An update
I’m writing lots of updates, just not on this blog, but on SkillPages, as the place where any professional update should be posted. Oh, I almost forgot, over there I also lead an amazing Front End development team.
I also recently spoke at the Web Summit in Dublin 2011.
I won’t be posting much on this blog, so feel free to connect with me on SkillPages: www.skillpages.com/enrico.foschi
Tumblr? Why not WordPress with shorter posts?
Sometime I feel like I need to write something, need to write posts, need to share stuff.
But I don’t like to write blog posts that much. I don’t know why, but I tend to procrastinate it. Probably because it looks like a bigger task as it is (or as it should be), looks like I have to write something more than I want to, or whathever.
I thought I would have started my Tumblr at this point.
But their incredibly slow loading of any preference/account page and the fact that over there it becomes easier to lose track of your thoughts made me realize that I can just try to write shorter posts 
.
Apple was right, Adobe: get over it
As many of you know, Adobe decision to ban third-party apps converter (.net, flash, …) got a pretty bad reaction… in particular among developers.
I love Apple and the iPhone mainly because of the apps.
- I find them all in one place
- The quality is awesome
- I am sure they won’t fuck up my phone
and this is because Apple created a great process to streamline any developer application into a single App Store. A very rigid process, actually. And it worked excellently.
Now, seeing all the apps compilers that are bypassing their development environment, they saw a clear danger of not being able to keep the process controlled and streamlined anymore. The very same development & approval process that made the iPhone and the iPod Touch apps so successful nowadays.
Therefore, the ban. And to me, it seems pretty fair.
Apple gave and is still giving developers awesome chances to publish great apps, get their name out there and get a fairly decent revenue leveraging on a very successfully working App Store.
It would be utterly insane for them to get thousands and thousands of more developers submitting thousands of apps, developed by third party frameworks that hide completely the Cocoa environment and Apple’s SDKs.
It would have been great for me as well to develop an iPhone application just using C#, without studying their Cocoa framework. But I understand their choices and I pretty much agree with them.
Anyway, please just stop saying Apple is evil. They are playing by their rules and they decide who can publish apps on THEIR phone. Don’t you like it? There are tons of other phones and companies out there waiting for you.
Adobe has been just one of the companies being affected by this… but I wonder if there has been any deal or partnership before starting the “Flash to iPhone” feature development. If not, Adobe has been victim of a very bold move.
Flying to work
Finally I found a new better (but not safer) way to get to Weedle from Dublin West: Flying!
Margin Jet Packs are now on sale in New Zealand:
“Powered by a 200 HP gasoline engine, each $75,000 jet pack can reach a top speed of 60 mph, an altitude of 8,000 feet, and fly for about 30 minutes on a full tank of fuel” (via)
It looks pretty stable too:
…but I wonder how it’ll work with the strong wind we have here in Dublin
Less is more – the smaller, the better
While prototyping the front-end architecture for one project I am working on, I am starting to consider that I should design the pages considering 800px as maximum resolution (so, the page width, will be around 760 px, to be sure that scrollbars and border lines will be included).
Why 800px and not 1024px? Why not fixed layout? Here are my reasons:
- The layout is going to be minimalistic. The page is not going to contain a lot of text and boxes. Less is more, as always
- No fixed layout, otherwise the information on the page would be too spread out and would be too difficult to focus the user attention if the screen is pretty wide
- 800px is becoming the standard resolutions in many mobile browser. Even the ones that support larger resolutions have a better user experience when the width of the page is contained. Twitter has a 800 pixels fixed layout as well, and I think this has been a key factor of its success.
There is nothing bad in having larger blank vertical stripes on the side of the page, as long as now we can easily focus the user attention on what we want
Twitter style suggestion and validation boxes for jQuery
Few minutes ago I just deployed a new JQuery plugin: TwitterSuggestion: twitter style suggestion and validation boxes (> link)
Basically it reproduces the suggestion and validation effects anybody can see on www.twitter.com/signup
Here is a screenshot:
And here is a demo.
Let me know what you think
My mom on Google Street View – WTF?
Few days ago, when trying out Google Street View in my hometown, I discovered that my mom was caught by Google cameras:
As first impression, it was really funny. Then, I realized that this wouldn’t be great when thinking about privacy. Not a big deal, as well as anybody can just drive in that street and see same or more things, but still is a kind of strange to know that those images now are available worldwide.
Getting Not Safe For Work content (NSFW) at work without getting noticed
At www.ihaswork.com you can set a front Safe For Work page and a hidden Not Safe For Work one that will be displayed only when the user keeps the mouse pointer over the content of the browser.
It’s a pretty simple service. All of it resides in one page. It’s just based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Anybody is free to take the code and to use it anywhere. Although, keeping references to the author (myself) would be much appreciated. Is is released to the public under MIT license.
Why did I do that?
I am pretty tired to see companies that instead of trusting employees, start to block websites like Facebook, LOLCatz, Skype and Messenger protocols, etc…
I strongly think that not trusting your employees is discouraging them significantly, demolishing their enthusiasm to work and to get noticed and recognized for their productivity.
As a team leader I am the one that often sends to the whole team LOLCatz photos, interesting OT articles, EPIC FAIL videos, etc…
And they so the same.
But not because we are unproductive. Just the opposite.
We are very busy everyday, with short timelines and a huge amount of work to do. Spending 5 minutes every hour or two just having a laugh with some NotSafeForWork website is getting rid of (part) of our stress and making us much more productive the moments after.
And, all my team members are adult and mature enough to understand when is time to work and when is time to relax.
In conclusion, I wish all the oppressed employees to get some relaxing time and, indirectly to their employer to get some more productivity out of them – even if maybe they shouldn’t deserve it
Any ideas for further development? Any constructive criticism?
Just let me know, post a comment, I would be really glad to help
Enrico Foschi
How to check with Javascript if a Firefox Add-on / Extension is installed
Agglom was used to display an invitation to download the Firefox Add-on Agglomerator in the main pages to all the users.
Unfortunately, the invitation was displayed by users that already installed the Add-on too. The challenge was to check with JS if the user already had the add-on installed and, if he had it, to hide the invitation.
Surfing the web I stumbled upon this page:
http://ha.ckers.org/weird/firefox-extentions.html
Thanks to ha.ckers.org, the feature has been pretty easy to develop. What we did was to include the invitation inside a DIV with a specified id (firefoxExtension). Right after the closing tag of the DIV we appended this image:
<img src=”chrome://agglomerator/skin/icon24.png”
class=”displayNone”
onload=”if(document.getElementById(‘firefoxExtension’))
document.getElementById(‘firefoxExtension’).style.display=’none’;” />
The IMG tag loads an image that is included in Agglomerator (the icon displayed in the toolbar to save and share the current browser session). If the extension has been installed correctly, the icon will be loaded and the onload event will be fired. This is then hiding the DIV with id=firefoxExtension. If the extension is not installed, the onload event won’t be fired.
This is a quick and dirty method and should work with all almost any add-on.
Hope it helps.
Saving your Web searches in Firefox is easier than ever
…and you can even access them wherever you are and share them with anybody.
Is just a few clicks operation with Agglomerator, the Firefox add-on from Agglom.com.
This is a web search that I just organized in less than 1 minute:
http://www.agglom.com/agglom/323/Best_cars_drawn_in_MS_Paint
This extension will add one button on the toolbar that, when clicked, will open a new window in Agglom.com with a list of all the URLs of the current opened tabs. You will be able to choose which ones you would like save and how to share them (you may share them with everybody, with your friends, keep them private or protect them with a password).
Once you save them, you’ll be able to view all the saved web contents (links, videos, images, wikipedia pages, etc…) in just one page and to share it with a Permalink.
Here is a useful video tutorial to get started with it:
Here is the link of the Firefox Extension:
- From Agglom: http://www.agglom.com/extension.aspx
- From Firefox Add-on (requires registration):
https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/7935
