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New kids on the block

At our company we normally welcome new fellow members of our team by handing them a backpack with all the relevant info about the company, contracts etcetera

Lately I've been asking myself if this is enough or the right way in the end. Shouldn't the company get something in return? Almost every new member is active on the internet: twitter, personal blog, Facebook, github, bitbucket, etc

Wouldn't it be fair to say to the newest member to give a proper introduction? As I've come across, it seems that among the newest members a lot of interesting things are stowed away and not known unless specifically asked for. It's such a pity to leave such valuable information behind, to both the newest member as the company.

Maybe one of your new colleagues has a proper use case for the tool you've been writing or wanting to write. Maybe someone can help you to finish this beautiful peace of code you've been writing. OMG, to much to mention.

Yeah, I'm convinced. Are you? We should revise the introduction of our new fellow nerds to be ;)

Inline SVG

Lately I came across an HTML page which had inline SVG elements in the source. "Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a family of specifications of an XML-based file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and dynamic (i.e. interactive or animated). The SVG specification is an open standard that has been under development by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) since 1999". (courtesy of wikipedia)

Since SVG is XML-based you would assume that it would render in the browser by serving the document as XML. The page I came across wasn't served as XML and didn't contain the XML header (< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >) and was setup to validate against a HTML5 document type.

Support The main focus was to create fallback support for Opera 11, as can be seen at http://caniuse.com/#svg-html5 that this version has no support yet for this functionality. Based on feature detection, the DOM is queried for inline SVG elements and if the browser doesn't support this feature yet, all SVG elements are replaced by images with data uri's Besides the normal usage of data uri's, we're using a base64 encoded variant and will result in a shorter string. To maintain a proper serialization of the SVG element, the XMLSerializer is used and this object ensures a valid node structure which is needed for the svg+xml data uri.

Solution with example code:

https://gist.github.com/1293822

Drawbacks

Width and height automatic calculation: now they are taken from the SVG element with an extra fallback of specifying these values in CSS. Base64 encoding has been chosen for this testcase, as an alternative you can also use basic escaping and skipping the base64 part in the image data uri: var escapedHtmlElement = escape(elmTxt); .. replacement.src = "data:image/svg+xml,"+escapedHtmlElement+""; ..

Thanks Divya Manian (@divya) from Opera (for being helpful via IRC) Modernizr (http://www.modernizr.com/) for the inline SVG test

*Update* As of version 12 Alpha from the Opera browser, which has been released recently, inline SVG is supported. Feedback has been sent at http://caniuse.com/svg-html5 accordingly.

Mozilla Thunderbird 5

As of today, a new major update has been done by Mozilla. From version 3.1 to 5 seems like a 'major leap in space', especially in the release strategy as it evolved this year where it's quite common to plan releases close(r) to eachother.

Download your version now: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/

Features: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/features/

For the Ubuntu users (the easy-terminal-way)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-stable sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get upgrade

has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) 64bit

#mozilla #thunderbird

Google IO 2011 Day One keynote

Google IO is live and kicking as we speak. For those of you who are not familiar with this, hereby the intro as mentioned on the Google IO website:

“Google I/O brings together thousands of developers for two days of deep technical content, focused on building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications with Google and open web technologies such as Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, Google Web Toolkit, App Engine, and more.”

It's a two day event by Google and started yesterday. During the opening keynote some nice new features and new services have been displayed.

* Android 3.1 An updated Android version for tablets which will be released any time soon, in which some nice features are implemented like: expanding, resizable widgets Android devices can be USB hosts, so you can hook up keyboards, mice and even game controllers like a Xbox 360 controller

* Android Ice Cream Sandwich : 'one Android for all (devices and people)' This will be the updated version of Android for mobile devices and will bring the nice features of Honeycomb to the phone. They presented this as an all-in-one system for all devices so it can reside on a phone, tablet , Google TV and any other device. The main advantage is, one SDK (Software Development Kit) for developers to accompany multiple platforms. At the moment it's unclear if this will be version 3.1, as mentioned before, or new release number.

* Movies (rentals) in the Android market (cloud > web+mobile) Besides support for books in the Android market, they presented a new feature: movie rentals. For $1,99 you can rent a movie from every device running Android. It's connected to your Google account, so you pay for it once and you're able to view the movie on both your tablet and your mobile. You're even able to download the movie so you can play it offline. Comes in handy when you're on a plain. This feature will be accessible via the Android market (as featured content) and via a movie app on your device.

* Music (beta) by Google (cloud > web+mobile) The music service from Google: once you've uploaded your music, stream all your songs from the cloud. It even has a bit support for offline caching, so you can listen to your music while not connected to the Internet. As of this moment, this service launches in beta and rolls out to US users for free gradually while in beta. http://music.google.com

* Android Open Accessory: Standardizing hardware development across Android devices Platform-level support for hardware accessory communication with Android devices - including integration with Android Market, a new USB accessory API and an open-source Accessory Development Kit (ADK). This presentation was illustrated by two example implementations:

1) Connecting your mobile phone to a cardiotrainer which opens up the most suitable application on your device. If a suitable app cannot be found, a link to the most suitable app in the market is provided.

2) Tilt-controlling a labyrinth marble game with an Android tablet.

Video: http://gizmodo.com/5800446/androids-new-hacker-dream-adk-makes-anything-an-ac... ADK http://accessories.android.com/

This opens the doors to create whatever you can think of.

* Android @ Home Open source libraries that will enable developers to build apps that can discover, connect and communicate with devices and appliances in the home. Control your lights, alarm, thermostat, whatever is in your home, all with the touch or a wave at your Android device.

* Android @ Home hub (Project Tungsten) This is a combination of the Android @ Home framework and the Google Music cloud, accompanied with a pair of audio streamers which results in a streaming system much like Sonos or Airplay-enabled devices.

-- Archive of announcements: http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/announcements-archive.html Event site: http://www.google.com/events/io/2011/index.html

#ADK #Android @ Home #Project Tungsten #android #android 3.1 #google #google io #google io 2011 #honeycomb #ice cream #ice cream sandwich #keynote #slate #tablet

First time

lets see how this works

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