There is going to be an Ajax Seminar in New York in March 2006. Registration is now available at AjaxSeminar.com.
Prices are as follows:
Secure your seats now. Don’t miss out on this opportunity.
Popularity: 3%
Ok, Firefox 1.5 was finally released today from Mozilla. Um, I must say that I’m not really impressed. Well, given the types of updates that were made, most people won’t notice a huge difference. There is added support for all sorts of things like SVG, CSS 2, CSS 2, and CSS 3, however most current sites don’t make heavy use of these so we won’t be noticing anything for a while. The Forward and Back buttons have been tweaked for greater response. I personally have not noticed much of a difference. I just hope the thing doesn’t crash like 1.07.
Tabs can not be repositioned by dragging and dropping, with no need for an external extension. Tons of security fixes have been added, which we won’t notice. That is actually a good thing. I feel that they kind of messed up the options interface. It’s all horizontal now. It’s just going to take some time to get used to. There is an auto update feature for updating extensions, themes, and the browser. What’s deferent you ask? It can be set to fully automatic: just download the updates and install whenever available. And the browser update is an actual update as apposed to the “Download the entire Firefox Installation and reinstall”.
All three of these companies have decided to give webmail a “fresh spin”:
Microsoft and Yahoo are poised to make Web-based e-mail more powerful than ever with updates that bring a desktop-style interface to their respective Web mail offerings.
We tested betas (currently invitation-only) of Windows Live Mail and Yahoo Mail, and also looked at an open-source newcomer called Zimbra.
All three apps use an increasingly popular programming technique called Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to improve on standard Web mail and even Google’s Gmail.
Yahoo is adding some keyboard functionality. Control and Shift keys to select multiple messages; PgUP and PgDN to scroll through messages; and they do have an interesting feature where multiple messages can be opened in the same window.
Microsoft is basically making Windows Live Mail into a sort of Hotmail on steroids. It’s basically going to be Outlook from the browser.
Zimbra, although a little rougher (give them a break, they’re new), does look more promising in my view. Check out their online demo here. They’re not into the personal email accounts thing. Their suite is aimed at cooperations and businesses and goes way beyond just email. They can also integrate a company’s own database into this making ordering, for example, painless.
This is where many web developers tend to disagree. We can never seem to settle on a good code editor, ever. I’m going to leave you with a few of my favorites and some that I hate.
First off, I live and die by Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Win/Mac. As a matter of fact, I also use Macromedia Fireworks 8heavily for my web site designs. I just think that they have done a good job and incorporating HTML and CSS together. Especially with version 8.0. But then again, you get what you pay for because it’s going to set you back quite a pretty penny ($399). But it was a good investment for me.
On the other hand we have the Frontpage junkies. I haven’t really looked at Frontpage much since early 2000. I’ve opened up the version that comes with Office XP, but I was not impressed. What I do remember is that back in the day it was horrible. Frontpage used to dump a bunch of Microsoft specific “tags” into the code that it just served to bulk up the final output. There is the small advance of using Frontpage Extensions, which enable things like site counters and other things (sorry, I really haven’t been looking into it), but the problem lies in the fact that Frontpage extensions on servers usually cost more and they are very limited, and simply I haven’t heard anything about Frontpage lately, so I’m staying away from it.
For PHP editing I use a simply text editor called emEditor. One nice feature is tabbed editing. It also has syntax highlighting. Since I don’t write or compose very large PHP scripts, this is more than adequate for me.
When I’m at work and on Linux (Fedora) I stick to KDevelop. Most likely, I would be doing some C programming anyways, so it is just convenient since it is already opened to just drag and drop scripts and HTML files in there. I don’t, however, do any heavy HTML design on Linux though. I haven’t found tools suitable for such yet. There is something called NVU, but it just doesn’t do enough for me to design a site from scratch using this.
Popularity: 4%
Since this blog does (claim to) encompass all sorts of Web Development. I’ve decided to insert a couple basic links. I’m not much for HTML my self. Honestly speaking, I don’t know much HTML and I refuse to learn it. Yes, I am a Web Developer and have designed 20+ websites in the past 4 years, but HTML is something I’m not too good at. If you ask me, it’s all in the tools you use.
Since my personal knowledge is limited in this field I’ve provided you with a series of links to site which have helped me:
I do hope these help you on your HTML quest, if you choose to embark on one.
Popularity: 3%
I finally took it upon myself to install WordPress. I mean I’m just been hearing so much about the darn thing, I figure, why not give it a shot. I’ve been using Mambo (now renamed to Joomla) for a while. It’s a complete website CMS. I’ve been using it on a couple sites and realized sooner or later that most of my site simply boiled down to just a blog anyway. So I decided to give the actually blogging software a try.
It does seem rather light. I guess that’s not so much of a bad thing. There are a log of plugins for it though. Not a vast library like Joomla and very little tool integration, such as forums (phpBB, SMF, etc); but I guess that’s just not what it’s meant for. It’s for blogging and it seems to do this well so far.
I do like the fact that the templates are highly CSS based and the Google Sitemap plugin is incredible. It does URL rewrite stock (out of the box) where as for Joomla, you need to jump through a few hoops to get this done right.
Filed under: