Someone came up to me after my MAX session on web development debugging and asked for some advice on how to 'sell' unit testing to his clients. This was my response:
Simple. Tell the client you feel unit testing is so important that you're willing to talk about it with him face to face. In fact, you'll even fly him to your location. In order to save money though you're going to use a budget airline that skips testing.
Many moons ago I blogged about a proof of concept I built that allowed you to view Edge Inspect screen shots via a nice web interface. This was built in Node using the Express framework. I've finally gotten around to doing some updates to it as well as pushing it up to Github.
I've never understood the appeal of "unboxing videos". Don't get me wrong - I love to get new tech and I love the open it up and play with it. But watching someone else do that? Lame. But I just had to share my own personal experience with this. After my first MAX presentation today (demo assets will be posted tomorrow, sorry, this was far cooler), a woman walked up to me and handed me her "business card". Here is what she gave me:
If you are a PhoneGap users, hopefully you know about the various aspects of the Notification API. The Notification API allows for visual, audio, and tactile notifications. In this post I want to focus on the visual notifications and how they differ from the built in web view notifications.
For those who attended my PhoneGap presentation earlier this week (or those who just want to hear the sound of my silky-smooth almost Billy Dee Williams voice) you can view the recording at the URL below. Note that if you did not register for the event you will be asked to register before you can view it. To be clear, this is free.
http://w.on24.com/r.htm?e=582941&s=1&k=A3BCF648B71580CC093EF1264D5D27B1
For folks who want a copy of the demos I used, you can get the source code and the slide deck here: https://github.com/cfjedimaster/Introduction-to-PhoneGap
As always, thank you to everyone who showed up (apparently near 900) and I hope you enjoyed it.
Earlier today I was happy to hear that PhoneGap 2.7 was released. While perusing the changelist, I thought I read that progress events for file transfers were added in this release. However, I was wrong. FileTransfer has supported a progress event for a few months now. But since I figured this out while halfway through a demo, I figured I'd finish it up anyway and share it on my blog.
Many years ago (early 2006 to be exact) the ColdFusion Cookbook was launched. The idea behind the site was simple. Provide a set of 'recipes' with clear solutions provided in ColdFusion. In some cases this was a bit like the regular documentation. (For example, "How do I parse RSS feeds?"). In others, the questions are more unique: How can you test to see if two arrays are the same?"
I'm a big believer in the cookbook format. For the most part, I can use regular documentation to grok technologies. But cookbooks allow you to see more real world examples.
In 2009, I decided to shut down the cookbook site when Adobe launched their own cookbooks (http://cookbooks.adobe.com). I got permission from the original submitters and donated the content to Adobe.
However, the cookbooks at Adobe will soon be switched to "read only" mode. I suppose you could call this "news" (I got permission to mention it), but because of this, I thought it might be nice to re-start the cookbook.
So I've removed the "We're dead" notice, slapped on some Disqus, and switched the search code to Solr. The code behind the site is... um... dusty. But it works. Most of the entries are not quite out of date, but I'll be taking volunteers to help do edits. (In fact, hell, it may even be worthwhile to relaunch as a wiki.)
I'll leave folks with a great blog post by Rob Brooks-Bilson. This is an old one too, but it helps describe the philosophy of what kind of content the site expects: A Word on the ColdFusion Cookbook Philosophy
I don't normally do a blog post for new Brackets releases, but I wanted to specifically call out the most recent release, Sprint 24. From the web site, this release includes:
A few weeks ago I blogged about an online course dedicated to Chrome's DevTools. That was my first experience with Code School and I thought it worked very well.
Warning - this falls into the "Cool, but may not be a good idea category." I'm a huge fan of the Reveal.js framework for HTML-based presentations and I've already posted a few of my utilities/tips/etc for making it work better (or at least better for me). One issue I've run into a few times lately is escaping HTML for code slides.