No margin for errors

I’ve just updated my prettyComments plugin and made a project page for it (the old post was too dirty for me )

You can view/test the updated version on this page. Feel free to leave any comment in this post as this will become the main post for the plugin.

Thanks!

As most of you must know by now, yesterday was the much anticipated release of the iphone 3g. The inner geek in has rarely been excited that much for a new device. I was ready to give allllll my money to Rogers to get one on the release date, but they said no…NO!

I have been a client for more than 4 years, but last year I upgraded to a new contract. When yesterday night I finally had the iPhone in my hand, ready to sign the contract, the clerk told me “Sorry sir, you need to wait until october 11th before you can upgrade your plan”. WHY!, the guy told me it was some policy where you have to wait 1 year since your last upgrade or plan activation to be able to upgrade again.

This simply don’t make any sense for me, the only reason why I think it’s good for them (because they don’t care about the customers) is that their 6 gig data plan for 30$/month won’t be effective then, therefore forcing bunch of people who wants their iPhone but can’t get them to get the crazy plans.

The past two week has been nothing but bullshit from Rogers, every time they make a somewhat good move, there’s something somewhere that reminds me how bad they are.

What pisses me the most is that Rogers is the only DSM carrier in Canada, so if I want to have a somehwat good phone, I’m forced to go with them.

So what will I do? I just don’t know, I don’t want to go with Rogers, but I want the iPhone so bad.

I have just put online a new version of prettyPhoto, this version now supports titles.

As usual, if you have any comments/bugs feel free to leave a comment in the main prettyPhoto post.

Head to the project page to view the latests changes.

Google and Adobe has been working together in order to improve Flash indexation. While this seem like a really good news, there are some important points to consider.

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.

Does this mean we’ll have to go back to the old way of embedding flash in webpages and drop SWFobject ?

We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.

That’s a big stopper. Most rich flash websites load either external SWF or XML files, the website should be considered as a whole and not as separate entities. I guess it’s a technical challenge for Google/Adobe to work this out.

I’m also wondering how Google will rank the content in the web pages. We know that in HTML the title tag is the most important after that comes the headings, etc, etc. As far as I know that content in flash is most of the time not formatted this way, even if it’s possible.

So overall this is very good news, but there’s still some work to do.

In a previous blog post I talked about the release of processing.js and how it could change how we see/use Flash. Upon experimentation and research, I looked at the canvas element and all the possibilities it offers. And…it’s sick!

First of all the canvas element is a part of the HTML5 specification and it allows for dynamic scriptable rendering of bitmap images. I won’t go much into details as of how to use it, since all I did with it is a lame paint clone. Instead i’ll provide links to example so you can see how you can use it.

Please note that all those demos work best with Firefox 3 or the latest version of Safari, since their JavaScript processing is much, much faster than what it used to be.

So here are the examples:

• 3d Counter Strike like game
• Hairy div
• Interactive 3d models
• 3d racing “game”
• My lame paint clone

It’s really worth it to take a look at that element and follow closely what will happen in the future as more and more browsers will support it.

P.S: I told you my paint clone was lame…

Today is the day! Download your copy of the new Firefox 3.0 and help Mozilla break the record of the most download in one day.

This page gives you the current number of downloads. It’s quite impressive when you see that it gets downloaded more than 13 000 times a minute.

The Firefox team did a great job, not only  with the browser, but also with all the buzz they created around the launch of FF3. I can’t wait to see the next browser usage statistics, I’m pretty sure this move will help them.

So go ahead, download your copy and break the record!

I’ve just put online the new version of prettyPhoto. This release include a bunch of fixes and improvement that makes it much, much better, it is recommend to update your current version if you are already using it.

Here’s a list of updates:

• New button design;
• Fixed a glitch on image resizing;
• The images bigger than the viewport are now resized to fit;
• The pictures now follow the scroll when the gallery is opened;
• CSS has been tweaked a bit.

To view a demo or download the latest version, go to: http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyPhoto

Feel free to leave your suggestions/comments!

About 2 weeks ago John Resig, the maker of jQuery, released processing.js, an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. Porting it to javascript made it available to a wider audience. I saw the processing project about 2 years ago but didn’t see much use at the time since it was open source but required a software to code it.

In the near future it might not change much things, but as it becomes better known and people start working/improving it i’m pretty sure we have a strong Flash/Silverlight killer here. First of all you don’t need to install any 3rd party application, it’s straight javascript. Secondly, developers won’t need to buy expensive licenses to work with it. And third, the javascript community is already pretty big, once people starts jumping on the wagon, the train will be hard to stop.

The main problem right now is that you have Silverlight that tries to steal market from Flash, but Flash penetation is so big that it’s nearly impossible to overcome. Developers simply won’t start developing Silverlight applications because no one asks for it. This is where processing.js come in play, the penetration is even stronger than flash, and you don’t need any kind of license to develop it.

In my opinion, at the moment, the only real use for Flash on the web is for video/audio players. And it’s something that might change in the near future since HTML 5 already has a video and audio element planned what will be the use of flash?

The agency I’m working at has just launched it’s new website. It’s a full flash website with a full HTML equivalent for people without flash and to help SEO.

It’s our first attempt at making a flash website fully SEO friendly, which is pretty cool.

Since I don’t do any flash I wasn’t implied in the main site development, I have been in charge of the HTML version development.

To view the new site just go to: http://www.cloudraker.com
To view the new HTML version of the site go to: http://www.cloudraker.com?noflash=true

I’ve just finished prettyPhoto, a lightbox jQuery plugin.

You can find it here: http://www.no-margin-for-errors.com/projects/prettyPhoto/