Brian Fitzgerald

• Grow Collective: Web Design, Development, Hosting and Consulting An open-source slide show creator for web sites
• CAFFEINE Browser An image management system for the macintosh

• Evolving Trends » Wikipedia 3.0: The End of Google?
• Flip4Mac WMV Beta Program Flip4Mac for Intel-Macs Beta
• Handbrake Lite Handbrake lite is a VERY simplified version of handbrake that allows you to take a DVD and convert it for use on a video iPod.

• Flash Animator vs the Animation This is a crazy flash animation where the animation jumps off of the Flash stage (shown in-application) and starts fighting against the animator.
• ted@onFlex.org

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.

technorati tags:opera, browsers

Thanks to those of you who attended my Dreamweaver workshops this week in Columbus. I have updated all of the class notes with the resources I mentioned through the days and have provided downloadable project files on the page from the second day. You can find these pages by clicking on 'events' on the right side of this page.

We covered a LOT of stuff and I'm sure that you probably feel overwhelmed. The best suggestion that I can offer for getting something out of all of that is to start using it. You don't need to be the designer for a school (or other established) site to apply this. Make up something and build a site just for fun. Build just a page. Do anything.

When I started applying CSS to the LPS web site a few years ago, I didn't change the layout at all. I created some simply style sheets that did nothing more than style the text. I set the font, size, color, etc. For the first many months that I worked with CSS, this was all I did. Whenever I got a small site to work on (maybe only one page) I would try designing it with CSS. In the name of productivity, I often had to throw in the towel at first and build the sites in ways that I was more proficient. Eventually though, things started clicking and I got decent at creating CSS designs. This also gave me a long time (2-3 years) to establish my own 'best practices'. Finally, I applied my knowledge to re-styling the LPS website in the late summer of 2004. It took about six months to go through the site and recode the pages to work well with the styles. (I could probably do that same thing now in a few days).

Hope you had fun and find this something that you enjoy. Keep hackin'

technorati tags:dreamweaver, columbus, css

I’m in columbus, nebraska tonight between sessions of a two-day dreamweaver workshop that I’m facilitating. I turned on the TV, watched a replay of the US getting spanked by the czechs in the world cup, then saw the funniest thing I have seen in a long time: The USA Rock, Paper, Scissors League championship. A full blown sports broadcast complete with player back stories, expert analysis and guest referees. The winner, from Omaha, took home $50,000.

technorati tags:usarps

MacPractice Uses Parallels to Bring Windows Dentistry App to Mac

MacPractice this past weekend announced an agreement with Synca Direct, Inc. to bring the company's Cadi dentistry software to Mac users via Parallels Desktop, which enables running Mac OS X and Windows XP simultaneously

I knew this would happen. While it is a great thing to be able to run both OS X applications and Windows applications on the same computer, I do not like the idea that some developers will look at this as an opportunity to not write software for the macintosh. This could be particularly true in the future for Microsoft. Why would they create an Office for Macintosh when they know that everybody needs it and that only having a Windows version would require the purchase of a $300 copy of Windows. Where will this go?

technorati tags:windows, parallels, macpractice

Google Browser Sync is a new plug-in for Firefox that will allow you to keep multiple copies of Firefox (home, work computers?) in sync. Your bookmarks, history and cookies are all continually synced. Very cool – If you don’t mind google having a running record of everything you do online.

Update: I played with it a little bit, hoping that maybe it would provide a nice way for a person to log into any installation of Firefox and make it theirs. While it is conceivable that you could use it in this way, it really nags you to enter a login and password and not everybody would use it. It seems best suited to being used by a single person (like the home/work example earlier).

technorati tags:google, browser, firefox, sync

Adobe - MAX 2006 has been announced. Max is the conference for anybody doing web development using Adobe (Macromedia) tools. There are tons of sessions covering ColdFusion, Flex, Flash and Dreamweaver along with other Adobe apps. It’s a fun time to meet other developers and sit shoulder-to-shoulder in sessions with people that work for big-time companies. This year it’s in Las Vegas at the Venetian - October 23rd through the 26th.

technorati tags:adobe, max

Here’s a great page describing methods of debugging web pages with Safari.

Freedom Interactive has a fun site that shows posterboard carriers walking through New York City trying to sell web sites.

Today I have started the first serious effort I can remember in the 8 years that I have been with Lincoln Public Schools to clean out all of the orphaned junk on the web site that has collected over that time. I have just completed one of the smaller sections of the site. I figure I removed over 70% of the files that were on the server in the five hours that it took me to go through it all.

Lessons Learned?

1. If you are putting things on a web site that you know is temporary, make an appointment on your calendar to remove it (or at least to revisit the content to see if it is still needed).
2. Schedule a "Spring Cleaning" date for your site periodically. If I had done this once a year, this effort would have been much easier. I have scheduled 5 days this summer to clean the site and have scheduled one day already for early next summer (hopefully that is all that will be needed).
   

Every couple of weeks I encode the audio for the Board of Education meetings of Lincoln Public Schools an publish them in a podcast. While iTunes works very well as an audio encoding tool, it can be frustrating when podcasting. My audio starts as a track in a quicktime movie. I export that movie as a AIFF file, giving me a very large (1GBish) audio document. I then put this file into iTunes, right-clicked on it and chose to encode it as an MP3. Once encoded, I would edit the ID3 tags to reflect the artist/album/genre that the rest of my podcast has. Now I have two files in my iTunes library. Once uploaded into my podcast (I use Podcast Maker) iTunes would pull a third copy of the file as a part of the subscription (you should always subscribe to your own podcast for quality-assurance purposes). Finally, I have to remember to clean out the garbage files and get everything back in order. A real mess, I think.

Last week I got very frustrated with this and tried the command line utilty LAME to compress my files. This worked very well. It was just a little usability-challenged. I wanted something that I didn't have to pull out an instruction book every time I used it.

Today, a new version of Max was released that does what I need it to do. Max is an audio encoder that only does audio encoding (and does it well). It has a lot of input and output options and can play nicely with a few other applications to do tagging and playing. I'm really hoping that this will finally allow me to do everything outside of iTunes and leave iTunes to do what it does best, organizing and playing audio files.

technorati tags:lame, podcastMaker, iTunes, mp3, encode

Dale Dougherty from O’Reilly created the term “Web 2.0” to describe the recent rebirth of web development that has brought us cleaner interfaces as well as AJAX-powered behaviors. As a part of this, O’Reilly has organized a couple of Web 2.0 conferences around the topic. Now, O’Reilly is trademarking the term “Web 2.0” and people are very angry about this. If this were a company like Microsoft, I would have no doubt that they had plans to either lock down the term in a way that nobody could use it, or they would popularize it in a self-centered way that would bring more attention to them. O’Reilly has done nothing I know of to give me a reason to immediately jump to the conclusion that they are doing this for selfish reasons. I think that it is fair that they have exclusive access to the term when it is used to describe a conference (that is all that they are requesting). Considering their history with Web 2.0 conferences, I agree with them that if I saw a conference billing itself as a “Web 2.0 Conference” that I would assume that it was an O’Reilly conference. This is the confusion that they are trying to avoid. I’m sure that O’Reilly would be pretty understanding if contacted about a conference title that used the term “Web 2.0” as a way to clarify the topic of the conference and less as a title for the event.

I'm actually glad that they have taken the step to take some ownership of this. Next thing we would know, Web 2.0 would be a menu item/feature/search/option in Internet Explorer 7 and the term would be off limits to everyone.

technorati tags:oreilly, web20

AppleInsider reports that Apple is working on a new all-in-one Mac for education, to replace the phased-out eMac, and that Apple is targeting release in the "September timeframe" 2006. If so, Apple would catch only the tail end of the purchase cycle for the school year beginning this Fall, since many educational institutions, faculty, and students are already planning their next purchases.

Mac Rumors: Apple Mac Rumors and News You Care About

It will be interesting to see how Apple tries to bundle a likely LCD display with an education-class computer in the old eMac's price range of $800ish.

technorati tags:eMac

Which Universities have the most gamers? University of Washington tops the list forvisitors to MapWoW. Washington is known for its computer software and game development programs, so it's not too much of a surprise. Several other tech-heavy schools make the list including RIT, Purdue, Virginia Tech (Hokies rule) and Georgia Tech. A few big name schools win out on sheer number of students, such as University of Michigan, The Ohio State University, and The University of Texas (go horns!). The state of California has the most universities in the top 25.

MapWoW.com World of Warcraft Map Blog

University of Nebraska at Lincoln ranked 75 in this listing.

technorati tags:wow

Adobe has published a new link set up on delicious. They have product categories like After Effects, Acrobat and Dreamweaver, as well as content categories like Video and Design. They do not have ColdFusion up there right now, but they said that they are not done setting this up yet.

Sexton has joined the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) as a plaintiff in a lawsuit that charges Target with violating the federal Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) and California’s Unruh Civil Rights Act and Disabled Persons Act.

The lawsuit, scheduled for a hearing next month at U.S. District Court in San Francisco, could have a broad impact because Target’s site is hardly the only one that could be accused of having access barriers, according to attorneys for the plaintiffs.

An alpha version of sIFR 3.0 is available. sIFR is a package of javascripts, css and flash files that allow site designers to replace html text with flash text, allowing for text in any font that is crisply anti-aliased. Version 3 supports new flash features such as drop shadows. LPS uses sIFR 2 for many of it’s page titles.

Macy's will dip its foot back into the retail consumer electronics market again by adding iPod vending machines to its stores this fall. The company plans to install Zoom Stores robotic vending machines stocked with iPods in stores across 32 cities according to The Buffalo News. The retailer stopped selling consumer electronics after the market proved to be unprofitable in its stores.

The iPod Observer - Now Playing - Macy's Gets iPod Vending Machines

Please wait while I slide 400 $1 bills in to here...

This comprehensive guide covers the design of software and hardware systems for web applications. Using scores of examples and leading-edge tips, it details proven methods for scaling web applications to millions of users. Topics include application architecture, development practices, technologies, Unicode, and general infrastructure work. Ideal for anyone ready to realize the cost and performance benefits available to web applications today.

oreilly.com -- Online Catalog: Building Scalable Web Sites

Weblogg-ed » Engaging Teachers

Will Richardson considers a Mark Presky talk discussing how students are either enraged or engaged by teachers. Will asks how we get teachers engaged if we want students to be engaged. A teacher kicks off the comments by saying that they are enraged by the lack of support that they get – setting them up to enrage students.

10 things about this school year

JournalStar.com

technorati tags: LPS, Lincoln

Karelia announced the immediate availability of Sandovox and Sandovox Pro 1.0, a graphic-based Web site development application, on Wednesday. Sandovox includes support for blog, podcast, and online photo album publication, RSS feed generation, uploading sites via FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and .Mac, as well as support for add-on modules to enhance the application's functionality. Pro users can also supports the creation of raw HTML code so that advanced users can add their own code and server-side scripting elements.

Karelia Introduces New Web Development Tool || The Mac Observer

technorati tags: Sandvox, Karelia