In 2011, Google introduced the Dart programming language as an alternative to JavaScript. It’s been a little over a year now since it launched. It’s come a long way since then, but there’s still a lot of work to be done.
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Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
The Future of Dart Talked About By Google Developers
Wednesday, January 30th, 2013Tips For Building Maps In Chrome DevTools
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013Google has posted a new video to its Developers YouTube channel about using Chrome DevTools when building maps or visualizations. It’s actually an episode of Google’s Google Maps Garage, hosted by Brendan Kenny and Paul Saxman, who share “techniques for using the DevTools to save time and sanity”.
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Unity Plugins Added To Game Development Tools By Amazon
Tuesday, November 27th, 2012Mark my words – Unity is going to be the next big game engine that everybody uses. Unreal Engine is still going to be the go to development suite for big budget console and PC games, but more and more mobile developers will be turning to Unity for its ease of use and wide array of user created assets. The folks at Amazon obviously realize this, and are taking preemptive measures to make it easy for Unity developers to craft games for its platforms.
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3D Modeling Comes To Kinect For Windows
Wednesday, November 7th, 2012Kinect For Windows is one of Microsoft’s best projects to date. It’s a bit gimmicky and not that great for games, but it’s been amazing for app developers on the PC. Back in September, a developer created an email system for his mother who suffered from aphasia after a stroke. Now Microsoft is adding a new tool that will inspire a whole new range of applications.
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Understanding The PDF File Format – Custom Font Encodings
Tuesday, April 12th, 2011One very powerful feature of the PDF file specification is the ability is the option to create custom font encodings. This means that for each font you can choose exactly what glyph value the text index values used in the Tj command map onto. This has a number of advantages, including:-
Adding Better Images Optimization To Your Web Development
Wednesday, November 10th, 2010Most web developers know the importance of optimizing images for faster page loading times, but it’s also a very cumbersome, time consuming and boring process. Then when you are done, the customer or designer gives you new images to use and you can start the process over and over and over again. The result is that we spend a lot of time optimizing images and also forget to do it from time to time.
That’s why I’ve been experimenting with a way to automate the process of optimizing images for use on web pages. This has resulted in a Visual Studio 2010 extension to do just that.
The extension
The idea with automating the optimization is that the images must have the same quality in color and fidelity as before they were optimized. That is done with proven algorithms, and when an image has been optimized, it cannot be further optimized by the same algorithm. Nothing happens if you run the optimization multiple times on the same image – it will only be optimized the first time.
If you run the optimization on an image that has already been optimized using other tools, you might still be able to optimize further, but often nothing will happen – the image will not be touched when it has been analyzed and no optimization is found possible.
In this beta of the Image Optimizer extension, only JPEG and PNG files are supported, but that should hopefully cover ~90% of images in modern websites.
When you right-click a folder in the Solution Explorer in Visual Studio, you now have a new menu item called “Optimize images”.
Building Custom Menus Within WordPress
Wednesday, October 27th, 2010With the introduction of WordPress 3.0, bloggers can create a host of different menus for use either on the blog template or as a sidebar widget.
This allows you to create child pages, sub-categories, navigation tabs with external links and much more.
Here, we show you how simple it is to create and get a custom menu up and running in a matter of clicks.
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Build Your Site For Tomorrow’s Algorithm Change
Wednesday, July 7th, 2010When it comes to search engine algorithms, the one thing you can count on is change. Google says there were hundreds of tweaks last year, Bing is always refining its indexing, and scores of other “Google Killers” are trying to worm their way into the market with a better search experience. In the process of all these changes, there are sites that keep their positions, ones that suddenly move up, and others that drop off the map. People who employ search engine optimization tactics usually see their sites hold positions or improve slightly during these updates. Despite this, the majority of SEO work involves playing “catch up” with the latest indexing changes, even though they could have been anticipated with a little foresight.
Using Google Labs To Develop Your Site
Wednesday, May 26th, 2010This final section of Google Webmaster tools provides some tools that Google calls “experimental”. The tools in this section change frequently so those mentioned here are available at the time of this writing. More may be added or others removed in the future.
Adding Better Security To Your WordPress Blog
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010Last week I was asked by a client why he wasn’t seeing the https: prefix in his URL (and the little lock icon in the bottom of the browser window) when he was logged into his WordPress site. That got us into a discussion about SSL and we wound up installing an SSL certificate on his hosting account, as well as making some additions to his WordPress installation to make it less appealing to hackers.