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Friday, July 22, 2011

Upgrade Your Facebook Blackberry Software With Chit Chat for Facebook

Recently, Daniel Offer, Managing Director of Athena IT Limited wrote to us inviting us to write about their latest incarnation of Chit Chat for Facebook - a port of their popular Windows application to the Blackberry. You've probably heard of their Facebook chat desktop application for Windows, and this Facebook Blackberry IM app according to the company is intended to be the "bigger and better brother app" for Blackberry Smartphones.

Intrigued, I paid out my $1.99 and purchased a copy of Chit Chat for Facebook for my cherished Blackberry Bold 9780. I was eager to see if the Facebook Blackberry chat app matches the hype - and well, the picture perfect official Chit Chat for Facebook Blackberry website.

Once purchased, Chit Chat was awaiting me in my "downloads" folder on my Blackberry - the icon will be familiar to users of the desktop Windows application and is basically two pacman like C's standing for Chit Chat. After going through the normal software rigmarole of choosing my desired language and accepting an End User License Agreement I was asked to provide my login details.

At this point I was instructed to enter my Facebook Username and password, put simply - I didn't need to sign up for any additional services in order to do this like other applications I've used in the past. Although, if you don't already have a Facebook username, you'll need to create one. That said, the instructions provided on how to create a Facebook username are fairly straight forward. Although, you'll need access to a computer to be able to perform this step.

Once logged in I was presented with a list of my Facebook friends that were online and available to chat over Facebook chat. As an aside, there seem to be some people whom are always available on Facebook chat, at least on my buddy list. Back on to topic, the list is attractively presented on a green gradient with three tabs above it - three lists, buddy list, conversion list and unread chat messages. The touch pad enabled me to move up and down the contacts list, and left and right between tabs. Using Chit Chat feels very instinctive and effortless.

The menu button on your Blackberry allows you to select from a range of options, most of the options on this list you can more easily perform with keys on your blackberry, with one exception, preferences. The preference menu is only available via the menu button on your Blackberry.

Preferences is split into three sections - Conversation, Messages and Advanced. Dealing with the latter first, advanced preferences allows you to reset your settings as well as change your network configuration. More usefully, conversation and message preferences is home to a variety of functionality that enables you to customize the look and feel of this Blackberry Facebook chat software.

'Message preferences' includes the ability to change the wall paper, add the time to messages, sort the buddy list and change the text size. Functionality that you'd normally expect from a Windows application, but not necessarily from a Blackberry app. Some brownie points for Chit Chat here.

My favorite features of this app are the ability to filter your friends on the buddy list and the excellent message received alerts (it flashes the light on the Blackberry, vibrates and plays a jingle - although these can be turned off in preferences.

During my test I was able to stay logged into Facebook chat passively for several hours and then start using it actively without any issue arising. The Blackberry Facebook chat application feels solid and robust. One thing I felt was missing was the lack of the Facebook smiley's and them replaced with Chit Chat's own smiley graphics although that's probably a copyright thing more than anything else - there are substitutes for each of the Facebook emoticons .

In summary, Chit Chat for Facebook has moved from Windows to Blackberry in an elegant fashion. Chit Chat for Facebook (Blackberry) is a best in class instant messaging app for the Blackberry and is recommended if you wish to use Facebook chat on your Blackberry Smartphone. It's available from Mobihand for $1.99 at the time of writing.

Upgrade Your Facebook Blackberry Software With Chit Chat for Facebook

Thursday, July 21, 2011

5 sliders content for jQuery

Sliders are powerful tools to highlight content on a website. This article gives you five options jQuery plugins to implement this functionality.

Nivo Slider - Site | Demo

The strong Nivo Slider is a clean HTML for the initial structure of the slider. Only a div element with pictures and links is necessary. The main focus of this slider are images, but the HTML caption feature just enabling the display of any content.

Among the options offered are the speed and direction of the transition and callbakcs to perform actions after the start and loading of the slides. The plugin still has no more and no less than 16 choices of transition from one slide to another. Its compressed version has 15kb.

Coda Slider - Site | Demo

This plugin has emerged based on the application site Slider Coda . Each element of the slide should be a div element with class "panel".

Coda Slider leaves something to be desired flexibility, offering few options but to display different types of content is most appropriate plugin.

Orbit - Demo

Originally developed to be a slider images, Orbit also incorporating HTML content just as long as the content div element contains a background set.

Its compressed version is very light, and another differential 3.2kb cool Orbit is the application of a loader marking the transition time between slides.

Anything Slider - Site | Demo

As the name suggests, the AnythingSlider accepts all and any type of content. In the words of the author, "the plugin is an attempt to gather all of the features found in other plugins of this type."

It is the most adptável plugin and integrates better with the rest of your application oferencendo own hashtags for each slide and the possibility of creating a direct link to a slide.

Moodular - Demo

The neat thing is Moodular, as well as the name suggests, is modular, core, control and effects. So if you need a simple slider is not necessary to load the control module, for example.

The effects of Moodular module includes the popular "reflection" (the one from Apple) and the control has built in support for touchscreen applications, and keyboard navigation.

5 sliders content for jQuery

Sliders are powerful tools to highlight content on a website. This article gives you five options jQuery plugins to implement this functionality.

Nivo Slider - Site | Demo

Coda Slider - Site | Demo

This plugin has emerged based on the application site Slider Coda . Each element of the slide should be a div element with class "panel".

Coda Slider leaves something to be desired flexibility, offering few options but to display different types of content is most appropriate plugin.

Orbit - Demo

Originally developed to be a slider images, Orbit also incorporating HTML content just as long as the content div element contains a background set.

Its compressed version is very light, and another differential 3.2kb cool Orbit is the application of a loader marking the transition time between slides.

Anything Slider - Site | Demo

As the name suggests, the AnythingSlider accepts all and any type of content. In the words of the author, "the plugin is an attempt to gather all of the features found in other plugins of this type."

It is the most adptável plugin and integrates better with the rest of your application oferencendo own hashtags for each slide and the possibility of creating a direct link to a slide.

Moodular - Demo

The neat thing is Moodular, as well as the name suggests, is modular, core, control and effects. So if you need a simple slider is not necessary to load the control module, for example.

The effects of Moodular module includes the popular "reflection" (the one from Apple) and the control has built in support for touchscreen applications, and keyboard navigation.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

How to make a widget from your Google+ profile

Like other social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), Google + allows you to create a widget from your profile, as a sort of badge of their information. The novelty is that now began to appear some plugins directed to him.

The plugin Script Google + Profile + widget, for example, allows you to add on your website or your blog Wordpress + Google widget. In it, you will see your photo, a box to add it to the network, and also the possibility to activate the links for available networks in your profile.

In Step by step we will see below how to add and add the widget to your website or blog in Wordpress:

Step 1. Sign in to your account and download the Wordpress plugin on this link;

Step 2. Extract the files into the Plugins folder (located inside the folder of wp-content root of your site or blog);

Step 3. On the control panel of your website or blog, enable the plugin Script Profile + Google Widget;

Step 4. Widgets menu, drag the plugin to the sidebar panel. Fill in your details:

Googe + ID: is the number that appears on the link in your profile Google +;
Width: the width (in pixels) that the widget must have;
Domain: the domain of your site or blog;

Color: the background color of the widget (in hexadecimal);
Social links: here you can choose to expose them or not.

Step 5. Click "Save" and your widget is ready!

The plugin is currently available for those who have their own domains (wordpress.org). For blogs hosted on wordpress.com (blog.wordpress.com), there is not expected to be available.

How to make a widget from your Google+ profile

Color: the background color of the widget (in hexadecimal);
Social links: here you can choose to expose them or not.

Top Reasons to Firefox even better than Chrome for web development

Some time ago, some of us, web developers, we changed the Firefox Google Chrome because of the important features such as speed.

With the release of Firefox 4, it solved some of the problems we had in past versions, leaving it better, at least when it comes to web development.

This article, divided into two parts, explains some of the reasons why the Firefox browser is still a better than Google Chrome for your web development work.

Evolution of the market share of browsers

About a year ago, I talked about something most of us already knew, that PHP developers are switching to Google Chrome as its web browser access.

As you can see in the table below, this trend continues to be true this year. These numbers were taken from statistics developers PHP Classes logged in to the site .

Browser	May 2009	May 2010	May 2011	Change
Mozilla Firefox	68.0%	63.5%	57.3%	-6.2%
Microsoft IE	18.5%	13.6%	8.9%	-4.7%
Google Chrome	6.0%	15.7%	28.1%	+12.4%

As you can see, Chrome almost doubled its share in a year, while Internet Explorer has lost a little more than half. Firefox also fell slightly.

The gain of Chrome is greater than the loss of the Firefox and Internet Explorer. This means that Chrome also gained share lost to other browsers.

Reasons to Firefox even better than Chrome for web development

Given the fact that the participation of Google Chrome continues to grow enough, you may wonder why on this article. The fact that Chrome will continue to become increasingly popular for web browsing does not mean that web developers are also working with him in his projects. For me, this is not the case. Often when I'm doing development work, I feel I need to switch to Firefox, for reasons which I will list below.

I wish they had in mind that this article is not a rant against Google, which gave us web developers a lot to be grateful to him, but when we speak of Chrome, there is still much to be improved.

I decided to write this article now in the hope that maybe someone at Google to read, and do something to resolve these issues, most of the time, really bother most of us, since we do not keep changing all the time browsers .

1. View HTML

When the code of our sites have bugs, it usually generates an HTML code that is incorrect or invalid. So we need to analyze the HTML code to understand what's wrong. Firefox has an amazing feature that allows you to select a portion of the page and it shows the exact HTML that corresponds to that portion of the selected page. This feature does not exist in Chrome.

The best you have is the Inspect Element feature, which allows you to find the HTML code for the page element below the cursor of your mouse. Not the same thing. If I select a region of the page, I want to see the full HTML of that region, not a single element.

Another annoying thing is that Chrome tries to make the HTML pretty. This means that if you have a malformed HTML, you will not see where he is malformed because Chrome will show an embellished version of the HTML code after it has been repaired. I wish they had an option to disable.

2. Validation of HTML

Another great feature of Firefox is the ability to display any validation errors of HTML that you may have. In fact, this feature is provided by the extension HTML Validator .

I tested several extensions with the same goal in Chrome, but nothing that was really good. Some just used the W3C validation service through the page's URL, which is not good, because when you are developing a page that is not public service W3C can not access it, and any user logged into the site you is developing can not access it.

Other extensions have tried to copy the currently loaded page and pass it to the validation service, but none showed any invalid HTML code that the Firefox extension HTML Validator shows.

It also does not rely on an external validation service. That means you can validate pages even if you do not have internet access. So for all these reasons, an equivalent version of the HTML Validator extension is sorely needed for Chrome.

3. Disable JavaScript

Sometimes you need to test your site with JavaScript disabled. The only way to disable it in Chrome is going to preferences and disable. This is truly annoying. In Firefox, you can use the extension Web Developer by Chris Pederick to add a button to the browser to quickly disable and re-enable JavaScript when you want.

In Chrome, there is also the extension Web Developer the same developer, but it provides no means to disable JavaScript. The problem is due to the limitation of the API exposed to Chrome extensions. It does not allow a way to disable JavaScript from extensions.

There is a request for funding for the project Chromium to implement the necessary support to disable JavaScript. Implementing this feature was actually given a year ago, but it never happened. Oddly, users have been banned from posting future comments on the application of this feature.

4. Empty the browser cache

Sometimes you need to force the cleanup of the browser cache, so that new content can be recovered from the site server you are developing.

It is the same limitation to disable JavaScript. You can not do this through an extension. You need to go in the preferences of Chrome.

There is also a feature request to enable support for clearing the cache from an extension. It was made more than two years, but only a few months ago was released for implementation.

5. Changing the agent identifier of the browser

Sometimes you need to access your site pretending to be developing using another browser, so you can see if it fits to that browser the way you expect.

For example, if you are serving an RSS feed to be handled by Feedburner, all you need to redirect browsers to the URL of the Feedburner feed, unless the current agent is checking if your Feedburner feed has been updated. Therefore, it would be helpful if you could cause the browser to pretend to be the Feedburner, so you could check if he was working as it should.

In Firefox, you can use the extension User Agent Switcher also Chris Pederick. In Chrome, there is also an extension called User Agent Switcher . The problem is that it does not work. Good works, but not the way you want. The extension can only change the browser identification exposed to JavaScript. This means that HTTP requests sent to the server will not use the string identifying the agent that you need to be sent.

I suspect that an application for resource to be implemented in Chromium, but not found. Until this feature is implemented, we will always have to go back to Firefox, which works well with the User Agent Switcher extension.