Category: Developer

If there's one thing that I dislike about other people's CSS, it's how messy it can be. Seriously... Some people just do whatever they feel like! There's no order or convention. If you feel the same way, ProCSSor may come in handy the next time you have to tweak someone else's layout. It may be someone who doesn't take the same meticulous care that you do to align all the braces just so and sort ...

This one's for the Web developers in the audience. ColorPicker is a very powerful JavaScript ... color picker. Okay, so maybe the name isn't very original (or searchable, for that matter), but it is very descriptive. In the demo shown on the page, ColorPicker pops up as you click a text field that needs to be filled with a color value (think #ff00ff format). But what you get feels like a ...

A new beta 'Labs' add-on from Adobe adds a ton of HTML5-specific features to Adobe Illustrator CS5. This follows the release of an HTML5 add-on for Dreamweaver CS5 that shipped at the end of August. This add-on actually allows users of Illustrator to export their designs directly into HTML5 code. Instead of shipping off finished designs to be re-rendered in HTML and CSS by a Web designer, ...

In a surprising move toward transparency, Apple just announced that third-party development tools are fair game for building iPhone apps, and opened up its App Store Review guidelines so that developers can see why their apps have been rejected. The guidelines have been a mystery for so long that it's a breath of fresh air to see the reasons behind so many bizarre app rejections. Most of the ...

In a rather momentous and magnanimous reversal, Apple has rescinded its draconian iOS development tool restriction. Developers are now free to use any development environment, framework (Unity) or cross-compiler (Flash-to-iPhone). We probably won't ever know the real reason for Apple's change of heart, but it's likely a gambit to ensure the iPhone and iPad remain top-dogs, at least as far as ...

Another day, another CSS3 playground. Are you excited yet? Wait for it – this one has wood paneling for a background! (That's classy!) Even though it's not exactly the first tool of its kind (or the second, ... or the tenth), CSS 3.0 Maker is pretty handy and comprehensive, so I decided it was worth covering. Let me quickly sum it up: I like: That it provides clear compatibility ...

While prevailing sentiment seemed to be that Google Wave is all but finished as a standalone product, Google has made a pair of big announcements about the service. Google's Alex North has published a blog post which seems to indicate that something different is going on. Wave is not so much dead, as preparing to enter the second chapter of its saga. To that end, Google will be open sourcing ...

In a nutshell: Rails 3 is now officially out! This is a pretty big deal for the Rails community, and it's a release that will reverberate all across the web in many subtle forms. Lots of high-profile sites are Rails-based (think Twitter and Github), and version 3.0 is a massive update. Searching through O'Reilly's Safari Books Online I was unable to find a Rails 3 book – I guess these ...

In a move that is surely an effort to keep pace with Firefox's helter-skelter development of Jetpack, Chrome Beta now has a context menu API! There's also a bunch of other new APIs, the most exciting being the Omnibox API. Imagine Chrome's built-in search engines (type 'Amazon', then a space, and then a book name -- it searches Amazon!), but with extension access. Type the name of an extension ...

With Chrome's Web app store about to launch and Chrome extensions skyrocketing in popularity, a little extra security makes sense. Right now, there's nothing keeping extension developers from introducing malware or using extensions to take over systems. Google is addressing this problem by adding a sign-up fee for developers and running domain verification for Chrome extensions. The fee is a ...

YoYo Games, creators of the popular Game Maker platform for Windows, have finally brought their game creation engine to the Mac. Game Maker for Mac is a pro version of Game Maker 7 (Windows is already up to GameMaker 8) and it's got all the features of the Windows version of GM7. From the YoYo Games blog, here are some of the perks of Game Maker for Mac: Remote update mechanism (with ...

Large websites (like DownloadSquad or any other major blog/site) have full-time sysadmins, dedicated hosting facilities, and a ton of fail-safe mechanisms to ensure that they're always up and available. However, if you have a small site that's running off of a shared host you may sometimes be surprised to discover that it's down. That rarely happens, but when it does happen you usually discover ...

The HTML5 test gives you one huge, bold number denoting your browser's HTML5 support level. Simplicity is the key here: you just get a number. The number you see above is for Chrome Canary. Firefox 3.6.8 (my browsing workhorse) only scored 139 (and 4 bonus points). It's important to understand that this is not a benchmark. It doesn't use any of the HTML5 features to render anything; the browser ...

Slightly ahead of schedule, Microsoft has just squeezed out the fourth and final IE9 developer preview. From the outset, the news is much the same as the previous release: More hardware acceleration! Faster! More standards compliant! But there's some juicy stuff under the hood, too -- read on, if you want technical details. If you want developer-level stuff, check the IE team's new blog post. ...

For the bleeding-edge browser testers out there, Opera just split into two parallel release candidates: 10.61, which fixes bugs and security issues, and the tentatively-named "10.70," where new features are being tested. A second developer snapshot of 10.70 is out today, with 40+ bug fixes, tweaks to Opera's Presto rendering engine, and some new HTML5 and CSS3 features. This release is for ...