All these posts are related to the Code category.

For those of you who are developers, and still use Firefox, you’ll be happy to know that Mozilla announced yesterday that they’ve rolled out a new developer too. Mozilla put together a video for all of us to have a look at it:

Some of the features are:

1. More built in tools for real-time editing.
2. Page Inspector allows you to look into a page’s structure.
3. Style Inspector allows for quick and easy style editing.
4. Scratchpad uses Eclipse Orion to give you syntax highlighting
5. A full-screen API for full screen web experiences.

Those aren’t shabby additions and some of them are definitely going to give Chrome’s developer tools a run for their money.

The tools come bundled with Firefox, so you’ll need to update to get them.

Over to you Chrome, let’s see how you come back!

Just brilliant, click to enlarge!

If you’ve ever built a website before you’ll more than likely know something about CSS, well at least I hope you do otherwise you might have been using tables ;) Naturally, when you make a change to the CSS files on your website, you need to refresh the browser to see the changes, right? Well, I’ve stumbled across something pretty cool, read on..

CSS Refresh is a really small and unobtrusive JavaScript file that monitors your CSS files, when you make a change, the JavaScript file automatically implements the changes and you need not refresh your browser – think of how much time that could save you! If I had a dollar for every time I’d pressed F5, I’d be writing this from my villa in France!

Getting started is really easy, you just need to follow 3 really easy steps which you find here: http://cssrefresh.frebsite.nl/#how

It’s a really useful little tool, give it a go!

We’ve all got “share on Facebook” or “Like” or “Tweet this” on our blog posts, but I’ve noticed a lot of people who don’t have Google+ share buttons and it’s incredibly easy to add them if you’re using WordPress.

Open up your functions.php file and add the following lines of code at the bottom of the file:

add_filter('the_content', 'wpr_google_plusone'); 

function wpr_google_plusone($content) 

{ $content = $content.'<div><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>'; return $content; } 

add_action ('wp_enqueue_scripts','wpr_google_plusone_script'); 

function wpr_google_plusone_script() 

{ wp_enqueue_script('google-plusone', 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', array(), null); }

Save your functions.php file and enjoy allowing people to share your posts on Google+

I’m not sure about you, but I’m really not a Flash fan. Despite our Internet lines getting faster and some incredible animation being possible, I just find that Flash is slow, doesn’t always work and hardly ever renders correctly on mobile devices.

Big news last week involved Adobe informing developers that the development of mobile flash browser plugins would be stopped. In other words, Adobe is dropping mobile Flash support, which means Flash will no longer be geared towards mobile devices. If Steve Jobs were alive, may he RIP, he would be smiling from ear to ear.

Here’s a quote:

“Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.”

Adobe seems to have changed their focus, initially it was all about stopping flash, but now they’re saying that their development will focus on applications for mobile, expressive content on the desktop and increasing their investments in HTML5 in general.

If you’re interested in reading more information about this directly on the Adobe blog, here’s the link.

I come from a programming background, desktop applications, websites and even some firmware stuff for electronic devices. I love programming, but as a day job it just doesn’t suite me unfortunately. So these days I don’t do too much coding, but from time to time I need to do some web stuff and when it comes to CSS, well, that’s a job for someone else ;)

CSS Desk is a web application I’ve used a number of times as it allows you to test your CSS on the fly instead of saving and refreshing a browser. So, if you need to hack some div structures together and see results quickly, then this application will be of use to you.

I must warn you, this is a great application, but it’s very basic, so I wouldn’t go as far as dealing with transparencies and so forth, and you’ll have to use absolute URLs for certain things, but if it’s something simple, then by all means this application will save you a nice amount of time.

Have you used CSS Desk before?

I seriously love Geek and Poke, some of their cartons are just priceless and I’ve published quite a few here. Anyway, this week’s one is for the programmers, if you’ve ever programmed you’ll probably relate to this in some way, even if it’s when you headed up that team and go a new junior.

Hope you have a good laugh:

Read More »

This is fantastic news for merchants, but more so for developers of 3rd party applications for FourSquare. If you’re not sure what an API is, simply explained, it’s a protocol which allows developers to send and receive information to and from, meaning that developers can request information from FourSquare to integrate in their own programs.

Any web application which launches a great API stands the chance of having many useful 3rd party applications built, which increases the usefulness of the web application. I think FourSquare is yet to capture the true value of having over 500,000 merchants listed with them and this is going to be one step closer to gaining that.

I’ve had a read over some of the documents for the API and right now it looks rather straight forward and most developers would be able to fairly easily find their way through the system.

If you’re interested in learning more, be sure to read the overview and definitely take a look at the endpoints, because that’s where things get interesting.

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git revision control system. It is written using Ruby on Rails by Logical Awesome developers Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. If you aren’t a coder you don’t really need to worry about this post, as this is geek stuff :)

Today, GitHub announced the release of their Mac version, which is exciting news for Mac users. I grabbed a bunch of screen shots for you to have a look through below, but be sure to read the official release if you want to find out more or grab a copy of the application. Read More »

There’s nothing more exciting when a social platform opens its API up, and lets developers around the world tap in. I’m a geek, so this gets me going off the bat, but if you aren’t, then what this means is that we can expect more exciting 3rd party applications as they’ll be able to tap into new features on FourSquare, so we essentially all benefit from this sort of thing.

These new API features include Explore, Leaderboard and post-check-in leaderboard information. What’s cool about this is that a lot of FourSquare users are all about the competition with their friends, so allowing developers to access leaderboards, means that more competitive applications will soon be available. Great move from FourSquare here, in my opinion.

As an example: If you have an application which shows bed and breakfasts, what this will do, is allow you to tap into the Explore area of the API, and do things such as suggest bed and breakfasts to the person who’s in a specific area. This is just one obvious example, but there are plenty, imagine the possibilities of the leaderboard API.

So, if you’re a developer or interested in learning more about this, head on over to developer.foursquare.com