgnited, where I tried to outline (on a professional level) all the cool s**t we had in store, and (on a personal level) how excited I was. That excitement part… yeah, didn’t come through. So today I leared that Andru (Dru) Edwards posted the video that he made during one of the presentations. Pure Awesome.
If you want to learn a bit about the future of ExpressionEngine, CodeIgniter, and our plans as a company for opensource, ecommerce, and all points in between, then take the time to watch it at http://video.gearlive.com/video/article/q208-bleeding-edge-tv-expressionengine-20-sneak-preview/.
I hope it captures a little bit of the excitement I get to feel every day.
Continue reading “Video of the ExpressionEngine talk at South by Southwest”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine with 8 comments
April 13th, 2008
So, I just spent the last hour getting a screencast built to show how you can start using ExpressionEngine on your site now, even if you don’t “know” ExpressinEngine yet. Good times. Used Screenflow, had a sexy little video thing going… and then realized that I recorded the blasted thing nearly fullscreen on my computer (it’s a 24inch iMac). I tried to scale it down so that it would fit onto 1 screen for most people, but then so much detail got lost that it looked like crap.
How frustrating.
So I’ll re-build it at some point in the near future, and for now, you can admire all my hard work in static, useless, image form ;)
Continue reading “failed screencast”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, How-To with 11 comments
April 09th, 2008
Just like the title says, BambooInvoice 0.8.4 is “out the door”. I’ve upgraded all the application queries to take advantage of the new CodeIgniter Active Record improvements, and squashed a lot of bugs on the way. The changelog is pretty small, but a lot of work went into it.
As I wrote a few days ago about the future of BambooInvoice I think this reduces any lingering bugs down to about none. I’ve also introduced a few additional error catches, and I’ve tried to make a few error messages more helpful. The next version of Bamboo will focus on finishing off features that I want to see, and will probably be a full point update (0.9) and then the real work starts, with what will amount to a code overhaul. That stuff won’t happen until at least summer, but if you are an “end user” you probably wouldn’t ever notice it anyhow. It’ll be “under the hood” type stuff that programmers obsess with ;)
If you have any specific features you want to see, by all means please comment!
Continue reading “BambooInvoice 0.84 released”. Posted in
BambooInvoice with 6 comments
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