I’m not sure what the meaning of the name “Todos” is, “but this is the application launcher”:dbachrach.com/opensoft/… that I have been waiting for . I have wanted something that would give me quick and visual access to all of my applications quickly and this does it wonderfully.
(screenshot_of_todos)!
I was looking through some of the video blogs that my computer had pulled down lately and found a bit about being able to post to blogs from TextMate. I had to try it out!
(blog_from_textmate)!
While Adobe develops and sells THE ColdFusionMX server, there are cheaper and even free alternatives. A post on the Inside Out Outside In blog details some of these.
technorati tags:coldfusion, adobe, railo, bluedragon
The Israel / Hezbollah conflict has given CNN plenty of opportunity to use the Breaking News section of their recently redesigned site. I think it's pretty sharp looking.
technorati tags:cnn, breakingNews
Today I’m beginning the process of creating a new design for the LPS web site. I’m not sure at this point if it will be a dramatic change or just an update of the current design. The first step that I’m starting today is evaluating other web sites. It’s difficult to find well-designed K-12 sites, so I’m mostly visiting University and College sites. My link dumps this week will likley contain a number of sites that I thought had some good ideas or design. I’m only considering sites that are standards-based. If the sites aren’t based on CSS and xHTML, I’m moving on.
It’s been pretty quiet here for a couple of weeks. I spent last week on vacation visiting my brother and his family in Saco, ME. We had a fantastic time up there. Amanda, My sister-in-law Courtney and I went Kayaking at LL Bean (It’s only $12). We saw fourth-of-july fireworks in Kennebunkport. We had lobster, went to the beach and saw Portland Headlight. My brother also took us to a place called the Great Lost Bear that had a great menu and almost 60 beers on tap. The weather was beautiful and we came back feeling like a vacation should make you feel.
15 to 20 brave folks will be joining me for the next two days for a sort of web development boot camp. We’ll be hitting all of the Web Development acronyms and will hopefully have a site to show for it all at the end of Wednesday. Participants can learn more on the workshop page.
Yesterday, I think, Opera (the company) pushed out the finished version of Opera (the browser) 9. If you haven’t tried or used Opera before, this is a pretty good time to try it out. Opera could probably be considered the original ‘standards’ browser. While IE and Netscape were battling over features and market share, this browser from Norway was steadily creating a browser that followed the rules.
Opera has become a browser that tries to do everything, similar to the way that Mozilla suite (they call it seamonkey now?! ha.) included all that one should need to use the internet. Opera sports a pretty good email client, a note taking system and a news reader. The new version also has widgets that are similar to dashboard widgets on OS X and Yahoo widgets (used to be konfabulator).
Opera is the only real browser on the macintosh that I know of that supports a true full-screen mode and if you work with CSS, it can emulate other user-agents such as a terminal or low-visibility display to let you see how your work will appear. The new version of opera can also respond to voice commands and read page text. One suggestion from Opera that I'd like to try is creating a slide presentation using pages, displaying them in full-screen mode, then using the voice recognition to have Opera navigate the slides.
Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004 on the Macintosh used Opera to do it's in-application page rendering, but Dreamweaver 8 now uses Safari (WebKit). Opera was recently announced as Nintendo's choice to embed browsers in their current Gameboy DS portable devices, ensuring that many youth will be using Opera for every day browsing and requiring that web developers consider it when designing sites.
So what's wrong with it? First, the UI is a little kludgy. Opera 9 doesn't suffer from the window overload that previous versions did, but you can still end up with a lot buttons trying to get your attention. Second, like Firefox, the application is not really 'native' to any operating system, so while it runs on just about anything, it doesn't run as well as applications that were written specifically for a single operating system. Third, many developers just don't consider opera when they are developing sites, so many sites don't appear as they were intended.
While I still prefer Flock for my everyday-allday browser, Opera is worth having and knowing for when you need to do something were one of Opera's many tools can help you out. Every web developer should maintain this as one of the primary browsers that should be tested against along with IE, Firefox and Safari.