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Mobile User-Agents
The last couple of months I've been using my Xoom more and more. I give it many uses, like streaming Starcraft 2 games, reading email, magazines, books, playing MKV videos, gaming and much more. Apps are getting much better over time and so are games.
Bringing Shortcodes to Drupal
One of the things I love the most from Wordpress is the ability to define custom shortcodes on your theme's functions.php. This is possible on Drupal, but as with most things with my favorite CMS, it is more powerful but requires more work to set it up.
Ingredients
- Custom Filters
- Basic Regex.
Creating a Shortcode
Once you have Custom Filters enabled, go to the module page and add a new filter. Name it the way you want, and click save. Once you are back in the filters list, click on the one you just created so we can create a rule.
Testing a website using a slow connection
After seeing a weird behavior when loading one of our sites at work when my connection lagged, I tried to look for a way to slow down my browser's network to see how the site was slowly being loaded. After some work I ran into this blog post "Simulating slow or laggy network connections in OS X" but it wasn't the most friendly procedure.
After giving it a try I decided to create a short script and it works beautifully.
touch slow.sh chmod 700
Drupal 7 theme structure
I decided to create an explanatory graphic that ilustrate the different theming portions of Drupal 7 and how to access and modify them. This is not a theming tutorial but a quick guide to see the different parts of a Drupal theme.
Notes:
Flash the Xoom with the US firmware
After being disappointed again at Motorola Canada for being completely useless with updates on their devices I decided to take a look at fashing the US rom into my Canadian Xoom. And it worked!
As a note, there's no hacking involved here, you are just unlocking the bootloader and flashing an official ROM provided by Motorola. As you will see, you won't find any link from a non-trusted source. It just involves some terminal work and since I'm a Mac user, I will give the instructions for OSX.
Android's only virus are the OEMs
Warning: Rant ahead!
Since 2007 I've been beta testing Google's Android. Back in the days were we had one phone, the G1. I say beta testing because the software wasn't complete, it lacked good audio formats, multitouch, polished UI, etc. I still followed the development (even reading GIT commits). And now we got to a point where I can say Android is capable enough and stable, in fact It's the best mobile OS in my opinion.
But the fact almost every headache Android gives me comes from manufacturers and carriers is what is driving me away from the platform:
Install Android Market on Honeycomb emulator
Wanting to try out the new Android Market UI I decided to try a couple of hacks in order to install it on my emulator (which I'm pretty sure you heard is _really_ slow).
1. Install the SDK and create an Android 3.0 ADB, like you normally would. We are going to assume you named the AVD: hcomb30
2. Copy system.img to your AVD folder:
Using MenuStructure module in KO3
MenuStructure is a simple module I built for Kohana3 for creating menu trees. I'ts very easy to use, and in this tutorial I will show how to build a very basic website with a tree navigation menu.
First of all, start with a clean installation of Kohana 3 (that we will call ko3site), and then setup the database and htaccess file. (You should know how to get to this point).
Now, install MenuStructure in the application's modules folder.
Inspiring Web apps UI design
In the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get some inspiration for upcoming web projects I've been working on. Finding a simple and clean way to add tons of information into a Web app is not an easy task, so I've been doing a lot of prototyping and mockups.
I could be writing about thousands of elements but I will try to focus on a few for now: Remove things that we don't use that often. Tables that need to have a lot of information; and the use of icons: when and how.
Removing unnecessary elements
Some sites try to stay clean by removing unnecessary elements, or by fading things that are not that important.
A good example is removing the login box from the design when you are not logged in, something that was really common before (specially in forums) but it became a trend to have a dedicated login page and remove the login box from the menu bar. While this requires an extra click and page load, it gives the login box a proper place to be instead of trying to fit it into the navigation design.
Skype's website has a clean top bar, and pretty much all the stuff you need in the main navigation: Features, Get Skype (download), etc. And for the top bar, it's your account stuff, Buy Credits, Sign In and Join.
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About
Hi, I'm Ivan Soto Fernandez (yes, two last names). I'm a chilean web developer living in Edmonton, Canada. I'm also an anime fan, Gundams lover and gamer. Welcome to my blog.
You can read more about me or follow me on Twitter or any of the following social websites.