Cheaper Developer Book Resources
Posted on | January 1, 2010 | No Comments
iPod Touch
As a web developer, you rely on your reference books to solve problems, look up functions, syntax, terms, etc., and to learn about new technologies. Trying to keep up with the number of new books that come out and the cost can be overwhelming on the psyche and hits the pocketbook hard. At $35-$50 a book, that’s nothing to sneeze at. I’ve found an alternative resource to buying retail books that I wanted to share.
One of the gifts that I received this Christmas was a gift card to the iTunes App Store. I do a lot of things with my iPod Touch, from keeping track of finances to social networking to even updating and administering my web sites (including this one). I never thought of the iPod Touch as a book viewer (because it’s not a Kindle or Sony eReader) as the screen size is limited. Anyway, back in the iTunes App Store, armed with my gift card, I started doing searches for web development tools. I already have some quick reference apps for CSS and Javascript and WordPress and Joomla admin apps, so I was looking for more resources along those lines. A handful of O’Reilly programming books popped up and I dismissed them initially. But when I took a closer look at an iPhone Apps book, I started to delve a little more into it. The name of the book is “Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript” by Jonathan Stark and the print edition (pre-release) pricing is $29.99, in the Apps Store it’s $5.99! I did more searches for other books and came up with some that were $4.99! Compare that price with the print price and it’s a no brainer.
But wait–is there stuff missing? Without going through both books, print and iPod Touch versions, I honestly cannot say if it is the same word-for-word. But, I did verify the table of contents and both match. As far as any supplemental materials, you can download the files from the O’Reilly site. So, it looks like the content is comparable. I’m not saying that this is a substitute for a printed book, because, of course, there are advantages to having a printed book over a digital version. That is not the purpose of this post, but I think that in these tough times, low cost alternatives to really expensive computer books should be considered and if you can deal with reading from a smaller screen, the $5-$6 cost is worth it!
Happy Holidays!
Posted on | December 31, 2009 | No Comments
Happy belated Christmas and here’s to a Happy New Year! It was a rough year, but thank you Jesus for giving us many blessings to keep on going!
Google Chrome
Posted on | December 13, 2009 | No Comments
I just uploaded Google Chrome today and I am very pleased so far. Here’s a quick summary of what I’m liking:
1. Speed: I timed the page load time between Chrome and Firefox on a web site that I have never gone to before and Chrome took 2.1 secs vs. Firefox which took 3.8 secs.
2. Search within the address bar: makes sense, doesn’t it? Why have two places to enter in web page information?
3. Thumbnails of recently visited pages in new tab: when you open a new tab, thumbnails of the last 8 web sites that you visited are displayed. The grid, to me, is reminscent of the speed dial in Opera in the way it looks. You can toggle the view from the grid to a list view.
4. Setup was FAST and imported my settings from Firefox very easily
I’ll update this post as I keep using this browser. I am very impressed with the speed, most definitely!
EDIT: After using Chrome for 3 days, I’m missing 2 things that I liked in Firefox: 1) the bigger back button (left arrow) in the main toolbar and 2) the ability to pull down the history by clicking on the down arrow to the right of the page forward button. If you want to go back in the history, you have to keep hold down the back button and the recent pages will dropdown and you can select. I understand why they probably made this UI decision which I think is to save on space and for the look and feel, but I’m too accustomed to the FF way. Wah, wah, wah, call the wam-bulance!
Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted on | November 26, 2009 | No Comments
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Thanks be to God for all our family and friends, and for giving us a ton of blessings in our lives
Review of Sprint PCS and the Sanyo SCP-2700 Smartphone
Posted on | November 24, 2009 | No Comments
Sanyo SCP-2700 for Sprint
Sprint Service Review
My wife and I recently changed carriers from AT&T to Sprint to take advantage of Sprint’s online promotion. We ordered 2 new Sanyo SCP-2700 smartphones (pictured). My wife ordered the pink model and I ordered the deep blue. The phones came in 2 business days later as promised, but we received 2 blue ones instead of 1 pink and 1 blue. After figuring out what number to call, which can be a little bit of a Lexis-Nexis search on the Sprint site, Sprint customer service acknowledged the mistake and shipped the correct one right away. My wife received her phone in 2 days. So far, Sprint followed through on their promises and corrected their mistake.
Sprint plan overview: our new plan includes 1500 anytime minutes, unlimited after 7pm on nights and weekends, unlimited text messaging, unlimited minutes on phones in the Sprint network, and nationwide coverage/roaming. Compared to our former AT&T plan we end up with free text messaging and more minutes.
Sanyo SCP-2700 Smartphone Review
This smartphone reminds me of the old Blackberry 6230 I used to have, with the full keyboard and comparable screen size, the main difference being a full color display vs. monochrome and the track wheel on the side.
Likes:
- threaded text messaging: my wife and I set up Twitter right away through the free messaging feature in Twitter. It was a welcome site to see the thread of messages during the set up process.
- manageable keyboard size: the feel of the keyboard was pretty natural for me. Caveat: I do not have huge fingers, so for anyone with “fat” or wide fingers, I can see having a harder time.
- user-friendly keyboard layout: standard QWERTY layout with a function key to access numbers and symbols. With the limited amount of text messages we’ve sent out, all the symbols were readily accessible.
- GPS turn-by-turn functionality: GPS is AWESOME! Instead of spending the money on a Nuvee or TomTom, this phone is a great alternative. My wife and I tested the turn-by-turn feature on a trip from Wisconsin to Illinois and did not experience any errors in the route or misdirection. My only beef is that it is hard to hear over the regular phone speaker.
- GPS locator: Another great feature on the SCP 2700! You can use the GPS to locate other family members on your plan. Another name for this feature could be the “spouse finder” or “really, you said you were picking up the kids” feature. Please note this requires a separate fee.
- Account Access: you can access your minutes and plan features over the web browser.
Dislikes:
- slow data transfer speeds: slow even when turning off images
- limited browser view: because of the small, 2.2″ wide (diagonal) screen, it is difficult to see basic web pages on the screen.
- news service portals : this is probably my biggest problem with the phone, especially the news services portals set up by Sprint. I expected a listing of articles under each heading, not a featured article list of 2 that rotates. It reduces your number of choices per section.
- poor quality 1.3 megapixel camera: I took a picture and sent it via email to myself. The camera is very limited with a low resolution, no flash, and you have to have a very steady hand to get a clear picture.
- out-of-the-box theme customization: this phone is mainly for business, and offers limited out-of-the-box customization. You get only several options for ringtones, background and text color, no image for the display wallpaper (maybe I haven’t found it yet…). For a fee, you can download ringtones and other features using the content manager.
To improve: to unlock phone, have to press spacebar and back buttons, in the dark this can be very hard to do.
Overall, we’re really happy so far with the phones and would give the phone a 3.5 stars out of 5. When you get a phone like this which wasn’t meant to be a Blackberry killer and definitely not an iPhone contender, which is left to their other models.
Please don’t do this!
Posted on | November 18, 2009 | No Comments
I remember when I was first starting out learning about web development in the late nineties and not knowing and appreciating elegant coding. I was more preoccupied with trying to put up “pretty” web pages and was looking for a tool that could help me achieve the dream with minimal coding. I tried out several different web page editors including Dreamweaver, BBEdit, and FrontPage. Dreamweaver wasn’t user friendly-enough for me. BBEdit was too code-oriented. FrontPage was more for me because I was accustomed to other Microsoft products at the time and I achieved (in a manner of speaking) what I was looking to do.
I showed one of my coworkers who was a programmer what I was working on and this comment of his stuck with me: “What ugly code!” He pointed out how inefficient the code was and how difficult it was to follow. At that time, there was a distinctive separation between web designers and programmers, mainly because web applications were not as ubiquitous as they are now. So, I didn’t necessarily see this as a programming problem.
Now, I’m wiser and probably less impatient when it comes to coding so I do a lot of it by hand. I’ve abandoned FrontPage with a vengenance and I only use editors when I need to do repetitive tasks.
But flash forward, and now I’m doing some work to revamp a site which I’ve been postponing for a long time. Take a look at this code:
<p style=”text-indent: -.25in; margin-left: .5in”><span style=”font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Symbol”>
·<span style=”font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"”> </span></span>Receives gift with gratitude<p style=”text-indent: -.25in; margin-left: .5in”><span style=”font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Symbol”>·<span style=”font:7.0pt "Times New Roman"”>
</span></span>
I’ve learned from the error of my previous ways and now it’s come back to haunt me! I have to recode these pages with Microsoft FrontPage WYSIWYG-speak. Span tags everywhere with complementary font tags, text-indents, webbots, and more cr**. I hope that my penance for using FrontPage and actually putting up web sites using that tool is satisfied with the overhaul of code I need to do on this site (Tidy hasn’t helped, by the way).
So please, if you’re still using FrontPage, please graduate to Expression Web, or better yet, Dreamweaver. If you’re a web site owner who has a web site like this, please understand that you will probably have to start from scratch and get rid of your old site. It’s not worth it to keep it. If you want an overhaul or slight redesign based on your current site, give me a call. I don’t think that I will clean up the code on the old site, though. You probably don’t have the money and I don’t think that I will have the time 
Great tech podcasts
Posted on | November 14, 2009 | No Comments
Here are several links to some great podcasts about tech:
1. CNET’s Buzz Out Loud (BOL): get up-to-date tech news and commentary on new products, events, industry news.
2. Leo LaPorte, The Tech Guy: what I like about Leo’s show is that he incorporates a lot of variety of subjects including computers, the internet in general, home theater systems, security, and photography. Every show includes call-in segments for Leo to help with (mostly) computer problems.
3. Boagworld: podcast for web designers by web designers. Paul Boag and Marcus Lillington discuss pertinent web design issues and running a web design shop. They also have interviews with movers and shakers in the web design world.
-Joe
Just a simple little creative and developmental blog…
Posted on | October 20, 2009 | No Comments
Welcome to my blog on things pertaining to web development and design. I just switched hosting providers from GoDaddy to Bluehost and added this blog to the mix. I’m hoping to bring some interesting tidbits, rantings, ravings about the web design world and goings on with NUVAL WEB DESIGN.
To get started, this is my first post. Mark it in the history books.
Joe