Pages Tagged “Category: Development”
Blog Posts
- Free Software and Failed Ideals
Once upon a time, the idea that “only the code mattered” was sold as a way to be inclusive. No one would be shut out if their code was good. But building software is more than code. It’s design. Planning. Discussion. It’s figuring out use cases, misuse cases, and failure modes. It’s interacting with people. […]
- To the Limit
Kiddo’s been wanting to learn programming, with the ultimate goal of modding Minecraft. We’ve done some Ruby, but he’s impatient, so last night I we started Java with a simple program that repeats a println X times. He wanted to pass it the integer limit. After a few minutes, I suggested we watch a movie […]
- Mobile: Design for Offline
Mobile apps shouldn’t stop working in a dead zone.
- Protecting Firefox from Farmville
Firefox has been testing a new release that detects and closes crashed plugins (instead of letting them crash Firefox entirely) for several months, carefully making sure everything was working before they released Firefox 3.6.4 last week. Within days, they released an update. I couldn’t imagine what they might have missed in all the beta testing. Katie […]
- Browser Sniffing Strikes Again!
Opera 10 will pretend to be Opera 9.80 in order to work around websites that only see the first digit of the version number.
- Don’t Hurt the Web
The Mozilla Developer Center has just posted some desktop wallpaper promoting open standards, (and the MDC itself) with the theme, “Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standards.” Apparently the design was a big hit as a poster at SXSW. For those who haven’t seen it, the MDC is a great developer resource for web […]
- Widget Mania
The Opera web browser has introduced a Dashboard-like Widget feature in Opera 9 Preview 2. I believe this is the first 3+ platform widget framework out there. Dashboard is, of course, Mac OS X only. Yahoo! Widgets (formerly Konfabulator) is Windows XP and Mac OS X only. The KDE Desktop (mostly used on Linux and […]
- Fixing broken sites in the browser
The new Opera 8.0.1 includes an experimental feature called Browser JavaScript. It’s a collection of client-side scripts that automatically corrects known errors on websites as they’re displayed. Opera downloads updated scripts once a week. It’s an extension of the User JavaScript concept. Firefox’s Greasemonkey is basically the same thing, and it’s gotten a lot of […]
- Trust the MIME
Great example of why a browser shouldn’t second-guess file types. In this case, it’s Safari looking at a text document that mentions XHTML in line 1.