After years of riding the iOS wagon, I’ve jumped off in search of greener pastures: Android. I’ve been quite happy with my iPhone’s for the last few years, but the Galaxy S4 really had me excited for a new phone and my contract was up with Telstra so I decided to upgrade to an S4.
First Impressions This phone is fast, smoother than butter. You open something and it loads instantly. Candy Crush on my iPhone 4 would sometimes take a good 30 seconds to load, on the Galaxy S4 it loads instantly faster like it already loaded before you even opened it. The build quality isn’t iPhone quality, the back plastic feels flimsy and no doubt will be the first part to degrade. This phone is light, it has more sensors and features than a luxury sports car and if you’re new to Android it might be overwhelming.
The talk of a Linux resurgence has been echo’d for many years now, but year after year it never comes true. While Linux does grow a tiny bit each year no doubt, it hasn’t achieved the commercial success of Windows or even Mac OS just yet and Adobe is mostly to blame.
As a developer who isn’t wooed by Apple’s brushed aluminium rubbish bins, I use Windows. I was running a Windows/Ubuntu hybrid setup for a while but after issues with getting file sharing to work between the platforms and trivial things like running a web server in my Linux VM and being able to access it via a web browser in Windows I reverted back to plain old Windows.
“Oh, you work with computers that must pay alright and be a great job”, as a developer or anyone who works in the I.T industry you’ll get this response a lot when you tell people you’re a developer and to a degree it’s somewhat true but being a developer isn’t the walk in the park those unaware of what a developer actually does it seems.
You spend 9 til working for an employer and although you were hired to work 9 am to 5.30 pm Monday to Friday it’s a known thing in the industry that you’re not always guaranteed to leave on-time nor even start at the time you would like. Some places basically make you feel as though you’re not a team player if you try and leave on time too.
Once upon a time there was a blogging application called WordPress and after a few versions and a rabidl fanbase, WordPress expanded outwards. As the community improved it via plugins and themes, the direction WordPress started to head in was more of a content management oriented one. Now it’s time to start viewing WordPress for what it actually is: a powerful PHP framework that can be used to build serious web applications.
Whatever you want to call them, charity stores are all the rage nowadays usually owned and operated by organisations who offer a wide variety of services from counselling to help lines and clothing & feeding the disadvantaged The underlying goal of a charity store is a very noble one (there is no disputing that), anyone who has the disadvantaged in mind and wants to make a difference has my vote for moralist of the year. As someone who grew up in a household that didn’t always have what everyone else had (I have 5 sisters), a household of 6 kids isn’t exactly a recipe for a rich life.
Television although the internet has easily overshadowed it in terms of media consumption is the last 10 years is a hot topic amongst tech blogs, journalists and speculation. First it was talk of Apple wanting to revolutionise TV and now apparently Google might be moving into the TV space as well with its push for high-fibre connections and its internet TV offering for a competitively priced $120 per month in the states.
Although I am not a designer, it doesn’t stop me from trying and throughout my trials I’ve been experimenting with different grid systems.
I used 960.gs for a while but it seemed too small, so then I experimented with 1140px for a while and it was good, but I’ve since gone bigger and better and believe to have found one of the best grid templates for web design.
After previously trying a 15 column 1200px grid, I soon ran into some limitations, a major limitation being the fact 15 doesn’t evenly divide by two (which for a theme I’ve been designing is something I need).
There are some amazingly high quality themes on Themeforest but for every quality theme there appears to be 10 bad themes. I am not entirely sure how Themeforest reviews a WordPress theme; are claims of responsiveness tested, are test installs performed in different environments, do the reviewers truly use the themes before approving them?
I always check the homepage of Themeforest to see what great new themes there are. Funidfy a crowd-sourcing theme in the vain of Kickstarter for WordPress is an amazingly coded theme (not to mention it looks phenonimal). A lot of work has obviously gone into the theme and it deserves every ounce of support and success.
We’ve all been there at one stage or another. You have a grid of items that are floated using float: left but their heights are different. So your items don’t nicely sit within the grid area that you envisioned. Worry not, this simple script I’ve written gets the job done.
The plugin will calculate the height of multiple elements and return the tallest height of those elements. The plugin has an example of usage so it should be easy to understand.
If you’re not already using LESS, you should be and I advise you start now or else. As you’ll know developing responsive websites involves taking the desired pixel value dividing it by its parent contextual value and then multiplying by 100 to get the desired percentage. I used to use a calculator back in the day before I discovered LESS.
I realised a few developer friends of mine were still doing it the hard way, so I thought I’d share some mixin functions I created and incorporate into my LESS workflow. These could perhaps be merged into one super function, but in responsive development I only ever use percentage widths and margins/paddings left and right values so this works better for me and is for flexible.