Adobe Responds to the iPad

It appears that Adobe (well, the Flash Platform Blog) is publicly stating its discontent at Apple’s growing trend away from supporting Flash and other  plug-ins.

“It looks like Apple is continuing to impose restrictions on their devices that limit both content publishers and consumers. Unlike many other ebook readers using the ePub file format, consumers will not be able to access ePub content with Apple's DRM technology on devices made by other manufacturers.  And without Flash support, iPad users will not be able to access the full range of web content, including over 70% of games and 75% of video on the web.”

iPad = Cool, but No Flash = Fail

Gizmodo’s first “hands-on” review of Apple’s new iPad is pretty glowing except for this portion. Which I heartily agree with:

“Browsing over Wi-Fi, Gizmodo loaded quickly. The 9.7-inch screen is an excellent size for reading the site. You can pinch zoom, but you won't need to. Of course, on such a pretty web browsing experience, not having Flash makes the big, empty video boxes in the middle of a page is pretty disappointing. Put differently, the fatal flaw of Apple's mobile browser has never been more apparent.”

HTML5 and CSS3 Goodness

MC pointed out this nice article at the Inspect Element blog: “Code a Backwards Compatible, One Page Portfolio with HTML5 and CSS3.”  It showcases some nice new features of HTML5 and CSS3 and how that might elegantly degrade in lesser browsers.

iPhone URL Scheme for Map Links

I was just looking at this nice (and very simple) explanation of iPhone map links at the iPhone Dev Center. It also mentions phone links, text (SMS) links, iTunes links and so on. Here is how to construct the map link:
<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?q=cupertino">Cupertino</a>
Nice and simple.

SharePoint Designer and Date Calculations

I was struggling to accomplish a simple date calculation that would be simple in a SharePoint List view. [Today]-15 and [Today]+15. Thanks to the Microsoft SharePoint Designer Team Blog I now know it is also a simple CAML manipulation. The key word to search for is “Offset!” Here is the excerpt from the SPDT Blog:

<SharePoint:SPDataSource

...

selectcommand="<View><Query>

<OrderBy><FieldRef Name='Date_Due' Ascending='TRUE'/></OrderBy>

<Where><Leq><FieldRef Name='Date_Due'/><Value Type='DateTime'><Today OffsetDays='+15'/></Value>

</Leq></Where></Query></View>"

...

>

XSLT: Microsoft's XSLT 2 and Grouping Using the Muenchian Method in XSLT 1

Here are some great insights on XSLT. They are rather unrelated except for the one thing I was looking up: grouping in XSLT. It turns out, there is a grouping function in XSLT 2.

*

First, an article from Tech Talk entitled “Where is Microsoft's XSLT 2?” discusses one blogger’s efforts (and frustrations) with Microsoft not implementing XSLT 2. Here is an excerpt he has at the end of the article from Microsoft:

“While XML continues to be a key part of our platform going forward, we have decided not to pursue an XSLT 2.0 implementation at this time. If there is a specific XSLT task you’re trying to accomplish and are having difficulty with XSLT 1.0, please let us know and we’ll do our best to help.”

*

The main interest I had in XSLT 2 was the new grouping function. It turns out there is a method to accomplish this in XSLT 1. Jeni's XSLT Pages has this great article: “Grouping Using the Muenchian Method.”

“The Muenchian Method is a method developed by Steve Muench for performing [grouping] using keys. Keys work by assigning a key value to a node and giving you easy access to that node through the key value. If there are lots of nodes that have the same key value, then all those nodes are retrieved when you use that key value. Effectively this means that if you want to group a set of nodes according to a particular property of the node, then you can use keys to group them together.”

 

BumpTop

Have you heard of BumpTop? I hadn’t. A cool idea for making a desktop more like a 3D desk.

http://bumptop.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqcmPJ-oVL0

xsl:if and xsl:choose

I ran across a great article by Bob DuCharme on XML.com titled “Conditional Execution.” It illustrates the uses of xsl:if and xsl:choose in XSLT. A few samples to whet your appetite:

  <xsl:if test="@author='jm'">

    The poem's author is jm.

  </xsl:if>

And

  <xsl:choose>

    <xsl:when test="@year < 1638">

   The poem is one of Milton's earlier works.

    </xsl:when>

    <xsl:when test="@year < 1650">

   The poem is from Milton's middle period.

    </xsl:when>

    <xsl:otherwise>

      The poem was written after Milton's death.

    </xsl:otherwise>

  </xsl:choose>

Cell Size and Scale

This is fun from a scientific viewpoint as well as Adobe Flash. Make sure to drag the scroll bar below the image pane.

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

 

FlexPaper

This looks like a very handy library to keep track of.

“[Flexpaper…] is an open source light weight document viewer component designed to work together with libraries such as PDF2SWF, making it possible to display PDF files in Adobe Flex and other Flash based applications.”

 

YouTube Branding

This article is a few years old, but still does a nice job of quickly covering how to customize a YouTube page.

 

SharePoint: JQuery and the Content Editor Web Part

I thought this was a nice explanation of (and a bit of encouragement for) using JQuery with a Content Editor Web Part in SharePoint.