Why can’t HTML5 and Flash co-exist?
Feb 28, 2010 Articles
This post is a comment in reply to user sentiments on a recent Mashable poll titled “HTML5 Knocks Out Adobe Flash in Reader Vote”, with some minor changes for clarity.
I’ve mentioned to people before, Adobe is at a critical point here. They can choose to sit on their arses and ignore HTML5, which will steamroll Flash when it does come into play. Or they can choose to do something better with it. Adobe’s strategic advantage will be that they have control over the progress of the Flash platform, and they need to use that to quickly make itself relevant in a HTML5 world.
In the meantime,
Read the rest of this entry »
Google Chrome Developer Tools: Styles Tip
Nov 13, 2009 Articles
If any of you have been using Google Chrome instead of Firebug for your web development, you might have found yourself in a pinch. When using FireBug, it is relatively easy to add additional CSS styles to an element or its styles on the fly. Chrome doesn’t seem to have that ability out of the box.
Well, there IS a way, although it is rather hacky. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t do the trick!
Lets say you have an inline element with the following styles
However, you suddenly realise that in order to apply a width to an element it has to be a block element. So, instead of changing your stylesheet and refreshing the page, type:
Press Enter, and the additional style gets added!
Quite simple, but annoying if you didn’t know about it. Hope this helps anyone out there using Chrome for their development.
Tags: chrome, CSS, developer, firebug, Google, HTML, style, styles, stylesheet, tools, xhtml
eGames Expo 2009: Day 3
Nov 2, 2009 Articles
Well, the last day of the expo wrapped up what was essentially a very disappointing event. Too many hawkers ands not enough exhibits equates to a very uninteresting event. Take note organisers: your attendees do not really want to buy lots of stuff from expos, considering that they had to pay to get in.
Perhaps what I saw this weekend was the result of a extremely tumultuous year for everyone. Companies simply don’t have the confidence to slap down thousands of dollars at events anymore. Not events with such a low street-cred level anyway. All we have left is the hope for a better eGames Expo next year.
Read on for Images!
Tags: 2009, australia, egames, expo, fairytale, fights, Games, IDEF, melbourne
eGames Expo 2009: Day 2
Nov 1, 2009 Articles
This is day 2 of the eGames Expo 2009. You can find my post on day 1 here.
Unfortunately, my worst fears were proven accurate. There was absolutely nothing new to see on the 2nd day of the event. This meant that I had crawled through the eGames Expo (excluding the Digital Lifestyle and Careers events) in less than 4 hours.
What did I do on the 2nd day? I decided to get hands on with some of the lesser known games being displayed.
Tags: 2009, australia, egames, expo, fairytale, fights, Games, IDEF, melbourne
eGames Expo 2009: Day 1
Oct 31, 2009 Articles
Yes, a rare post from me today, as I took the day off to head on down to the first day of the iDEF eGames Expo 2009 held at the Royal Exhibition Building. There was a severe lack of exhibits which was rather disappointing, but it was not without some blockbusters. Major groups consisted mainly of Ubisoft, 2K Games and Microsoft. The rest were all small development houses and publishers, most of which failed to make any considerable impressions on me.
Tags: assassin, assassin's, avatar, creed, egames, electronics, exhibition, expo, forza, Games, gaming, IDEF, Microsoft, ubisoft, xbo360, xbox
Google 2.0
Aug 12, 2009 Articles
With the release of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine and the Yahoo/Microsoft deal, its no surprise that Google is starting to feel a little heat. This can only be a good thing; nothing like a bit of good healthy solid competition.
The result? The next version of Google 2.0, as reported by Mashable.
It is evident that Search is the foundation of all of Google’s online strategy, and in order to stay profitable it has to stay on top. And now Google has generously allowed the general public to preview the development build of its dominating search engine.
While searching for me, there are no immediate differences in the results. I did, however, notice that the previous version of Google could not find my facebook profile (rather strange, I think), where as the new version had listed me under an expandable list of results from Facebook.
Regardless, it is an exciting (and often scary) period to be involved in the development of the internet as we know it. Be sure to hop over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ and give it a whirl!
IE Team Meddles in HTML5
Aug 11, 2009 Articles
Just saw a post over at Ajaxian mentioning some involvement from the IE team in the HTML5 discussions.
Personally I feel a little mixed about it. Obviously, any interest in the specifications from the IE team should indicate some level of consideration towards standards compliance, which is always a welcome sign. However, judging by some of the feedback given by Adrian Bateman I can only feel that the IE team continue to fail to understand what I feel are some of the goals of the HTML5 specifications. Read the rest of this entry »
Windows 7 – First Impressions
May 17, 2009 Articles
So, after a long wait, I’m finally working on a totally new setup! And all for the low cost 700AUD. And to top it all off, I got a copy of Windows 7 RC1 to put on it.
I must say I have grown extremely biased against Microsoft products, but it is hard to dismiss their continuing relevance in our everyday use of our systems. I still cannot drop Live Messenger to keep in contact with friends, nor can I stop using Microsoft Office for documents despite all the rave reviews about Open Office. Similarly, I still cannot get rid of Windows as a result of my work.
This does not mean I’m a total pushover when it comes to what I need. I was not pleased with Vista, just as I was disgusted by Windows ME. What is strange, though, is that most of the time, it is hard to identify the things I disliked about either of them. But most people still manage to express either positive or negative impressions despite being unable to elaborate on their position. This is my attempt.
Tags: Impressions, Windows 7
Papervision3D: Materials and Collada
Jan 19, 2009 Articles
Today I spent a little of my spare time playing with Papervision3D, in order to participate in a Papervision3D Competition. I quickly ran into a problem, to which I couldn’t find the solution the usual way (i.e. Google). However, I finally got it working, and I’m glad to write up my findings here for those of you who might face the same problem.
The Problem
The problem I faced was simple. I downloaded a few Collada files from Google 3D Warehouse, expecting it to work in my project out of the box. It did work, but it gave me a completely untextured model, like so.
After a little looking around, I spotted a post which suggested looking inside the DAE file, to check if its materials are pointing to the right locations! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: 3D, actionscript, Collada, ColorMaterial, DAE, Flash, Material, Models, Papervision3D, Texturing
Do you use Wordpress.Com Stats?
Jan 14, 2009 Articles
I’ve been trying to show my most active posts on my site (for the purposes of driving more traffic) for the past few days, and the plugins that I tried just didn’t seem to work.
That is when I realised I had already installed the Wordpress.com Stats plugin. Unfortunately, the plugin is purely for the administration area (consisting of a widget and a full section), so I decided to hack the code to leverage on a plugin I already had.
The Hack
The code I wanted is found inside “stats.php”, where you find the code that displays the admin widgets and page statistics. From there it was just a short search for the function in question (in this case, we need “stats_get_csv()”). Once I figured out what the parameters meant, I was able to integrate it into my page.
The Code
<ul>
<?php
$active_posts = stats_get_csv( 'postviews', 'days=7&limit=5');
foreach($active_posts as $post){
?>
<li>
<?php printf('%s (%s Views)',
'<a href="' . get_permalink( $post['post_id'] ) .
'">' . get_the_title( $post['post_id'] ) .
'</a>', number_format_i18n( $post['views'] ) ); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>
</ul>
In the code above, “stats_get_csv” simply gets a list of Posts, and we can simply use them to display the information that we want.
Hopefully this might be helpful for anyone out there who is using Wordpress.Com Stats, and don’t wish to use another redundant plugin.
Tags: Frontpage, Hack, Most Active, Most Popular, php, Wordpress, Wordpress.com Stats
